10 ms·

An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.

• nukeop 9y ago
  In addition to my other projects, I've also added the code of all HackerRank problems I've solved to a repository on Github. I link that profile whenever I look for a job. This way the recruiters have an abundant source of code samples they can look at when making their decisions.
• tty7 9y ago
  You want a personalized interview, styled exactly for you ? I would be a 'no' if i were interviewing me. You obviously can program but this makes you appear to be someone who would be difficult to work with.
  • chii 9y ago
    For a homogenous culture of a large corporation, where each dev is a cog in the system, yes, i would agree that this person will not fit. If i had a start-up, i would definitely give this person a good old try, because i can tell that he/she is capable enough to churn out rather advanced projects with complexity higher than just CRUD. Programmers of this type is what i'd call 10x, and one should never dismiss a 10x!
    • tty7 9y ago
      I would be even more hesitant to hire for a startup! can this person grow with the startup? what happens when we have 10, 20, 30+ engineers - how will they work with the team - will they second guess everything? will everything be an argument? I'm not doubting this persons ability - I'm only responding my opinion of this person based solely on this email.
      • foo101 9y ago
        What kind of startup hesitates to have arguments? I have never been in a startup that fears arguments. Every startup I have been a part of has lively debates and arguments almost every other day. It's only the large slow moving corporate giants where I see such lack of debate and arguments on what is obviously wrong. I would go to the extent of saying that a startup that does not encourage arguments in a harmonious fashion would die very soon anyway. Debates and arguments help in weeding out stupid ideas and focus on what that really matters. This person's email shows that he can have a qualitative argument in a coherent, polite, and non-confrontational fashion - exactly the kind of people you need in startups!
      • swampangel 9y ago
        I might agree if the author hadn't clearly listed their (very reasonable) objections to HackerRank near the start of the email. I wish I had more teammates who could write as effectively.
      • eeZah7Ux 9y ago
        A meaningful and informed debate is more useful to the company than writing a million lines of code. You hire people to solve problems, not churn out code. Code is only a tool to solve a problem.
    • fragmede 9y ago
      I'm afraid I have to disagree. They're called 10x engineers because they're 10x as productive, not because you have to take 10x as long to talk them into not using Haskell for a basic CRUD frontend (remember, it's a startup, someone has to do that part - not everything is gonna be sexy to code). If they're too cool to waste a single second conforming to a basic FizzBuzz test to assert that their resume isn't a lie, they're probably way too cool to do anything but write the most glamorous code in the most visible part of the product - which is the last thing, a startup - with too much work and not enough people, needs.
      • crdoconnor 9y ago
        >If they're too cool to waste a single second conforming to a basic FizzBuzz test I'd be willing to waste 5 minutes tops, unless the employer has put some skin in the game (fizzbuzz is ok - nothing much more than that tho). There's a 1,000 other employers out there who might be a better a fit. I am not going to do a 1 hour, 30 minute or even 15 minute task if they can't at least even be bothered to pick up the phone to talk to me or glance at my github profile. Companies that expect completion of a weekend-filling exercise before granting you an interview are universally run by entitled assholes. You're actually doing yourself a favor by screening them out: they'll be bad to work for, you won't get to work with other 10x engineers and the company will likely achieve nothing impressive anyway.
      • spyspy 9y ago
        > using Haskell > too cool to waste a single second Why are you so quick to extrapolate an entirely new character based on this person not wanting to use HackerRank?
    • iabacu 9y ago
      I expect a 10x to be effective, and to know when to pick a fight or not. In this case, it definitively shows a bent for the innovative and smarts, but shows lack of judgement / wisdom. For a 10x, merely completing the test is a lot faster and more effective than trying to go change the process from the outside.
      • adgasf 9y ago
        Maybe he cares about the industry as a whole? By putting his reasons up publicly, he has triggered a debate about the issue. This seems like a very high cost-benefit ratio to me!
  • fredley 9y ago
    ...If "Tells me when I'm doing something in a way that could potentially be improved, in a polite, validated way" falls under your definition of "Difficult to work with", then perhaps he wouldn't want to work with you anyway. However if you want to hire people to just complete tickets as fast as possible, maybe that's a valid reason to reject the candidate.
    • tty7 9y ago
      To your first point, yes exactly. The interview is as much mine as it is the candidates. Not necessarily hiring to complete tickets as fast as possible, but some who can take a task and complete with minimal issues. I don't want to be stuck in meetings or arguing in PRs etc.
