Two thoughts on this. The first is honesty - I don’t mind if candidates google the question if they tell me about it. Information retrieval is a vital part of the software engineering job. What I take issue with is dishonesty, a trait that would not be something I’d accept in my teams.
The other thought is this: interview questions aim to collect evidence for skills needed for the job in a setting where you can’t observe these skills directly. I had a candidate for a senior engineering position once who clearly used an LLM. They had a vague understanding about what latency is, had no idea about SLOs, P99 or circuit breakers. The LLM then helped them to parrot this knowledge to me. But I didn’t want to hire them because of their theoretical knowledge - they need to monitor systems, act on alerting, build and improve existing monitoring and maybe join the 24x7 rotation. These are all scenarios in which it’s insufficient to know where to look for information given a keyword. The work reality doesn’t provide them always with something they can easily put into an LLM. Even if it did, progress would be too slow if for any incident they’d need to consult their llm first.
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Two thoughts on this. The first is honesty - I don’t mind if candidates google the question if they tell me about it. Information retrieval is a vital part of the software engineering job. What I take issue with is dishonesty, a trait that would not be something I’d accept in my teams.
The other thought is this: interview questions aim to collect evidence for skills needed for the job in a setting where you can’t observe these skills directly. I had a candidate for a senior engineering position once who clearly used an LLM. They had a vague understanding about what latency is, had no idea about SLOs, P99 or circuit breakers. The LLM then helped them to parrot this knowledge to me. But I didn’t want to hire them because of their theoretical knowledge - they need to monitor systems, act on alerting, build and improve existing monitoring and maybe join the 24x7 rotation. These are all scenarios in which it’s insufficient to know where to look for information given a keyword. The work reality doesn’t provide them always with something they can easily put into an LLM. Even if it did, progress would be too slow if for any incident they’d need to consult their llm first.