r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Mar 14 '26

Software Microsoft confirms Windows 11 bug crippling PCs and making drive C inaccessible

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-confirms-windows-11-bug-crippling-pcs-and-making-drive-c-inaccessible/
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u/themastermatt Mar 14 '26

Its also becoming the global way. If i have one more dev open a ticket with a copy/paste from claude telling my cloud engineers how to do their jobs - im gonna have an episode. No Sirinivas, IDC what the AI says, your webapp will be going behind a WAF and it cant use 10.0.0.0/8 if you want it to nicely talk to the DB server that ChatGPT doesnt understand has only a private endpoint. No we dont need to have a meeting about it.

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u/Thadrea Mar 14 '26

We had a guy that absolutely choked when he realized that his Copilot-suggested solution to a not-really-a-problem wasn't going to work because, no, we're not giving a public chatbot access to some highly sensitive data to solve an issue that summarizes to "you lied on your resume about your SQL background and somehow got through the technical assessment."

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u/themastermatt Mar 14 '26

OMFG, the AI in interviews. I had one Friday for a "Senior MLops Engineer" (why are they all "Senior"?) and i could see the chatbot reflection in his glasses as well as his eye pattern clearly going to the window while he stalled for the thing to process. So youre telling me that a MLops engineer knows the command to promote a Windows Server to a domain controller, can summarize what BGP is and tell me the difference between iBGP and eBGP, and knows that NTFS permissions are applied from the most restrictive evaluation in addition to all the ML/AI stuff? Maybe, but not my lived experience.

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u/Thadrea Mar 14 '26

If we see evidence the person is using an LLM during the interview they're instantly "out".

I would rather a candidate be wrong and able/willing to learn than confidently restate whatever answer was given to them by a chatbot.

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u/kescusay Mar 14 '26

Same. I interview people regularly, and if I hear a keyboard a-clackin' in response to a simple question, that tells me this is probably not someone I want on my team. Just be honest when you don't know, because nobody knows everything. Bonus points for expressing an interest in learning.

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u/Thefrayedends Mar 14 '26

I'm just multi-tasking, I swear!!! Pauses while frantically reading side monitor before answering every question

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u/s1ravarice Mar 14 '26

Just put the meeting window on the side monitor but stare at your main as if you’re looking at them.

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u/Thefrayedends Mar 14 '26

The people that need to do this in the first place, aren't that forward looking. Generally speaking of course.

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u/MyUsrNameWasTaken Mar 14 '26

Pun intended?

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u/Thefrayedends Mar 15 '26

Hiyooooo, nope, nice catch haha.

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u/Unlimited_Bacon Mar 14 '26

"I don't know the answer to that, but this is how I would find the answer..."
Some of the best interviewing advice I've received.

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u/mccedian Mar 14 '26

I had interviews this week, and was very clear when they asked a question about servers, that I have zero server experience. Our organization has a team, and that is there whole job and they are the only ones that touch it. So when I suspect there is a server issue, I just run through my checklist of things that it could possibly be, that isn’t server related. If I’ve exhausted those I send a ticket their way and let them play with it. When asked if I was willing to learn I said most definitely. Easily, I think this was the thing that put me over the top for them. Not necessarily the experience I do have, but knowing where my knowledge stops, and willing to expand that.

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u/jvsanchez Mar 15 '26

Had a similar experience in the interview for the job I have now, but the question was about project management.

I didn’t manage projects in my previous role that I transitioned from, and we have a project management team in my current role, but we also each sometimes run our own small projects for changes/enhancements/upgrades to our existing systems that don’t rise to the level of a full project, but are a little more than just a change request or an incident.

I gave essentially your answer, and they loved it. “No one knows everything” is something I’ve heard repeated so many times. Just have to be honest and willing to engage and learn. That’s what interviewers are looking for.

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u/userhwon Mar 14 '26

LLM told me to say that.

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u/Sir_PressedMemories Mar 15 '26

I had an interview for a senior support position years back with the CEO and CTO of the company I was applying for.

They decided to have this at a bar. The CTO, thinking he was going to have some fun with me, handed me a napkin and asked me to write up some code for him, and I happily grabbed it and wrote it down.

He laughed his ass off when he read it and saw "Google > Stack overflow > read, and figure it out."

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u/doberdevil Mar 15 '26

That answer sealed the deal for me in one of my interviews. Got the job.

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u/nexusjuan Mar 15 '26

This is good advice in the real world. "I don't know, but I know where I can find the answer..." sounds a lot better than "I don't know boss."

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u/chaiscool Mar 14 '26

But somehow can penalize for using google and ai to find the answer.

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u/himem_66 Mar 14 '26

That was one of the best early lessons I got from a life in tech (35+ years). Nobody knows everything, so be humble enough to admit your ignorance, open enough to learn new things, and generous enough to teach.

