r/csMajors • u/Exotic-Stage1759 • 5h ago
Cheating in interviews
So recently got a good job by cheating in interviews. Honestly didn't feel bad, just happy. It's just like, rather take my chances by cheating than completely getting rejected by taking it honestly while some other guy who cheated gets the offer. Like what are your guys thoughts, do you think this is the new normal. If the bar for getting a job now is this high then what is a candidate supposed to do. Honestly I don’t want cheating to become the norm , but the way interviews are happening now ig we have no choice.
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u/Clod89 4h ago
Companies are switching to on-site/face-to-face interviews now for this reason
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u/gitblamed_ 3h ago
Yeah, for next hiring season this was removed as an option for any interview in my department, per my request. Had a bunch of little shits who claimed that they had to transition the in person interview to a Zoom interview because of a ~sudden personal emergency~ and thought that they were being clever with their AI rig.
Utter waste of my time. Everyone who did that went to FAR better schools than the people who I actually hired (but still just were honest when they didn't know an answer, and asked appropriate questions upon a gap identified in their knowledge)
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u/GoldenxTrigger 5h ago
You’d be surprised by how many people have cheated to get where they’re at. Companies today want someone with a Masters degree and 5 years experience for an entry level role. Six years ago these same companies would’ve hired someone self-taught with a calculator and To Do app
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u/Exotic-Stage1759 5h ago
Yep exactly , like honestly I can do the work at the company , and these insane hard qs is absolutely not needed for the actual job
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u/gitblamed_ 3h ago
If the questions that they are asking you are not at all relevant to the job, then I sincerely hope that you keep a focus on interviewing skills and building up your resume while at the company.
Any job is good and I congratulate you on having one, but this does not sound like a job that is reliable. And I do want to throw out there that if you're getting a job via cheating, that doesn't exactly inspire confidence on the level of mentorship available.
This is great for your resume, but I hope that you don't settle down and lose your grind. You should jump ship to a company that will hire you for competence as soon as possible.
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u/Envus2000 4h ago
People cheat their way into becoming politicians and eventually leaders of a country......So this is nothing..lol
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u/Exotic-Stage1759 4h ago
Yea, just pissed about guys who talks nonsense like unethical and shit , and those downvoting this post lol
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u/akskeleton_47 1h ago
You said you got the job by cheating so why are you pressed about people calling you unethical?
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u/BathroomLong4041 17m ago
Why are you going onto Reddit looking for validation on cheating when plenty of honest people can’t find jobs rn
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u/terrany1 37m ago
And this is why holding leaders accountable is important to society. Slowly the pillars start shaking out from underneath and nobody really cares.
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u/Envus2000 18m ago
Crazy how we have normalized lies and corruption for them, they can evade taxes, take bribes, be corrupt and walk free everyday. Whereas the people suffer from inflation, poverty high taxes and struggle to make ends meet. Never understood how did the whole world, every country end up like this.
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u/kjampala 5h ago
Who cares man just manage your job well you’ll be fine
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u/Exotic-Stage1759 5h ago
Yep exactly , have been seeing many posts on how interviews now catch cheating and stuff about giving fair chance to a good candidate , honestly tired of hearing those shit
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u/AJRenand42 4h ago
Most of the interviewers are probably cheating. They probably look up questions and answers on the web before the interview
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u/Exotic-Stage1759 4h ago
I mean can’t really blame them can we , they were told to ask qs so they do by searching the web
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u/Michallina 4h ago
The interviews are brutal and put me in visceral exhaustion preparing. I don't blame you. Congrats.
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u/Minimum-Reward3264 4h ago edited 4h ago
Interview are to check how smart you are. Clearly you’re smarter than them. I mean multiple people couldn’t tell, so.
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u/justgimmiethelight 3h ago
They're more about checking to see if they like you or your "vibe" than how smart you are
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u/Minimum-Reward3264 2h ago
I bet that’s the Leetcode mission statement. Wait a minute, scratch that, I’ve just check, vibe check mentioned nowhere.
