Or are you counting also VC money into that "profit"?

And none is remotely profitable.

Esp. when they aren't even sure whether they will commit to offering this long term? Who would be insane enough to build a product on top of something that may not be there tomorrow?

Those products require some extensive work, such a model finetuning on proprietary data. Who is going to invest time & money into something like that when OpenAI says right out of the gate they may not support this model for very long?

Basically OpenAI is telegraphing that this is yet another prototype that escaped a lab, not something that is actually ready for use and deployment.

Yes, it is disgusting. Sadly also very common.

So why is Google relevant to this in any way?

You have missed his point. If the interview questions are such that AI can solve them, they are the wrong questions being asked, by definition. Unless that company is trying to hire a robot, of course.

This sort of comp-sci style exam with quizzes and what not maybe somewhat helps when hiring junior with zero experience fresh out of school.

But why are people with 20+ years of easily verifiable experience (picking up a phone and asking for references is still a thing!) being asked to invert trees and implement stuff like quicksort or some contrived BS assignment the interviewer uses to boost their own ego but with zero relevance to the day to day job they will be doing?

Why are we still wasting time with this? Why is always the default the assumption there that the applicants are all crooked hochstaplers that are lying on their resumes?

99% of jobs come with probationary period anyway where the person can be fired on the spot without justification or any strings attached. That should be more than enough time to see whether the person knows their stuff or not after having passed one or two rounds of oral interviews.

It is good enough for literally every other job - except for software engineering. What makes us the special snowflakes that people are being asked to put up with this crap?

But if you are the only technical person around, who is going to show you what a good or bad practice *in your specific field* is? That you won't find on Stack Overflow or by asking ChatGPT.

Being able to talk to an experienced mentor who knows the field you are working in is invaluable. Unlike learning some framework or design patters or what not, this information you won't find anywhere else.

If you aren't experienced already it is a very hard position to be in, with a huge responsibility and potential to screw up due to inexperience - and be promptly thrown under the bus when the proverbial shit hits the fan. Code reviews by ChatGPT can't compensate for lack of more experienced colleagues.

The best way to grow as a fresh grad is to join a medium sized, established business. There you are going to be a part of a team where you will get to learn the ropes of your field (that's something you won't find in ChatGPT or university) and at the same time the pressure won't be so hard. And while you aren't going to get the perks of working at huge companies like Google or Facebook, you likely won't have to deal with assorted corporate BS that comes with it either.

Only once you get a few years under your belt think about startups, small companies, etc.

Having a good mentor or two is pretty essential because most of knowledge isn't written down and retrievable by LLMs or about some framework or tool. It is the experience of people who have been there before, done it, got burned and learned to not do the same mistake again.

Makes sense.

That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the (especially) US startup culture in the last maybe 10-20 years. Only very rarely is the goal of the founders and angel investors to build an actual sustainable business.

In most cases the goal is to build enough perceived value by wild growth financed by VC money & by fueling hype that an subsequent IPO will let the founders and initial investors recoup their investment + get some profit on top. Or, find someone to acquire the company before it reaches the end of its financial runway.

And then let the poor schmucks who bought the business hold the bag (and foot the bill). Nobody cares if the company becomes irrelevant or even goes under at that point anymore - everyone who did has has recouped their expense already. If the company stays afloat - great, that's a bonus but not required.

That's definitely going to be an improvement. Not.

That assumes your talent actually gets through the automated HR filter after the recruiter has handed your over and collected their commission ...

Normal? Absolutely not. It signals loud and wide that your time is not worth even a reply from the recruiter/HR and you are being treated as a disposable piece of crap. You can imagine how they would treat you if you actually got hired.

There is zero excuse for wasting the candidate's time like this. Even less today with all the "AI" automation the recruiting companies & HR uses - writing a form rejection e-mail is literally a one click affair.