People are interviewing for jobs they don’t understand

A friend wrote to me about a job interview,

“Today, we had an online interview and we found the guy was answering our questions using ChatGTP and had a browser open. We asked him to share the screen to do some coding (after 30 minutes discussion) and we all saw his chat.”

Because we’re good friends and he likes a story, I wrote back the following.

This world we have created is an unmitigated catastrophe.

It did not begin with AI. The groundwork was laid when we built a world where results were rewarded without regard for principle or effort.

People learned what most of our societies very clearly value: appearance above substance.

Since the number of people who know how to keep society going at the current level is a rounding error, and everything seems to work fine anyway, what’s the harm if you cheat a little—or a lot—to get what you’ve neither earned and nor could possibly understand?

Everyone else is doing it.

Only your own principles stand in your way.

“It’s best not to have any principles,” whispers society.

“Just consume and cheat your way to the top,” cajoles society.

You’ll sleep like a baby in your king-sized bed in your king-sized home on the gold coast.

He wrote back,

“It is so annoying, we expend more than 3-4 hours interviewing a guy, who when you ask to write the type of a board game 8x8 replies: ‘I need to search how to do it.’”

My dear friend, it has been like this for a while. So much so that I remembered that already over a year ago, I’d written about a satirical article about it.[1] It included many humorous bits like the following,

“Some will say I should have prepared better. To them I ask: prepared how? By memorizing things? By practicing drawing pathways by hand like some kind of monk illuminating a manuscript? The whole point of AI tools is that I no longer need to retain information in my biological memory. My biological memory is for other things now. Important things. Like my Netflix password and the location of my car in parking structures.”

But now that I’ve also interviewed some people—in this day and age of late 2026—I have had the pleasure of speaking with people who are simply playing a mouthpiece for a machine.

These candidates are woefully unqualified for the jobs for which they’re interviewing but they are confident enough to show up for the inteview. It’s gobsmacking how confident they are that the job would “work out somehow”, even though they have no idea how to do it. What do they imagine the first day of work would look like? Do they even imagine it? Do they even care?

No sane person could imagine trying to learn how to be a home-care worker, a Chinese-language instructor, or a gynecologist “on the job”. So, why are people so confident that, with no training or experience, they can do the jobs that we’re doing?