      • foo101 9y ago
        Would you really want someone to take a task and complete with minimal issues if the task does not add value to the organization or is counterproductive? I don't know about you, but I would not want to hire someone who can take any task and complete with minimal issues. Where I work, one is encouraged to argue about what is not right in the meetings and offer better solutions. This candidate is doing exactly that: Argue why a certain hiring methodology is not effective and what a better alternative is. Considering that this candidate does not just follow orders but challenges the status quo and the fact that he has volunteering-based projects to show makes this author very likely a good fit for my organization.
        • tty7 9y ago
          Let me explain a little better, and again I am only basing this all off the small amount of data we have. Let me give an example as I am not the best at articulating. hopefully this helps. Lets say I hired this engineer as Senior or Team Lead. Now I want the base docker image we use for node bumped a major version. I checked the changelog for the nodes releases and knowing our codebase I think its safe. I could ask a Junior dev to do it, but I knowing that they are lacking experience this may seem like a "big deal" when really its not. What I want is the node version updated, validation unit tests pass, regressions tests are good. And it to be released. If there is a failure along the way, address it or sure lets chat about it. But this Email in response to hackerrank - would make me perceive this to be someone who would respond with a complete change to our CI/CD processes, to our infrastructure, maybe to even using Node - as this sort of task is beneath him. Sure there would be areas this person might excel at, but some days little tasks just need to get done to keep the ball moving.
  • dovdovdov 9y ago
    Yea, silly people are living in the misconception that companies are any way interested in their personality. While it's really just about to obey, and follow command. People have to understand that they have to fit the soulless masses and have to be tested accordingly...
    • tty7 9y ago
      I was only responding specifically to a candidate responding with this email if I had asked them to do a hackerrank. While I can understand your leap to soulless masses - that was not my intention.
      • dovdovdov 9y ago
        My comments are mostly sarcastic and polarized, so don't bother that much. Companies are missing out on a ton of creative talent, but they have to play safe and keep their recruitment costs low. I only understand that from a business point of view. Every other perspective suffers.
    • phkahler 9y ago
      If that wasn't sarcasm, you should find a better employer ;-) p.s. Even at the best companies there is some truth in what you say, but it varies a lot.
      • dovdovdov 9y ago
        yep, it was, and yes it's a mix. :)
    • fragmede 9y ago
      Filed under sad-but-true. Worse, your ability to code doesn't make you special, and doesn't qualify you as an interesting human being to anyone outside of tech recruiters, and only then if you are able to produce code on demand in front of a whiteboard. Thankfully, as a human being, you are not your ability to code. More importantly though, then it also means that people who can't code are worth just as much as you as human beings (more, if they've managed to learn social graces). If you don't hold it to be true, then code or GTFO. Look for places like the Recurse center in NY that can help you find yourself in the context of being able to code, or more traditional non-traditional approaches like backpacking though India, or taking LSD in the Haight in the 60's (anyone got a time machine?). If you'd like friends (who will be interested in your personality), go find some. Outside of work. Bonus points if you manage to find some that can't code. Hint: companies are interested in your personality - if you come across as this caustic in a phone screen or in person interview, I'd be surprised if you get invited back. (Or at least they should be; Google's current HR woes are their own creation.)
  • loriverkutya 9y ago
    I'm not sharing the view on the difficult the work with part. For me, this just means, that he is not accepting a solution to the problem, explaining why he thinks it is not a good solution and offering another one, which would work for him. Also, he is not dismissing the hackerrank test, but asking to evaluate his skills on a different way too. As far as I see, this is probably the best way to argue with somebody, that their chosen solution to the problem is not the ideal based on your knowledge and experience.
  • nine_k 9y ago
    Depending on who you are, having a personalized interview may make perfect sense. I'd say hiring a senior developer or a team lead should always take it.
    • tty7 9y ago
      Agreed, but without knowing the context I responded on this emails face value. I would also worry hiring a team lead/senior dev who appears to be combative from the initial screening
      • falcolas 9y ago
        I would worry about a company who sends lead and senior devs to HackerRank to do junior level programming tests and managers who weren't willing to engage in a conversation.
        • deleted 9y ago
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      • lucozade 9y ago
        I wouldn't be concerned with their being combative. I'd be concerned that, without any attempt to make sure they knew the full context, they assumed ignorance or stupidity on the part of the hirer. This kind of approach is fine for a junior. I'd even encourage it because there's an attempt to change the parameters of the problem which is something we often have to teach people as they progress. For a senior position, not so much. I mean, it might be that they're ignorant or stupid, in which case you've probably dodged a bullet when they don't hire you. Or it might be something else entirely. A more sensible approach, in my view, would be to ask what they were looking for with the HackerRank test in a subsequent face to face. If they say that they don't have a better way to determine developer competency then, sure, suggest that you may be able to help with that when you join. If it were me interviewing, I'd be particularly interested in suggestions that a) were developed from successful prior hiring practices and/or b) not so bleeding obvious as "look at their Github page".
