“They copied from AI”: Tech Company offers Rs 200,000 and can't find one technician who understands the code

The technology company has recently launched a recruitment campaign for a properly compensated entry-level position, offering Rs 200,000 a year. However, despite having an astounding interview with 450, the company was unable to find a single candidate suitable for the role. The recruitment team turned to developers' India Subreddit to share their ordeal, hoping to shed light on the complexities of employment in the AI ​​era.

The company had a job listing on LinkedIn for its QA role as well as junior-level front-end and backend developers. The pay range (200,000 rupees from UP) has stoked a wave of over 12,000 applications. From the beginning, the employment team excluded nearly 10,000 applicants. This cites reasons such as a lack of coordinated resumes and related technical capabilities. According to them, early elimination was not overly selective, but rather saving both your own time and applicants from fruitless interview rounds.

Those who participated in the interview were tested with basic programming principles and graph traversal methods such as standard data structures and algorithm topics, trees, heaps, linked lists, and wide range of searches and depth searches. Interestingly, the company has allowed the use of tools like ChatGPT during its evaluation to simulate real-world work environments.

However, this modern approach backfired. The candidates quickly unlocked their work solutions, but often copied directly from the AI, but the problem began when the interviewer asked for an explanation. Most people were unable to explain what their code was doing or provide details about the complexity of its time and space. This led to the realization that many candidates were simply copying and pasting the logic behind their code without understanding it. This is a phenomenon that recruiters call “vibe coding.”

This troubling pattern has led the company to look back at its own methods. Was the interview process too stiff or defective? Or was it showing a big problem that aspiring developers rely heavily on AI tools and skipped the basic learning needed to become a capable programmer?

The Reddit community did not refrain from responding. Some users questioned the company's hiring practices and pointed out that 450 hours of interviews without hiring one person suggested deeper internal issues. One user criticized the process as inefficient and falsely directed, claiming that the HR team could be more negligent than the candidates themselves. Another suggested that if so many interviews result in zero employment, it could be a sign that the employment strategy (not the talent pool) is broken.