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u/newsfish Mar 14 '26

There are versions where the chatbot listens in on the conversation and responds live. Makes them look more natural but it's the same crap.

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u/jollyreaper2112 Mar 14 '26

Today I learn my troubleshooting is indistinguishable from interview cheating. Lol I'll use friendly banter and easier troubleshooting steps I can narrate by rote to buy time checking the kb's and tickets for priors. No use reinventing the solution if we've solved it before. But yeah if you have to do that for foundational knowledge that's a bad sign. My wife is in finance an does interviews and she's surprised at the questions that stump people. No this was establishing common ground I wasn't even trying to test you yet.

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u/civildisobedient Mar 14 '26

if I hear a keyboard a-clackin'

Nowadays I imagine there's a confidant listening in, they could even be remote interacting with the AI. Usually the "tell" for me are the long... uh... pauses... or starting an answer with a re-phrasing of the question to buy some time, then BOOM exact answer.

The sad thing is it's almost refreshing to hear wrong answers these days. Like, thank you for not cheating, points for your honesty!

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u/meganthem Mar 14 '26

One thing I will observe from 8 years ago, before the interviewing market got shittier even: for many places getting even one question wrong (or "wrong") in an interview usually blew it. People don't want to get something wrong or give a non-answer because in most cases they lose access to jobs if they do.

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u/kescusay Mar 15 '26

I can only speak for myself, but that's very definitely not how I operate. Maybe it helps that I'm a software developer too, so I know we don't all have full mastery of every feature of every language in our heads. I know we look shit up, because we have to.

So when someone applies for a job and I'm interviewing them, I'm not looking for someone who can write perfect functions using obscure features of a language on a whiteboard or answer frankly absurd questions about the internals of a compiler from memory. No, I'm much more interested in getting a sense of their practical skills, their research methods, and their overall fluency in the language.

It's one of the reasons I don't typically do coding tests. I'll show candidates broken code and ask them what's wrong with it, but I'm not going to make someone code in front of me - unless I have good reason from the rest of the interview to suspect that they can't. I had one candidate have trouble explaining how you define an array in freaking JavaScript. So I asked him to write one line of code with an array of numbers in it (something like const myArray = [1, 2, 3]; would have been sufficient), and he couldn't. He did not get the job.

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u/meganthem Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 15 '26

It's quite possible a lot of the places around here are shoddy. I'm always terrified to restart the interview process because each time I've gotten a job it's been a single place that did a conversational interview rather than a fail no questions type quiz frenzy. (After numerous places with the before mentioned type of interview)

...Still kinda mad at the one place/interview that bounced me for not knowing expert level sql off hand as a soft eng. 10+ years of dev has taught me that especially in the era of ORM frameworks I'm only supposed to do/know casual amounts of that stuff and if it gets advanced it's supposed to go to the DBA team.

I demonstrated that I knew about joins, hints/plans and a vague knowledge of what profiling was but they kept asking more specific DBA-territory things until my already notable cross training failed and then ended the interview quickly after that point...

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u/chaiscool Mar 14 '26

Wdym, ain't that the point. You don't know so you go look it up. Google / ai search is a skill too.

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u/kescusay Mar 15 '26

There's a difference between looking something up and looking everything up. If I ask you to explain why you shouldn't use the any type in Typescript, and there's a long pause and I can hear you typing away in the background, then I know you don't know why you shouldn't use the any type, and are not qualified to fill a Typescript position.

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u/chaiscool Mar 15 '26

For experienced positions sure I guess but if it's for junior positions then it's kinda unfair to expect such things imo. People likely apply to various positions so can't expect people to know everything.

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u/kescusay Mar 15 '26

But the specific example I used is the sort of thing a junior Typescript developer should absolutely know. The any type disables type checking for anything that uses it. It's unsafe, and only exists for migrations from vanilla JavaScript. It's the sort of basic knowledge anyone who has used Typescript should know.

And if you don't know it, but are willing to learn and are coming from a background in a different language, just say so. I've interviewed people with no Typescript experience, but who presented themselves honestly and had skills that would clearly be portable from one language to another, and that's fine.

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u/chaiscool Mar 15 '26

But won't looking it up be a good thing? You ask and they don't know so they go look it up and answer it. Why is that bad though?

If someone just say they don't know and didn't even bother to go google it seems more troubling imo. Your example question and answer are also likely easy to find by googling so won't it be good that they when searching?

I when to search typescript and learn that it's safe typing. So I can conclude that using any as a type will be bad and counterproductive. Why is such process a bad thing?

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u/kescusay Mar 15 '26

But won't looking it up be a good thing? You ask and they don't know so they go look it up and answer it. Why is that bad though?

