A Columbia University student is facing a disciplinary hearing after he used AI to pass job interviews at Big Tech corporations.
For anyone who's tried to land a job at a FAANG company (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) probably knows that the interview process is brutal.
And if you haven't you can probably imagine with their reputation that their recruitment process is anything but a breeze.
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The worst part isn't the series of interviews or mind-boggling hypothetical scenarios, it's the technical interview.
It involves solving complex coding problems live on camera while an interviewer watches.
For Roy Lee, a sophomore at Columbia, training for the technical interview was 'one of the most miserable experiences I’ve ever had while programming,' adding that he spent 600 hours practicing.
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“I felt like I had to do it," he admitted. "It’s something I needed to do for a big tech job, and there was just so much to learn, so much to memorise, and so many random problems I could expect to have been thrown at me.”
The student argued that the technical interviews aren’t about skill and rarely apply to real-world programming. “It’s whether you’ve seen the problem before, memorised the solution, and can act like this is your first time seeing the problem,” he described. “The answer to a lot of these problems is so algorithmic. They’re also just not representative at all of what you do as a programmer on the job.”
So, Lee decided to create his own way to bypass the system by writing an AI program called Interview Coder to help him.
According to the student, the program can solve coding problems instantly and is undetectable by Big Tech security measures.
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“In reality, the product is really simple,” he explained. “You take a picture, and then you ask ChatGPT, ‘Hey can you solve the problem in this picture?’ Literally, that’s the entire product."
To prove his point, Lee used Interview Coder to pass technical interviews at Amazon, TikTok and Meta - and allegedly received job offers from all three.
He even recorded his entire Amazon interview and posted it, unedited, on YouTube as proof that his Interview Coder worked and how 'the recruiting process is now broken.'
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But, just two days after posting the video, someone reported him to Columbia University and accused him of cheating during the interview. In response, the university forwarded him the complaint and scheduled a disciplinary hearing for 11 March.
Although, Lee has already made it clear he has no intention of attending the hearing.
“Maybe it’s stupid of me to say this,” he said. “Most human intelligence work is going to be obsolete in two years. So I have two years to make something happen."
Instead of defending himself, Lee has booked a one-way ticket out of the city. “Big tech companies don’t have an incentive to change,” he added. “LeetCode is a slop system that works for them, but it’s a gigantic net negative on the development ecosystem around the world.”
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He argued: “It’s an attempt at a standardised test that measures problem solving, but in today’s world that’s just obsolete.”
Lee's story went viral in the programming world, with many agreeing that technical interviews are outdated after he posted his disciplinary actions on X.