  • lllr_finger 9y ago
    This is my first thought as well. It costs a lot of time and money to interview and hire - I do my best to not waste candidates time, and I hope for the same consideration on the other side of the table. Been at two startups and two enterprises and have worked with dozens of great devs who wouldn't respond this way. If I came across this in the wild, I'd reevaluate the parts of the interview I control to see if maybe I could make it less robotic and I'd probably still bring them in to make sure I'm not missing a good dev, but I would be fighting my bias at least a little. There is a small handful of people I've worked with before that would appreciate this approach and their toxic attitudes would prevent me from wanting to work with them again. The interview process can suck, but this is not how I'd recommend standing out from the herd.
  • danesparza 9y ago
    I appreciate you being so honest. Let me be honest in return: You'll never work on interesting, important work until you embrace a worldview that discards bureaucracy. If you want creative solutions to interesting problems, you need to sit up and listen when somebody takes the time to write a thoughtful reply like the OP did. If you want another drone hammering out application code and working overtime out of fear, just keep ignoring folks like the OP. You'll be out of work soon enough, anyway.
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  • mikekchar 9y ago
    Interviews are a 2 way street. Candidates have as much right to evaluate the companies that are trying to hire them as the opposite. Not the OP but, absolutely I want a personalised interview! I want the company I'm working for to care about the people they hire -- not to efficiently fill empty seats. Yes, normally that means I tend to work for startups. I'm happy with that. It's fair to say that you want to be able to evaluate potential employees cheaply before you invest a full interview. It's also fair for people to offer ways to do that evaluation rather than running through someone's maze. Neither side needs to accept the other's offer, but there's no need for either side to take it badly. A "no" is quite a good result if the company would otherwise be wasting the candidate's time.
• maxaf 9y ago
  My regular policy is to ghost any employer who throws a HackerRank test at me. This is usually a strong indicator that the work environment is incompatible with my values.
  • hashkb 9y ago
    Never ghost anyone. It's so rude.
    • jzwinck 9y ago
      US companies ghost candidates all the time. They actually do it on purpose, partly out of a fear that explicit rejections (especially with reasons given) may elicit lawsuits. Our applicant tracking systems won't be upset if you ghost them/us. Your application will simply expire after a while.
    • sincerely 9y ago
      Ghosting individuals? Sure, definitely rude. Recruiters acting in a professional capacity or companies, both of whom would ghost you without a second thought? I gotta say I don’t really see the problem.
  • StavrosK 9y ago
    I politely tell them I'd be happy to have a call or phone screen with them, but I don't do automated puzzle-type tests. This gives them an opportunity to give me their side of the matter and also gives them a signal that at least one candidate dislikes automated puzzle-solving tests.
• collyw 9y ago
  Nice, I wish i had a bit more code to show off on github, as most of my stuff is in house. Hackerrank is such a crap way to evaluate engineers.
  • hashkb 9y ago
    Hiring managers need to be sure they're being fair to everyone. How can they do that looking at your side projects? They need a way to compare apples to apples.
    • Evansbee 9y ago
      But hiring and the work force AREN'T fair. My performance review, salary increases, and bonus aren't based on some normalized criteria, we're rewarded for going above and beyond. Even on the surface "fairness" isn't really the objective, because there are going to be different hiring managers and interviewers throughout the whole process. The salary negotiation isn't going to be "fair" in this way. I'd rather have someone who had a rich github history and a record of real accomplishment than someone who had none but could produce a good hacker rank score. Hiring is the most important thing that we do as managers, I'd be selling myself short if I didn't take it all into consideration.
    • an_d_rew 9y ago
      Regarding the need to compare “apples to apples”: (Manager, rummaging through an apple barrel) “... apple ...” (toss) “... apple ...” (toss) “... apple ...” (toss) “... fist-sized lump of uncut diamond ...” (pause... toss) “... apple ...” (toss) (Days later) “Yeah, I found 2-3 decent looking apples... most are pretty bruised, though...”
• hashkb 9y ago
  No, no, no. They have the job, you want it. That email comes across so arrogant that I would expect even the newest hiring manager to laugh and delete. Without even addressing the sour grapes attitude about coding interviews, the sheer arrogance with which you try to dictate someone else's process is a red flag in the first place. That, plus the fact that you're refusing to do what they want, is really bad for your chances of being hired.