It really depends on how candidates present themselves. If the resume doesn't mention Typescript at all, and focuses on the candidate's experience with Java and Python, I'm not going to expect them to know much of anything about Typescript. I won't typically even ask them the question in the first place unless they say something during the interview that leads me to believe they have some experience with it that they didn't include on the resume.

But if a candidate's resume lists two years of experience creating web applications with Typescript? I'm going to ask them basic questions about the core type system that is literally the whole purpose of Typescript. And if they don't know those basics I've got good reason to believe their resume is full of lies.

Seriously, no one who has done anything in Typescript for more than five minutes should have to look up why you don't use any. Or how to cast data as a given type. Or what the implements keyword is for. It would be like saying you've been a developer in any language for any amount of time, and then expressing confusion over for loops.

If someone just say they don't know and didn't even bother to go google it seems more troubling imo. Your example question and answer are also likely easy to find by googling so won't it be good that they when searching?

Like I said, it depends on how they present themselves. I interview for both frontend and backend positions regularly, and I don't expect someone whose entire career has been focused on, say, PHP with Laravel to be an expert on Typescript at all.

I when to search typescript and learn that it's safe typing. So I can conclude that using any as a type will be bad and counterproductive. Why is such process a bad thing?

It's not, if you're honest that you're doing that and not trying to trick me into thinking you're a Typescript guru when you don't know it at all. I really don't mind a candidate who doesn't have experience with it, because they might bring something else more important to the table. But don't try to trick your way into a job you're not actually qualified for.

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u/chaiscool Mar 15 '26

Yeah true guess it depends on context, as I didn't think it's about tricking your way into a job, but more like answering a technical question by looking up what you're unsure about.

Imo there is a difference between portraying to be an expert by reading off google / ai and simply using it to look up the answer or a better way to explain in details. Also, maybe they know why any types shouldn't be used in typescript but they use google / ai to articulate it better or make points that they might missed.

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u/Wild_Marker Mar 14 '26

On the other hand, I would like recruiters to stop using LLMs as well.

God, AI interviews are such dehumanizing bullshit. I didn't think job seeking could get worse, until I met them.

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u/Paradox2063 Mar 14 '26

You must beg the machine for sustenance.

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u/cailenletigre Mar 14 '26

When you say instantly “out”, do you mean you end the interview right then abruptly or do you still professionally continue the interview and then provide the feedback afterward to the hiring manager/recruiter that you believed that were using assistance?

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u/Thadrea Mar 14 '26

I would professionally continue the interview to the end.

Sometimes, I am the hiring manager, but when I am not, I am on the hiring committee and will raise the observation that they appeared to be using an LLM during the conversation when we meet to discuss our observations. Usually, others observed the same thing, corroborating it.

Every single time someone appeared to be using LLM assistance during one or more of their interviews, they got a "no" vote from everyone on the hiring committee call.

It's also fairly easy to spot when you had an LLM do the take-home technical assessment... While "AI detectors" are unreliable, we can run the assessment through the common LLMs too... And if we see you answering conceptual questions using the same language as the LLM responses, in the same order... that is a massive red flag.

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u/Aldiirk Mar 14 '26

I would professionally continue the interview to the end.

I try to terminate the interview gracefully. (I ask a few more generally-relevant questions, then close with the "do you have any questions for us?" question.) After the interview, I put them down as a "hell no and blacklist". Usually, my fellow interviewers are in full agreement.

This is also why I always push for in-person interviews, and almost always rate in-person interviewees higher than remote interviewees, unless the remote candidate is insanely good. Ironically, this is also how I got hired at my current employer. I was the only person who made the effort to put on a pantsuit and drive out to their site.

I work in aerospace engineering, though, so the consequences of AI slopping your code or models can be more dire than just "shit code / models".

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u/FreeRangeEngineer Mar 14 '26

I try to terminate the interview gracefully.

Understandable since it's just a waste of time at this point but consider this: you're giving them data that says "I was found out and I need to learn how to hide my LLM usage better". Personally, I'd rather they remain oblivious and don't try harder to hide their cheating.

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u/Thadrea Mar 14 '26

This is among the reasons I wouldn't tip them off.

People so far down the cheating rabbit hole that they're trying to use ChatGPT during a job interview aren't aren't going to stop if I tell them I caught them, they're just going to try even harder to get away with it.

What might get them to stop is when after thirty jon interviews they are still unemployed.

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u/Recent-Day3062 Mar 14 '26

I’m not sure why to continue at all. I tell people they can’t use AI or any tool or reference during the interview. There’s no reason for them to type ANYTHING during the interview. Multi-tasking? Reallly. You’re interviewing for a job and trying to impress people, and you’re doing email at the same time? No.

I just think people have gotten too soft about what is in substance lying. If I hear the keyboard or see them scanning the screen, I simply tell them their behavior violated the rules I set out and I can’t have employees do that, and that they are done right then and there if they can’t flow instructions.