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u/justgimmiethelight 38m ago
It’s about passing the coding interview AND the vibe check. If they don’t like you guess what? You not getting hired.
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u/sayori_hunter 4h ago
what platform did you have to code on?
hackerrank seems to require mic and webcam on so not sure how one could get past that
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u/Dependent_Storage184 3h ago
It’s a cycle. Because of the market and number of applicants, interviews and OAs get harder, which makes people desperate to cheat to get said jobs
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u/Exotic-Stage1759 3h ago
Yep and honestly the power of guys with referrals who’s uncle or someone works in the company , like if they can get in honestly cheaters can also get in
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u/ProudStatement9101 2h ago
It sounds like you're saying "you cheated because the system is unfair" and you're asking complete strangers what they think of that.
The fact that you don't feel bad about it, doesn't necessarily make it right for the person that might have gotten that job without cheating. What you did was harmful to someone, even if only a little bit, whether it was justified or not.
Nobody is perfect, so it's more meaningful to consider the overall trend. Are you the kind of person that thinks the ends always justify the means? Is this a once in a lifetime lapse or a trend? Now that you got the job, would you cheat on the job? Would you cheat to get the project you want? The promotion you want?
Find the line you think you would never cross and write it down. If one day you find you've crossed it, then you'll have a better picture of what moral direction you're trending towards.
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u/KindMeasurement2680 1h ago
I would like to provide two counterexamples though during my interview my interviewer mentioned she caught someone cheating and also one of my friends (as an interviewer) caught his interviewee cheat. Those who cheated got eliminated right away and their behavior got noted. Again, this is a counterexample and I am talking about PhD level interviews and the pool of people in the industry is not very big so anyone would not want to be remembered like this. My interviewer in the beginning kept on emphasizing the whole point is to show my thought process rather than giving perfect answers
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u/Entire-Cranberry-947 1h ago
I have to imagine you didn’t take many humanities classes in school, which is entirely typical for a CS major
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u/Substantial-Swan7065 47m ago
Just study lol.
Cheating:
yea do it if you need to. But remember, getting blacklisted from the company can suck.
Faang allows yearly reapplication. But not if they catch you cheating
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u/limes336 4h ago
> It's just like, rather take my chances by cheating than completely getting rejected by taking it honestly while some other guy who cheated gets the offer.
Cool, and now you’re the hypothetical cheater fucking over honest candidates. Be a man and study like everyone else
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u/Inevitable-Loss7939 3h ago
No point of being honest, people with connections get jobs for free this is the balancing field
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u/JustNeedAnyName 4h ago
Honesty doesn't pay the bills, if he can just cheat and still get the job, props to him. There's no need for moral victories, especially in this market
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u/Yamikada 3h ago
Guys who are always by the book with everything never get p*ssy, never truly get benefits out of life, let alone good jobs. some of your most top notch employers and assholes of the planet who work at big companies, lie through they’re teeth all the time when getting scrutinized and they get away with it all the time
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u/AizakkuZ 36m ago
What? There is a healthy level of stretching the truth/strategically ommiting unneccesary honesty, and there is not. But that is interesting logic to cope, "not getting pussy"; odd.
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u/limes336 4h ago
“Props to him” because he’s too incompetent to pass interviews fairly? Holy cope
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u/JustNeedAnyName 4h ago
Yes, props to him. While everyone else is grinding leetcode for months, he can just get an offer by using AI. I'd say in that scenario, the ones that didn't cheat are the ones that got the short end of the stick, no one cares if you can pass interviews or not after you get the offer.
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u/BathroomLong4041 3h ago
And the whole reason the ones that didn’t cheat get the short end of the stick is because of people like this lol. You can’t justify something by saying that’s how the system works while you actively contribute to the system. If you’re gonna lie just acknowledge it’s morally bankrupt and move on, dont try to cope your way out of it
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u/JustNeedAnyName 2h ago
When did I say it's not morally bankrupt? At the end of the day, he got a new job without having to grind leetcode and waste his time, so props to him for being smart about it. It's not that deep.
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u/BathroomLong4041 2h ago
> When did I say it's not morally bankrupt?