  • chrisrhoden 9y ago
    > They have the job, you want it. By definition, if they have a job, they want to fill it with a qualified person. Jobs aren't (usually) charities to the person working.
    • hashkb 9y ago
      Qualified is something they've defined as "passes this interview process" so I don't think trying to get out of it will be a "yes" too often.
  • chasingthewind 9y ago
    His reply was gracious and well thought out. I didn't get a vibe of arrogance or sour grapes myself. The job hunt is a mutual process...employers are looking at candidates and candidates are looking at employers. If an employer doesn't have a process that fits a candidate's personality and values then it's better for both sides to simply move on. I think this response does an admirable job of beginning that conversation.
  • maxaf 9y ago
    I agree that the arrogance is misplaced, and will be lost on the HR peon whose job it is to send out HackerRank tests to warm leads. On the other hand, it's rare for coders to be so desperate that they'll jump at absolutely any and every job opportunity. The balancne of power has long tipped in our favor.
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• gstar 9y ago
  I think it's probably a great way to understand the culture of the hiring organisation and to see if your approach would work with theirs. It'll probably be relatively unsuccessful at a bigger company with worse internal comms, with an HR function that's too far removed from the engineering team. I'm sure you'll find a job that suits _you_ with this approach, though.
• codingdave 9y ago
  I think that is a great response. But you also should be prepared for them to say no, not because your proposal is bad, but because many hiring managers want to put all applicants through the same hoops, to understand better how they all compare when having to decide between 5 people who all could do the job well.
  • nilkn 9y ago
    Not just that, but doing a completely custom interview just for this one candidate is a lot of upfront investment to make in someone you may not even bring onsite for the full interview. All the caveats this candidate mentioned about standard coding screens are true, but they can all also be taken into consideration by qualified interviewers. There are flaws in this candidate's proposal too. In particular, their proposal does not satisfy their implicit criteria that the interview should mirror real-world conditions, because they chose their own projects with which they are already intimately familiar but the job most likely consists of working on a pre-existing codebase that they know nothing about.
    • shkkmo 9y ago
      > In particular, their proposal does not satisfy their implicit criteria that the interview should mirror real-world conditions, Real world conditions like these? >> (1) time limits, (2) forbidding research on Wikipedia or StackOverflow, (3) forbidding collaboration, and (4) forbidding the use of libraries
      • nilkn 9y ago
        Real world conditions like the one that you edited out of the sentence you quoted. The point is that neither exercise perfectly mimics the job the OP is being considered for, and they fail to do so in different ways.
        • shkkmo 9y ago
          > It asks for small algorithmic coding puzzles There is no mention of "working on a pre-existing codebase that they know nothing about" in the description of the HackerRank test... so I don't know how your point applies?
• arcbyte 9y ago
  Boom. Hired. If any of the candidates I've interviewed and hired had this sort of independent and outside-the-box thinking, I'd have doubled their salaries when I hired them.
  • nine_k 9y ago
    Have you actually made an offer to that person? Do you have the power to double salaries of people in your org?
    • PakG1 9y ago
      The implication seems to be that gp has never interviewed and hired people who "had this sort of independent and outside-the-box thinking".
      • nine_k 9y ago
        If the implication is true, that would be a data point. If the implication is false, it would be an exciting data point! HN being what it is, here is quite a non-zero chance to meet a person with real hiring power who really could have made an offer to the person in question.
        • StavrosK 9y ago
          The GP's sentence was in the conditional perfect (would have), which means he never met someone like that (otherwise he would have said "did").
  • sharemywin 9y ago
    But, did you use a recruiter for hiring? Seems to me like an org that uses a recruiter isn't looking for "outside the box" employees. Obviously they aren't sourcing candidates with outside the box processes.
• tanilama 9y ago
  This is not going to work because it is unfair to other candidates, who did the tests. And it is impossible to avoid any coding question later either.
• jacquesm 9y ago
  You probably might as well have written 'no' for all the difference it will make, but I have to commend you on the carefully worded and actionable bits in your reply. If I were the prospective employer I'd probably write you back that before we will invest into looking at your production we kindly ask you once again to jump over the low bar that was set for all applicants. Then again, if I were your prospective employer I'd never have used hackerrank in the first place because I feel that to expose a potential recruit to a third party service would be a breach of confidentiality and besides I feel that such services are - as you correctly identify - ill suited to picking the people I'd want to work with. It's akin to a luxury fizz-buzz test.