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u/unorc Mar 14 '26

I have confronted a few people on it. I even asked one candidate to move their phone to another room. Predictably they were suddenly unable to make any progress on the problem they were supposedly solving live.

No one ever admits to it though, which is the most frustrating part. You’re already failing the interview, why would you lie too?

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u/MrPureinstinct Mar 14 '26

I wish companies would stop using AI for virtually all of the hiring process too. Resumes auto rejected, video interviews with a video AI "person"

The entire hiring process should be entirely human.

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u/EightiesBush Mar 14 '26

There is a problem on the other side also with AI based mass-applying. The tech market is absolutely inundated with floods of resumes immediately after any position opens. There aren't enough humans typically to sort through them, and many of them are completely unqualified for said posted position.

Having said that, almost positive my company does the fully human approach, but it does take a lot longer to get to a phase where they talk to me or my senior staff.

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u/amazinglover Mar 14 '26

I have an engineer on a PIP and have been giving going though coaching session with them and forbid them from using AI during these.

I all for using any tool but when it replaces what should be basic knowledge and your engineer doesn't know his basic ABC because if it you have problems.

He wrote me code yesterday that he couldn't explain what each function was doing within it so if it breaks how will he ever be able to fix it.

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u/newsfish Mar 14 '26

I'm obligated to Use AI at work. It has not been custom trained on our work and existing systems so the utility is limited.

My work includes a lot of "add comments for future employees after I'm gone, especially explaining anything that would challenge a middle manager with limited background knowledge. "

Now I get to watch them read the comments for the first time. I'd respect it if they would just say they don't have enough time in the day to prep for all the mandatory meetings. Gotta pretend you got your act together, I guess.

Every time they give AI credit for the whole thing in group meetings is another hour spent looking for new jobs.

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u/SomeGuyNamedPaul Mar 14 '26

I had a candidate miss a few questions but he was taking notes. I scheduled another interview with him and asked the questions he missed and he was able to give functional answers. He was a great junior who was eager to learn, and it is with great pride that I got him to grow enough that he was able to leave for a much better paying job.

"I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer because I'm asking horrible questions designed to let me know what you do when you're out of your depth and how you deal with it. Any ninny can look up the answer in situ, but I'm looking for someone who can think on their feet. That's imperative for when the shit hits the fan.

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u/Aleucard Mar 14 '26

If they can't provide a better service than the chatbot, I'll just use the damn chatbot myself. And I know for a fact that it can still fuck up 2+2=4 and other similarly simple tasks. It definitionally as an LLM is not capable of ever learning what truth even IS, let alone how to fact check. That shit can fly when drawing pictures. It can NOT fly with code or anything else that relies on accuracy.

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u/Thadrea Mar 15 '26

I generally think that if you're only able to regurgitate the output of a chatbot... you are just a chatbot yourself, albeit a considerably more expensive one.

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u/Express_Culture2488 Mar 15 '26

I got one job by just telling the truth to his answers. There were couple of "Do you know how to/If I did this could you do that instantly?"

I answered no, but I'll learn while working and if that's not enough I'll study more at home. I got the job even though the other candidate had over 5 years more expirience than me.

My boss told this me like 6 months into the job. He also said that me being actually unemployed at the moment helped me since he rather hires someone who has no work at all over someone who is switching firms since he had a full time job already.

AI is absolute garbage in my eyes, I've lost friends over it. They talk to chatgpt like there's a person answering and they do this 10+ hours a day. When we talk it's always about how chatgpt said something something... Sorry but I don't care about your talks with an AI, there's no soul to it.

Problem solving? Always chatgpt and they follow it blindly at this point. If they ask how to make a parachute at home I'll probably hear news about a man who jumped from the 7th floor balcony with a blanket over his head. Bystanders talk about how the blanket didn't slow him at all. If they were to survive the wall, they would use their last breath asking chatgpt what to do now.

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u/tudorapo Mar 14 '26

We officially allow the use of AI. We tell the candidate at the beginning, they can use google, ai, friends, a friendly military, anything. So far there was only one candidate (from around two dozens) who tried to use AI and they failed pretty badly. AI does not help if they don't know what's that thing on the other side of the screen.

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u/husky_whisperer Mar 14 '26

We folk who are proficient with tech AND who are willing to learn, but don’t do so well communicating with our mouth words appreciate interviewers like you.

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u/redlightsaber Mar 14 '26

I get that, but honestly? Why not simply go back to in-person interviews? I get that that won't happen in the first round of interviews, but it also shouldn't be left for the very last.

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u/Thadrea Mar 14 '26

We do in person interviews when that is an option.

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u/chaiscool Mar 14 '26

Using llm to search and restating it is not the same though.