I’m seeing a growing issue in tech hiring that’s honestly getting out of hand — AI-assisted / proxy interviews.

Candidates are using:

- Real-time AI tools to generate answers

- Hidden setups where someone else feeds responses

- Memorized + AI-polished system design answers

And the result?

👉 People with little to no real production experience are clearing interviews

👉 Meanwhile, genuinely experienced engineers are getting filtered out

-–

### What’s frustrating

As someone with real hands-on experience (Kafka, Spark, pipelines, etc.), interviews are becoming less about:

- Debugging ability

- Real-world problem solving

- Tradeoff thinking

…and more about:

- How fast you answer

- How polished you sound

- How “perfect” your responses are

Which is exactly what AI tools optimize for.

-–

### The real problem

Most interviews are still:

- Predictable

- Theory-heavy

- Easily searchable

So AI can:

- Suggest structured answers instantly

- Fill gaps in knowledge

- Make candidates sound more experienced than they are

But this breaks the hiring signal completely.

-–

### What companies don’t realize (yet)

You can pass interviews with AI help…

But you can’t survive real production issues with fake experience.

Things like:

- Kafka data loss / ISR issues

- Spark skew / memory tuning

- Airflow pipeline failures

- Debugging distributed systems

These require actual experience, not generated answers.

-–

### Impact on genuine candidates

- You might hesitate → AI-assisted candidates don’t

- You think → they respond instantly

- You speak from experience → they speak in “perfect frameworks”

So ironically, real engineers look weaker in interviews

-–

### What needs to change

If companies want to fix this, interviews should shift toward:

✔ Deep dives into actual past work

✔ Failure scenarios (“what broke and how did you fix it?”)

✔ Follow-up drilling (keep going until depth is exposed)

✔ Live problem solving (not memorized questions)

Because AI can fake answers…

…but it can’t fake experience under pressure

-–

### Curious to hear from others

- Are you seeing this in your interviews?

- Have you encountered obvious proxy/AI-assisted candidates?

- How are companies adapting (if at all)?

This feels like a serious issue that’s only going to grow if ignored.