This might be a false alarm, but “tell me your thoughts on AI and the future” is an extremely counterproductive interview question. You’re presenting it as a litmus test for engineers to apply to themselves, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But if it’s typical or analogous to some other test(s) you use to actually judge incoming hires, it doesn’t bode well. By asking it you are, on some level, filtering for public speaking aptitude and ability to sound impressively thoughtful, two things which probably have little or nothing to do with the work you do.
I realize that might seem like a pedantic point, and you might be asking yourself: “how many smart people who want to work here can’t drop impressive speeches about X? We’ll just refrain from hiring that edge case population.” The reason it’s relevant that your interview “could” be selecting for the wrong thing is because recruitment is an adversarial process, not a random process. You are fighting against other technology companies who have better and more scientific hiring pipelines, and more time and money to build them. Those companies often diligently reject the people who can speak well but not code. The result is the candidates you’re looking at will almost always seem curiously good at answering these questions, and under-performing on actual workplace tasks. Even if this were happening I’m sure you’d believe everything is fine, because your VC money lets you give enormous salaries that obscure the problem and because AI safety companies get a glut of incoming attention from sites like Lesswrong. All the more reason not to waste those things.
Worse, you have now published that question, so you will now get a large amount of people who coach their answers and practice them in front of a mirror in preparation for the interview. “Oh well, most people are honest, it’ll only be like 1/2/5/10/25% of our applicants that...”—again, not necessarily true of your passing applicants, and definitely not necessarily true of applicants rejected or less-well-compensated by your competitors.
This might be a false alarm, but “tell me your thoughts on AI and the future” is an extremely counterproductive interview question. You’re presenting it as a litmus test for engineers to apply to themselves, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But if it’s typical or analogous to some other test(s) you use to actually judge incoming hires, it doesn’t bode well. By asking it you are, on some level, filtering for public speaking aptitude and ability to sound impressively thoughtful, two things which probably have little or nothing to do with the work you do.
I realize that might seem like a pedantic point, and you might be asking yourself: “how many smart people who want to work here can’t drop impressive speeches about X? We’ll just refrain from hiring that edge case population.” The reason it’s relevant that your interview “could” be selecting for the wrong thing is because recruitment is an adversarial process, not a random process. You are fighting against other technology companies who have better and more scientific hiring pipelines, and more time and money to build them. Those companies often diligently reject the people who can speak well but not code. The result is the candidates you’re looking at will almost always seem curiously good at answering these questions, and under-performing on actual workplace tasks. Even if this were happening I’m sure you’d believe everything is fine, because your VC money lets you give enormous salaries that obscure the problem and because AI safety companies get a glut of incoming attention from sites like Lesswrong. All the more reason not to waste those things.
Worse, you have now published that question, so you will now get a large amount of people who coach their answers and practice them in front of a mirror in preparation for the interview. “Oh well, most people are honest, it’ll only be like 1/2/5/10/25% of our applicants that...”—again, not necessarily true of your passing applicants, and definitely not necessarily true of applicants rejected or less-well-compensated by your competitors.
I can reassure you that it is in fact a litmus test for engineers to apply to themselves, and that’s as far as it goes.
While part of me is keen to discuss our interview design further, I’m afraid you’ve done a great job of laying out some of the reasons not to!
Glad to hear that :)