• xianshou 9y ago
  Evaluating side projects is a perfectly valid way to document a software engineer's potential value to a company, but that's not really the point of HackerRank. The purpose of HackerRank is to be a coding screen - that is, a test of basic ability to code simple algorithmic problems under moderate time pressure. I have taken a number of HackerRank screens myself, and I have never seen one that either (a) tests beyond the coding level that would be expected of a fresh CS graduate or (b) is not vastly exceeded in scope and complexity by the coding challenges given during the onsite, which do allow considerably more flexibility and relax some of the artificial constraints. Why attempt to circumvent a test that is meant as a slightly less trivial FizzBuzz?
• ElatedOwl 9y ago
  As someone responsible for hiring developers, these quizzes seem like an absolute waste of time. As an applicant it's almost insulting. I've been a part of two great alternatives: a pair programming session with the lead dev and adding some features/refactoring a sample project. I'd be curious if anyone here is responsible for hiring devs and finds hackerrank type tests useful.
  • jzwinck 9y ago
    I am responsible for hiring developers, and I do find online programming tests very useful. They serve as a relatively simple early-stage screen for applications from people we've never met. Ours costs each candidate 1-2 hours. But we do not require cover letters, which in the good old days might have taken about half that time, and been thrown in the bin. Some may think no CS graduate would fail a test that let you choose any popular language to implement some basic string parsing. But in practice about half the candidates fail this stage of the hiring process, which saves us quite a lot of time. Yes, it costs each candidate an hour or so, but that's a feature, similar to the oft-proposed idea that sending email could cost one cent to reduce spam.
    • ElatedOwl 9y ago
      If you don't mind sharing, what size company and how often do you hire devs? >Some may think no CS graduate would fail a test that let you choose any popular language to implement some basic string parsing. I don't see anything wrong with basic screeners like that, but I have experienced some really silly stuff. Recently I was given a test that asked ~10 questions (some trivia, some paragraph type response), a few small simple questions (reverse a string, etc.), create a class to handle card games (poker, blackjack, etc.), and create a user repository... in 30 minutes. I felt like a dog at a dog show.
      • jzwinck 9y ago
        45 person office, hiring developers gradually and continually. But what I wrote also applied when I was at a 6 kiloperson firm and we hired a hundred developers a year. Some tests will seem impossible to complete in the alotted time. Often that's intentional. It saves time for the candidates and gives a better spread of scores (very few will get 100% in some test batteries). But it can be disheartening. For these initial online tests I try to give enough time that most people won't really run out of time unless they get stuck.
• tw1010 9y ago
  I doubt being pissy against the recruiter is a good strategy for actually getting hired. It might score you a few bro points on HN though.
• deleted 9y ago
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• renegadesensei 9y ago
  It's an interesting idea. Phrased politely I think it's fine to suggest. Still I can understand why people would refuse your approach. There's an obvious risk involved letting the applicant dictate the terms of the evaluation. The point of coding tests is that you can't prepare or easily Google an answer. The employer wants to gauge your unscripted in the moment programming knowledge. Also as someone else said, you need a way to compare apples to apples. Not everyone has an amazing Github to show off. Still I wish employers would better understand the limitations of automated coding tests. Pair exercises where I can use my own environment and think out loud with an interviewer aren't so bad. Fully automated stuff like HackerRank often make simple things overly complicated because they expect answers to be written a certain way. I think those sorts of tests are only suitable for really low level screening - ensuring a sysadmin can use basic bash for example.
  • agentultra 9y ago
    > The employer wants to gauge your unscripted in the moment programming knowledge. I see the appeal of knowing this but I think I'd take a submission from the OP as-is in place of a "coding test." My thinking here is that I can't recall an instance where I needed to write code at a job with a timer ticking down and someone reviewing my work as I went. I usually have the luxury of doing some research and taking a few attempts at a problem before I understand it and write a decent solution. I'm not sure what we expect from candidates when we force them into these situations. Am I supposed to be impressed by their solution? I can't think of how I would be. The code I'm most proud of writing took me several attempts to write. Often over a long period of time. Am I supposed to gain some insight into the way they think about problems? I already know how most people tend to solve problems. It's a well understood area of research. What else is left? All I expect candidates to prove is that they've practiced a problem set and can recall a large number of solutions to trivial problems. Useful but it doesn't give me an indication about how they'll perform. Three months into the job and they'll probably forget 60% of the problem sets they practiced anyway. Do I want to hire programmers who have an intuition of complexity and know when to use a binary tree or a linked list? Definitely! But I'd rather talk to them about real experiences they've had when they had to make such choices and find out why they made the trade-offs they did. It's hard to do that with trivial problems.
• danaliv 9y ago
  The point of an interview process isn't to find out stuff about you in isolation; it's to be able to compare you to other candidates. That's only possible if all the candidates go through the same process. Also, processes get calibrated over time. The most bewildering thing to do as an interviewer is to try a new process, because it's difficult to tell how a candidate did without having collected some other data points.
