There's a button on ChatGPT in my iPhone app that allows me to switch it to microphone mode rather than needing to type it. An off screen tap and you can get the results.

I'm sure that some people have hooked up the whisper model so that it can tap a desktop audio out and feed ChatGPT too.

Typing during an interview is pretty common since many people (interviewers and interviewees alike) take notes during interviews, so the typing alone didn't stand out as unusual.

I once concluded an interview with a candidate who was rather conspicuously engaged in clandestine typing, subsequently rectifying their previously incorrect answers. I suspected they were resorting to Google, given this was before ChatGPT came out. Much to my surprise, they ended up landing the job.

They got hired even though you said "no"? That sounds extremely unusual, typically employers of SDE types are cautious this way.

I don't know what exactly happened there. The two of us conducting the interview advised against this candidate in our report. About a month later the candidate was introduced as a new hire on a different team and I never saw them again in a company of <100 people.

Arguably if someone can google the “answers” to your interview questions in 20 seconds they aren’t good questions to ask anyway.

And if someone's ability to answer questions using search tools in real time is sufficient to impress a series of interviewers, they're probably quite resourceful at finding solutions to problems they've been given a few hours to solve