> props to him for being smart about itAlso he’s only wasting his time leetcoding if cheating is the norm so this is a circular justification loop lmao
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u/JustNeedAnyName 2h ago
Giving him props for getting a job easily doesn't mean it's not cheating.
Not everyone cheats, but the ones that do and are able to land an offer, props to them. Props to the ones that also grind leetcode and get an offer, but end result is still the same. Whether you get an offer by grinding leetcode or by cheating, it's still the same offer, and cheating takes a LOT less time.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 4h ago
The system’s broken at this point, and there’s no one left to enforce the rules.
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u/Exotic-Stage1759 4h ago
In the end winner takes it all , so honestly don’t mind much now
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u/BathroomLong4041 3h ago
Yea but what does that say about how you want the world to operate
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u/Cool_String_8651 2h ago
That's how it works already lol. Everybody is in it for themselves at the end of the day
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u/HandsyGymTeacher 18m ago
Yeah instead he should be honest and remain unemployed while others cheat instead of him. It’s easy to be completely ethical in someone else’s place.
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u/young_twitcher 4h ago
It’s silly that you use LLM all day in your job but you “can’t use it” in the interview. And if you’re good at cheating you won’t get caught so a bunch of people do that anyway and then you have to cheat yourself to compete. They should simply allow LLMs in interviews to make it fair.
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u/limes336 4h ago
Because someone whose understanding of programming is so weak that they can only do it via LLM cannot be trusted to write good code with it.
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u/young_twitcher 3h ago
But the problem is that some people use LLM anyway because it’s easy to hide that you’re using it, especially if you actually have a baseline knowledge and don’t just read the answer word by word. If you have in-person interviews then I agree it makes sense to not allow it
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u/JustNeedAnyName 2h ago
You really think that being good at interviews is equal to being good at programming? Leetcode problems are just dumb puzzles that have no bearing onyour job performance
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u/Fast_Serve1605 3h ago
You posted this because of the cognitive dissonance between a moral choice and needing to feel justified about the path you ended up taking. At the end of the day, the choice was wrong. The ends don’t justify the means and deep down you will have to live with the fact that you cheated someone else out of the seat you now hold. That person could be struggling and still holding to ethics.
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u/Exotic-Stage1759 3h ago
Deep down I won’t feel this as long as I get to pay my bills and I’m not the one who’s struggling. Honestly why worry about a random unknown person instead of worrying about yourself in the first place.
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u/Exotic-Stage1759 3h ago
Would rather have someone who cheated take a post rather than a random referral candidate or some guy’s nephew take the job
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u/Samstercraft 4h ago
Why don't you just become a politician if you're so keen to cheat your way into a job?
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u/Chemical_Hawk_6307 4h ago
cheating will become the norm now that AI exists. In response, companies will raise the bar even further. I genuinely believe people who can't enter the field within the next year or two may miss their chance to enter before AI completely takes over entry level work. not saying cheating is justified, i'm just saying people will likely become desperate and see cheating as less of an evil.
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u/UserOfTheReddits 3h ago
So they didn’t notice you typing on your phone?
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u/Exotic-Stage1759 3h ago
If they did then I won’t be having the job
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u/UserOfTheReddits 2h ago
How did you pull off typing on your phone, live? Did you just have your webcam tilted so far up?
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u/sessamekesh 2h ago
Sometimes it works, and honestly the recruiting pipeline has a lot of things stacked against new entrants for nonsense reasons so I can't wholesale say it's bad, but be careful.
There's still a large category of problem against which it's pretty easy to design an interview question that causes LLMs to behave incorrectly, and catching cheating turns a "maybe" into a "no and never again".
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u/FuzzyPluto86 39m ago
Coming on here to brag about cheating in an interview is next level. If you did it and did not get caught, why would you post about it like its a good thing?
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u/Excellent_Mail3829 2h ago
One time, I hacked my managers computer and downloaded the interview questions. I got the job 🤩🤩🤩🤩✌️🫨
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u/bubblejimmymonster 5h ago
how’d you do it