• lettergram 9y ago
  Honestly, HackerRank is a pretty standard and easy test. I really think it's a reasonable test, at least more reasonable than some. I've been given much harder take home tests: https://austingwalters.com/you-are-given-a-deck-containing-n-cards-2/ https://austingwalters.com/you-are-given-a-deck-containing-n... However, HackerRank is just a screen on: 1. Are you going to be difficult 2. Do you have basic coding skills Typically, I'd interview at least 10 people before I'd give an offer. Once we added improved screening we got that number down to 5 people before an offer (note screening wasn't HackerRank). I think it's reasonable to screen and HackerRank is just that, it's not about complexity.
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    HackerRank isn't a test, it's a platform for testing; individual employer tests on that platform can be more or less reasonable.
    • lettergram 9y ago
      Alright fair, I intended my meaning to be "HackerRank type of assessments - limited time, basic, etc."
      • foo101 9y ago
        Your comment with the intended meaning is still incorrect. HackerRank test can be as standard or as non-standard, and as easy or as difficult as the individual employer wishes it to be.
• ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
  Good luck but they may just want a robot who shuts up and conforms. Despite some people here saying the balance of power does not necessarily rest with the employer, in some cases it does if there are many desperate job seekers who are willing to jump through hoops. You may want to apply to specific smaller teams and/or do your own thing. That said, if you do bite, I have learned a lot from my stints at places who hire like this. The biggest lesson I learned after several years is doing my own thing is right for me.
• dumbfounder 9y ago
  In their defense, they probably have a very difficult time weeding out candidates that don't know anything about programming. It seems like this is the new alternative to a 30 minute phone screen, and I bet a lot of candidates actually like it. But it's good they have your feedback, and if they aren't too crusty, they will use your demonstration of knowledge in stead of your HackerRank score as proof you know your stuff and pass you on to the next level.
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• nine_k 9y ago
  > unnatural conditions including (1) time limits, (2) forbidding research on Wikipedia or StackOverflow, (3) forbidding collaboration, and (4) forbidding the use of libraries The above indeed does not make sense, unless you're hiring a solve-puzzles-as-sports person. I don't think it's enforced by HackerRank, though. It must be the employer's requirement. If so, their hiring process does have problems.
  • sleepychu 9y ago
    I think this is enforced by HackerRank, colleague recently griped that they couldn't set the time limit higher or get rid of the messages forbidding x,y,z.
• romanovcode 9y ago
  I agree with you on the points that HackerRank actually is not a very good indicator of how good programmer one is. However unless they really like your profile they will immediately next you after that kind of response because companies also don't have time for this nonsense. They just want a standardised tests for all candidates so they can rank them and then hire the best.
• chadash 9y ago
  As a hiring manager, I personally don't use HackerRank (or anything similar), but I'm thinking about it. My issue is that many of the people who I come across (most of whom claim to have backgrounds in CS) don't have even basic coding skills. For example, "write a function to reverse a string in a language of your choice" baffles them or takes 20 minutes to write, even though it was meant to be a quick warm-up question. If I know someone is strong coming in (for example, someone I trust recommended them), I will tailor the questions more to them, but otherwise, giving some basic coding problems weeds out a lot of people and saves everyone some time. Even a short phone screen where I just ask someone to code a simple question takes 20-30 minutes of my time (plus however much time I need to get back in the zone), so HackerRank is appealing if only to weed out the very worst candidates. I'm not familiar with HackerRank specifically, but I imagine you have some choice as to how to set it up. If I could set it up to give candidates plenty of time and ask relatively straightforward questions to weed out people who don't have the basics down, it would be a huge time saver for me.
  • chrshawkes 9y ago
    How often does one have to reverse a string? What is the purpose of such a dumb test? How often have you had to do such a thing in the real world (outside of tests such as interview questions?) I suppose you could make the argument we do have to reverse arrays, but strings? Give me a break, only idiot programmers spend their time practicing for useless programming interview questions.
    • chadash 9y ago
      I'm not sure if you have ever been involved in the hiring process from the first stage of screening resumes, but my experience has been that when you post a developer job, many people will apply with very weak coding skills and those people need to be weeded out. Some of them have strong-looking resumes, but I often come across people who stretch the truth on their resumes. So when I do a phone screen, I start out with a basic question that surprisingly weeds out a lot of people. I let candidates code in a language of their choice after hearing the question. Is reversing a string something I do in the real world? Very very rarely if ever. But it's not meant to be a question that simulates a real world coding problem. The point is that it's a very simple problem that anyone proficient in almost any coding language should be able to do. And I don't know anyone I've worked with who wouldn't be able to do this in 5 minutes or less, with or without practice.
