Controversy Surrounding Interview Coder
A software application called Interview Coder has sparked controversy by promising to help software developers succeed at technical job interviews through unconventional means. The tool, developed by 21-year-old Roy Lee, cofounder and CEO of the company, uses AI to secretly feed candidates answers to programming questions during interviews.
Lee, who was recently a sophomore at Columbia University, claims that he and his cofounder Neel Shanmugam created Interview Coder partly as a protest against industry practices that require job candidates to solve programming puzzles during interviews. Lee spent hundreds of hours practicing such problems, time that he believes could have been better spent on actual coding projects.
“This kind of killed a lot of my love for programming, just because I was forced to write code that just wasn’t fun,” Lee explains. “I was forced to solve riddles instead of actually working on building real-world projects, and I just grew to really dislike the system.”
Despite its protest origins, Interview Coder has proven financially successful, recently surpassing $3 million in annual recurring subscription revenue. The program, available for both Windows and Mac, allows users to secretly take screenshots of programming puzzles presented during interviews, feeding the questions to AI for analysis and coded solutions.
The controversy surrounding Interview Coder has raised questions about the ethics of using AI to gain an unfair advantage in job interviews and the broader implications for the tech industry’s hiring practices.
