Comment by dansmith1919

This is definitely not unique to software engineering. Just out of grad school, 15 years ago, I applied for a position with a local electrical engineering company for an open position. I was passed over and later the person I got a recommendation from let me know, out of band, that they had hired the person because he was fresh out of undergrad with an (unrelated) internship instead of research experience (that I would have been the second out of 3 candidates), but they had fired him within 6 months. They opened the position again and after interviewing again they told me they had decided not to hire anyone. Again, out of band, my contact told me he and his supervisor thought I should go work at one of their subcontractors to get experience, but they didn't send any recommendation and the subcontractors didn't respond to inquiry. I wasn't desperate enough to keep playing that game, and it really soured my view of a local company with an external reputation for engineering excellence, meritorious hiring, mentorship, and career building.

I posted a job for freelance dev work and all replies were obviously ai generated. Some even included websites that were clearly made by other people as their 'prior work'. So I pulled the posting and probably won't post again.

Who knew. AI is costing jobs, not because it can do the jobs, but it has made hiring actual competent humans harder.

Same thing where I work. It's a startup, and they value large volumes of code over anything else. They call it "productivity".

Management refuses to see the error of their ways even though we have thrown away 4 new projects in 6 months because they all quickly become an unmaintainable mess. They call it "pivoting" and pat themselves on the back for being clever and understanding the market.

This is not a new norm (LLM aside).

Old man time, providing unsolicited and unwelcome input…

My own way of viewing interviews: Treat interviews as one would view dating leading to marriage. Interviewing is a different skillset and experience than being on the job.

The dating analogue for your interview question would be something like: “Can you cook or make meals for yourself?”.

- Your answer: “No. I’m great in bed, but I’m a disaster in the kitchen”

- Alternative answer: “No. I’m great in bed; but I haven’t had a need to cook for myself or anyone else up until now. What sort of cooking did you have in mind?”

My question to you: Which ones leads to at least more conversation? Which one do you think comes off as a better prospect for family building?

Note: I hope this perspective shift helps you.

Have you watched All-In? Chamath Palihapitiya, who takes himself very seriously, is clearly just reading off something from ChatGPT most of the time.

These Silicon Valley CEOs are hacks.

I volunteer at a non-profit employment agency. I don't work with the clients directly. But I have observed that ChatGPT is very popular. Over the last year it has become ubiquitous. Like they use it for every email. And every resume is written with it. The counsellors have an internal portfolio of prompts they find effective.

Consider an early 20s grad looking to start their career. Time to polish the resume. It starts with using ChatGPT collaboratively with their career counsellor, and they continue to use it the entire time.

I had someone do this in my C# / .NET Core / SQL coding test interview as well, I didn't just end it right there as I wanted to see if they could solve the coding test in the time frame allowed.

They did not, I now state you can search anything online but can't copy and paste from an LLM so as not to waste my time.

You should've asked "are you the one who wants this job, or are you implying we should just hire ChatGPT instead?"

How far did they get? Did they solve the problem?

Seems to me like people have to push back more directly with a collective effort; otherwise the incentives are all wrong.

My sister had a fight over this and resigned from her tenure track position from a liberal arts college in Arkansas.

You’re absolutely right. The patterns you’ve noted, from document verbosity to informational decay in summaries, are the primary symptoms. Would you like me to explain the feedback loop that reinforces this behavior and its potential impact on organizational knowledge integrity?

I have never seen an AI meeting summary that was useful or sufficient in explaining what happened in the meeting. I have no idea what people use them for other than as a status signal

This is the bull case for AI, as with any significant advance in technology eventually you have no choice but to use it. In this case, the only way to filter through large volumes of AI output is going to be with other LLM models.

The exponential growth of compute and data continues..

As a side note, if anyone I'm communicating with - personally or in business - sends responses that sound like they were written by ChatGPT 3.5, 4o, GPT-5-low, etc, I don't take anything they write seriously anymore.

I'm so annoyed this morning... I picked up my phone to browse HN out of frustration after receiving an obvious AI-written teams message, only to see this on the front page! I can't escape haha

> - The average length of documents and emails has increased.

Brevity is the soul of wit. Unfortunately, many people think more is better.

There's a growing body of evidence that AI is damaging people, aside from the obvious slop related costs to review (as a resource attack).

I've seen colleagues that were quite good at programming when we first met, and over time have become much worse with the only difference being they were forced to use AI on a regular basis. I'm of the opinion that the distorted reflected appraisal mechanism it engages through communication and the inconsistency it induces is particularly harmful, and as such the undisclosed use of AI to any third-party without their consent is gross negligence if not directly malevolent.

https://fortune.com/2025/08/26/ai-overreliance-doctor-proced...

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No, it hasn't. Even where people were just submitting reports from an automated vulnerability scanner, they had to write the English prose themselves and present the results in some way (either in an honest way, "I ran vulnerability scanner tool X and it reported that ...", or dishonestly, "I discovered that ..."). This world where people literally just act as a mechanical intermediary between an English chat bot and the Hacker One discussion section is new.