• a_imho 9y ago
  Hackerrank is nonsense, question is how desperate the person is for the job.
• anonytrary 9y ago
  I've done ballsy shit like this to get attention from employers. Once I was too slow with the programming questions in the screen-share, so I put up a website with a detailed solution to the last question. I almost got the job, they randomly canceled the on-site at the last minute. Needless to say, I think my effort at least got me to that final step.
• spork12 9y ago
  I can see giving a test like this for an entry level job, but for more senior positions it doesn't really make much sense to me. I'd rather show off a bunch of projects I have under my belt or code I've written in the past. For example, I haven't had to write my own algorithm to parse a b-tree or implement binary search since I left school. I could explain how these algos work, but to actually implement it perfectly in python or java under timed conditions with no outside docs, I would most certainly fail and the company would miss out on a pretty good generalist.
• soneca 9y ago
  It seems to me that this is a well-written, polite, non-confrontational counter-proposal. My opinion is that the company may have two responses that are both valid and legitimate: i) "Sure, go on, nice idea!" or ii) "No, sorry, please follow our established hiring practices". Now, if the company takes that as arrogance and that email only is reason to eliminate the candidate, the email still actually worked as a great way for the candidate to eliminate the company. If a company punishes a polite, thoughtful disagreement from a candidate, it must be a horrible place to work for.
• gedy 9y ago
  I think this is a perfectly valid response if you are senior/experienced/specialist and asked to do these impersonal quizzes. "We need to filter out the idiots" is not a valid reason to waste an experienced candidate's time either.
  • chadash 9y ago
    There's no question that some questions are inappropriate for senior hires. For example, if someone comes in with a lot of open source work, I think it's probably wise for the hiring manager to devote some more time and personalize the process a bit since that person has already has signals that they are probably good (or at least more likely to be good than most candidates). But most developers (and I'd venture most good developers) don't have reputations that proceed them. Since it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, I think that a quick coding quiz is fair game so long as it doesn't waste too much time. For example, if I were interviewing, I'd probably be willing to devote about 30 minutes to this sort of thing, but more than that and I'm probably not going to bother unless I'm very interested in your company.
    • gedy 9y ago
      Sure, valid points, and agree there's a place for this type of screening. I'm mostly referring to when you're experienced, and approached by a company via an on-site recruiter or employee referral. You are busy and not actively looking, but then trying to then feed you through hackerrank quizzes or whiteboards is just so off-putting.
      • chadash 9y ago
        Agreed. I've seen this a lot myself. Companies want you to jump through hoops for them, but the most qualified people for the job probably don't have the time, patience or desire to do so.
      • StavrosK 9y ago
        My experience has been worse: After I'd do all that, they said "great, we'd like to hire you at 80% your current salary!". It angers me. Nowadays I say up-front "I just want to mention this because it's generally been a sticking point and I don't want to waste your time, I'm looking for a salary in the range of $X". That has saved me a whole bunch of time.
• mpetrovich 9y ago
  From both sides as a hiring manager and candidate, I’ve found that a take-home coding challenge that’s tailored to the company is a far better indicator of fit. With a tailored take-home, the company has a chance to evaluate candidates based on more realistic, holistic challenges than “solve this academic comp sci problem that you won’t actually encounter on the job”. And candidates can get a better sense of the type of work and challenges they’d actually be tackling on the job. The take-home isn’t tailored to each candidate. The opposite, actually: it needs to be the same for all so that candidates’ solutons can be compared. Here’s the tl;dr example of a challenge we give web engineering candidates: “Here’s our API and API docs: <link>. Create an interactive data visualization using D3 and any other tools you’d like. Your submission should include instructions on how to run it.” By keeping the challenge relatively unconstrained, we allow candidates to show some creativity and prompt them to make the same feature/quality/speed tradeoffs that they’d have to make in the role. We look for autonomous individuals, so this turns out to be a good filter. We encourage them to spend less than 4 hours on it, but our time limit is a pretty generous 1 week since they likely already have a full time job and other interviews.
  • gedy 9y ago
    I very much agree after adding similar at my last company, it was a great way to screen the best-fit hires. Ironically the on-site recruiters didn't like it because it gave better results than their phone screens.
• avip 9y ago
  Immediate no hire. Just do the test, excel, then work on improving the hiring process. HackerRank is imperfect, but it's practical. Like code.
