there are two kinds of people in the world I don't trust: people who don't put swear words in their code comments and people who don't tell the truth. With the rise of remote work and large language models over the last few years, we've

also seen a rise in the number of people cheating on technical interviews. With an estimated 10% of people attempting to cheat, today we'll look at the actual techniques these clever wannabe programmers use to land a high-paying developer job in this highly competitive

job market and, most importantly, the disastrous consequences for those who get caught. Oh my God, it is November 25th, 2024 and you're watching The Code Report. Some of my biggest inspirations growing up as a kid were athletes like Lance Armstrong, Barry

Bonds, the entire Russian Olympic team, and Mike Tyson. They're all elite athletes, but they also bent the rules a little bit to get ahead. Now, I'm not recommending you bite your interviewer's ear off when you can't figure out how to

invert a binary tree, but the reality of the modern tech job market is that many people out there are cheating to get ahead and sometimes it actually works. But cheating happens in virtually every industry: academics like to plagiarize, investors like to do Ponzi schemes, and

chess players like to allegedly use remote-controlled Morse code emitting implants that transmit Stockfish moves directly to the sphincter. That's brilliant if true, but this technique wouldn't work very well on a programming interview. So now let's take a look at

Some real-world cheating techniques. The most basic technique is cribbing the answers. In high school, you may have written math equations in your palm before a big exam. In a remote technical interview, you can do the same thing by having a secret laptop out of the view

of your webcam with a million browser tabs open to different LeetCode solutions. This works because many technical interview questions are reused over and over again. There are classics like FizzBuzz, invert a binary tree, and a magical string. And if you're lucky

enough to get one of these questions, you can secretly look at your laptop to solve it. But solving the problem is only one part of the test. You also need to understand the logic behind the code. If you quickly solve a problem in code, but can't explain how it actually works, the

interviewer will think one of two things: this guy is an autistic 10x developer unicorn, or more likely, you're just a filthy cheater. In a technical interview, it's crucial that you explain your thought process clearly as you solve a problem. You're expected to make errors

and work towards a solution iteratively, just like you would in real life. But the most likely reason this cheating technique will fail is because you simply won't be asked a question on your secret laptop. A more sophisticated cheating technique is to study interview

questions that have been leaked on the internet. And companies are always updating their interview questions, but that doesn't stop people from screenshotting or taking that content from the interview, then sharing it on various low-key websites and Discord channels. I'm not going to share these

Resources with you actually know it you can find leaked questions all over GitHub as well as this weird Chinese website called 1point3acres.com They compile things like the most common interview questions asked in the last 6 months at companies like Meta, but most

of these are just public leak code questions anyway, but it becomes a gray area when proprietary non-standard questions become leaked. What doesn't constitute cheating though is discussing interviews with like-minded colleagues on awesome websites like Daily.dev, the sponsor of today's video. It's a

completely free social platform that curates all the best developer content on the internet and helps you connect with other like-minded people. Instead of scouring the bowels of Reddit for an update on your favorite JavaScript framework, you can rely on Daily.dev to

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invite link on the screen, but if you're not skilled enough to pass the technical interview, another way to cheat is to ask your bros for help. Pay a friend or two to sit next to you during the interview and deliver the solution to you in sign

language. Typically, this needs to be done in person because if you try to use some screen sharing software during the interview, you'll likely get caught because many interview tools use pre-screen tests to check to make sure that you're not using a remote desktop.

or some other collaboration tool, the main reason this won't work though is because most aspiring programmers don't have friends. But luckily nowadays we have artificial programmers in the form of chatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Nowadays you can simply screenshot a question, feed it into one of these AI tools and

get the solution immediately. But does this actually work? Earlier this year, Interview.io conducted a study to answer that question. They conducted interviews where the interviewers had no idea that the interviewees were using chatGPT. They tested verbatim LeetCode questions, modified LeetCode questions, and

completely custom questions. On verbatim questions, the pass rate was 73% for the cheaters and only 53% on the non-cheating control group. On modified LeetCode questions, the pass rate went down to about 67%, still beating the

control group. However, when it came to custom questions, the cheaters started to bomb and only passed at 25%. That's better than 0%, but the thing is AI tools often spit out code that looks correct but is actually nonsense. And if you try

to pass that code off as legit in an interview, it'll be blatantly obvious that you're cheating. And that's exactly what happened to some guy who was trying to use Claude during an Xai interview. The interviewer called him out, then they had

a nice discussion about how cheating actually occurs nowadays. One thing to keep in mind with this study though is that it was conducted about a year ago and AI tools have already gotten much better at coding since then. And what's crazy is that in their experiment, nobody

actually got caught in the act of cheating now even if you manage to get away with cheating with AI during an interview it's still a very bad idea because if you interview with Fang the next step is typically an in-person interview where you'll have to problem

solve on a whiteboard and your only hope of cheating there is with some kind of brain chip or remote controlled repository but if you can pull that off you deserve the job but the main reason you shouldn't cheat is that you'll likely get caught and when that happens

all kinds of bad things will happen first of all you'll be automatically rejected from that position second you might even be blacklisted from reapplying to that company in the future third if you're building a public profile on places like Twitter and LinkedIn you'll find that Tech is

actually a pretty tight-knit community and if people find out you're a cheater it could permanently damage your reputation four it'll be extremely embarrassing and will be a bad decision that haunts you for the rest of your life and five in the unlikely case that

you actually do get the job you'll likely end up being a low performer who's at the top of the chopping block for the next round of layoffs ultimately though cheating is not a mistake it's a choice so make sure to Choose Wisely this has been the code report thanks for

watching and I will see you in the next one

Cheaters are breaking the technical interview... how?

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