> If that's all which is expected of a person - to be a copypastebot for vast forces beyond one's ken - why fault that person for choosing easy over hard?

I wouldn't be mad at them for that, though they might be faulted for not realizing that at some point, the copy/pasting will be done without them, as it's simpler and cheaper to ask ChatGPT directly rather than playing a game of telephone.

We will quickly evolve a social contract that AI are not allowed to directly contact humans and waste their time with input that was not reviewed by other humans, and any transgression should by swiftly penalized.

It's essentially spam, automatically generated content that is profitable in large volume because it offsets the real cost to the victims, by wasting their limited attention span.

If you wantme to read your text, you should have the common courtesy to at least put in a similar work beforehand and read it yourself at least once.

You're absolutely right! There are no humans involved and I apologize for that! Let me try that again and involve some humans this time, as well as correctly balancing the the parentheses. I understand your frustration and apologize for it, I am still learning as a model!

Hey don't hate on us humans who genuinely do open random PRs to random projects to fix typos. https://github.com/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Ahenrebotha+archi...

I think there are humans that watch "how to get rich with chatgpt and hackerone" videos (replace chatgpt and hackerone with whatever affiliate youtuber uses).

It's MLM in tech.

Even with closed communities, real user accounts will get sold for use by AI.

You’re absolutely right, that’s a sharp observation that really gets to the heart of the issue.

Providing valuable and accurate information was, is, and will continue to be the "meta".

They also don't really use profanity

I once tasked an LLM with correcting a badly-OCR'd text, and it went beast mode on that. Like setting an animal finally free in its habitat. But that kind of work won't propel a stock valuation :(

You do realize English is one of India's two official languages, I hope?

So... nothing? Because I'm also not from an English speaking country and I speak English.

People usually don't type embdash, just use regular dash (minus sign) they have already on the keyboard. ChatGPT uses emdash instead.

I think the JS/Node scene was the pioneer in spamming emojis absolutely everywhere, well before AI. Maybe that's where the models picked it up from.

Here is a damn example: https://gist.github.com/BlueNexus/599962d03a1b52a8d5f595dabd...

It was far before ChatGPT. I remember once on a Show HN post I commented something along the line with "The number of emoji in README makes it very hard for me to take this repo seriously" and my comment got (probably righteously) downvoted to dead.

Clout? The dude behind the username?

I vividly remember the image of one guy digging a hole and another filling it with dirt as a representation of government bureaucracy and similar. Looks like office workers are gonna have the same privilege.

On MacOS (and I have this disabled since I'm not infrequently typing code and getting an — where I specced a - can be not fun to debug)...

Right click in the text box, and select "Substitutions". Smart dashes will replace -- with — when typed that way. It can also do smart quotes to make them curly... which is even worse for code.

(turning those on...)

It is disappointing that proper typography is a sign of AI influence… (wait, that’s option semicolon? Things you learn) though I think part of it is that humans haven’t cared about proper typography in the past.

In Office apps on Windows just type two hyphens and then a word afterwards and it will autoconvert to an em-dash.

I'm starting to wonder if there's a real difference between the populations who use em dashes and those who think it's a sign of AI. The former are the ones who write useful stuff online, which the AIs were trained on, and the latter are the consumers who probably never paid attention to typography and only started commenting on dashes after they became a meme on LinkedIn.

I find it disturbing that many people don't seem to realize that chatbot output is forced into a strict format that it fills in recursively, because the patterns that LLMs recognize are no longer than a few paragraphs. Chatbots are choosing response templates based on the type of response that is being given. Many of those templates include unordered lists, and the unordered list marker that they chose was the em-dash.

If a chatbot had to write freely, it would be word salad by the end of the length of the average chatbot response. Even its "free" templates are templates (I'm sure stolen from the standard essay writing guides), and the last paragraph is always a call to further engagement.

Chatbots are tightly designed dopamine dispensers.

edit: even weirder is people who think they use em-dashes at the rate of chatbots (they don't) even thinking that what they read on the web uses em-dashes at the rate of chatbots (it doesn't.) Oh, maybe in print? No, chatbots use them more than even Spanish writing, and they use em-dashes for quotation marks. It's just the format. I'm sure they regret it, but what are they going to replace them with? Asterisks or en-dashes? Maybe emoticons.

Books use it more liberally, internet writings not so much. Also some languages are much more prone to using it while some practically never use it

I'm skeptical this is the reason:

- Chatgpt uses mdashes in basically every answer, while on average humans don't (the average user might not even be aware it exists)

- if the preference for em dashes came from the training set, other AIs would show the same bias (gemini and Le chat don't seem to use them at all)

Is that why it uses colorful emoticons, too? Was it trained on Onlyfans updates?

Yeah but a dash, at least on my keyboard is a '-', not the one quoted above.

Don't let them win. Stand proud with your "–" and your "—" and your "…" and your "×".

I dislike the ellipsis character on its own merits, honestly. Too scrunched-up, I think - ellipses in print are usually much wider, which looks better to me, and three periods approximates that more closely than the Unicode ellipsis.

In the words of Michael Bolton, "Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."