A person walks past the entrance to a Google building in Dublin, Feb. 15, 2023.
Artur Widak | Anadolu | Getty Images
After landing internship offers from Amazon , Meta and TikTok, computer science student Chungin “Roy” Lee has decided to move to San Francisco.
But he won’t be joining any of those companies.
Instead, Lee will be building his own startup that offers a peculiar service: helping software engineers use artificial intelligence to cheat in their technical job interviews.
“Everyone programs nowadays with the help of AI,” said Lee, a 21-year-old student at Columbia University, which has opened disciplinary proceedings against him, according to documents viewed by CNBC. A Columbia spokesperson said the university doesn’t comment on individual students.
“It doesn’t make sense to have an interview format that assumes you don’t have the use of AI,” Lee said.
Lee is at the forefront of a movement among professional coders who are exploiting the limitations of remote job interviews, popularized during the Covid pandemic, by using AI tools off camera to ensure they give hiring managers the best possible answers.
The hiring process that took hold in the work-from-home era involved candidates interviewing from behind a Zoom screen rather than traveling, sometimes across the country, for on-location interviews, where they could show their coding skills on dry-erase boards.In late 2022 came the boom in generative AI, with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Since then, tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of programmers while touting the use of AI to write code. At Google , for example, more than 25% of new code is written by AI, CEO Sundar Pichai told investors in October .The combination of rapid advancements in AI, mass layoffs of software developers, and a continuing world of remote and hybrid work has created a novel conundrum for recruiters.The problem has become so prevalent that Pichai suggested during a Google town hall in February that his hiring managers consider returning to in-person job interviews.Google isn’t the only tech company weighing that idea.But engineers aren’t slowing down.Lee has turned his cheating into a business. His company, Interview Coder, markets itself as a service […]
Meet the 21-year-old helping coders use AI to cheat in Google and other tech job interviews
