💡 Why AI in Interviews Is Bad for Candidates, Not Just Companies (and more)
I got myself into a bit of a pickle on LinkedIn last week, which is something I do not recommend. Anyway, I tried to explain what I was trying to say using more words (see post below), which I'm sure will clear it all up and be the end of that...
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Why AI in Interviews Is Bad for Candidates, Not Just Companies
A LinkedIn post about interviewing a candidate who used real-time AI generated some pushback, so this expands on the argument. The point isn't that using AI is cheating—it's that interviews exist to evaluate how you think, what you've actually done, and whether you'll work well together. AI can help you prepare, but if it's generating your answers in real-time, you're hiding the thing the interviewer is trying to evaluate. And if you get the job anyway, you've set yourself up for a mismatch between expectations and reality.
Link Posts
- The Jevons Paradox and the Future of Knowledge Work — Mike Fisher argues that AI won't eliminate knowledge work because work expands when constraints are removed—radiologist numbers grew despite predictions of obsolescence, and software engineering will likely follow the same pattern.
- Why "Correction of Error" Gets Incidents (and Product Failures) Wrong — Lorin Hochstein on why AWS's incident terminology is misleading: defects alone can't explain outages since production systems are full of undetected bugs that never cause problems—what matters is the context that let the failure through.
- The invisible 40% of engineering work — Anton Zaides found a senior engineer spending 40% of his time on invisible work like code reviews and mentoring; the fix isn't eliminating that work but making sure the roadmap reflects reality.
- The B2B Product Leadership Delusion — Jason Knight's survey shows product leaders rate themselves significantly higher than their IC PMs rate them across every core responsibility—a gap that points to a mutual visibility problem, not just a performance one.
- The invention of "classic rock" — Daniel Parris traces how the genre was invented by radio executives chasing Boomer ad dollars in the 1980s, not by music fans debating what deserved the label.