• richmarr 9y ago
  > Would ABC be willing to work with me to define a better way... "Better" Open source contributions carry a set of particular demographic biases to a hiring process. They skew things towards comparatively well-resourced white men. There's certainly an argument to say that open source contribution is an indicator of ability, but there are other ways to assess ability which don't introduce such a heavy skew.
• fred_is_fred 9y ago
  As reasonable as this seems on the surface it implies a person who will likely next send me 3 pages about how he should be exempt from the vacation policy and a treatise on how we are doing our health insurance. I'd be a hard pass after reading this.
• dagw 9y ago
  I'll admit my initial reaction to these sort of requests can be pretty negative, I did find this letter well written and wouldn't have a problem with it if I received it. That being said, depending on the type of company and the number of candidates they are dealing with, I wouldn't be surprised if they simply ignore your letter rather than trying to deal with it. If you have 60+ more or less qualified applicants for a single job opening your first job is to get that down to less than 10 as quickly as possible and throwing out anything that doesn't fit into your template is a quick and popular first step.
• jaclaz 9y ago
  Not being a programmer, nor a recruiter for IT jobs, but having some experience in recruiting in my professional field, it doesn't look to me like such a great letter/proposal. Mind you, this might also depend on the specifics of the ad/request Mr. Fasiha was responding to. I mean this same letter if received from a senior developer would be received very differently than if coming from a first time or junior developer. What strikes me as negative, is - beyond the unneeded citation - is the sneaky/flattering tone (IMHO) or - maybe - failed attempt at humour in this sentence: >I'd never heard of HackerRank, but after you wrote two other employers sent me their own HackerRank tests. Having worked on those tests first (I considered them practice, for the real thing with ABC :) Then right after having confessed an almost total ignorance on the test, and only two previous experiences with it, the Author goes on at length enumerating in detail why and how the tests are "wrong". I would have more liked a sentence to the effect of either "after having gone through these tests n times I find them inaccurate" or "never heard about these tests, not being familiar with them I fear they might not reflect entirely my potentiality". Pontificating on something you just stated not being fully familiar with doesn't sound that good to me.
• DominikD 9y ago
  This tells me that author was never involved in recruiting people. He may be smart (even exceptionally so) but that can only be validated through a direct interview. However since a lot of people (and I mean A LOT) cheat in their CV and even GitHub portfolios, getting upset over "show us that you can do anything" minimal bar test is something I'd rather not get in my mailbox. It's polite and well worded, that's true, but shows that he doesn't understand the realities recruiters are facing. I'd respond to his mail explaining why these tests are mandatory but inevitably I'd have to treat him like a child that faces the world for the very first time. I guess he should ask himself: do you want to be treated exceptionally throughout the recruitment process? If you think you're that unique, you're probably wrong (and that level of detachment from reality isn't looking good).
  • StavrosK 9y ago
    > getting upset over "show us that you can do anything" minimal bar test is something I'd rather not get in my mailbox A minimal bar test shouldn't take 90 minutes. If you want a test like that, ask a FizzBuzz question, which is solvable in ten seconds and will be just as good a discriminator. Asking people to basically solve riddles isn't productive.
  • commandlinefan 9y ago
    Well, although I'm not one of these types that is insulted by online coding challenges as a hiring prerequisite, I think they're probably a lot more pointless than you believe. I've been working as a developer now for a little over 25 years - although online coding "challenges" are a relatively new thing, I've been given actual sit-down, pencil-and-paper, quiet room for an hour aptitude/language trivia tests as prerequisites for jobs in the past. This was actually the sort of thing that certifications (remember Java certifications?) were supposed to obsolete but never really did. Last year I found myself back on the market for the first time in quite a while and was presented with an online coding "challenge". It was actually really trivial, but I failed it anyway, because I'd never done one before. I'm used to coding in an IDE (or just in good-old vi), not in an online editor, and not with a ten minute time limit. The "challenge" was to write a Java function that would take in a number in words (like "four") between one and ten and spit out the numeric value of that number (like "4"). Well, it was timed, and I sort of panicked, thinking I wouldn't have enough time, so I jumped into it without reading the description. I skimmed over the description, and though I had to write a Java _program_ that would accept a _list_ of numbers, parse the list, and output their numeric values. So I hurried up and started coding in the (completely unfamiliar) online editor. Then I copied and pasted the whole thing into an editor on my local machine so I could compile it and run it and check for silly mistakes (since I was under the gun). Only after I had verified and tested it locally did I re-read the description and realized I had done the wrong "challenge"... so I tried (with three minutes on the clock) to refactor it so that the part that read in the number in words was a function inside my overall program. With maybe 30 seconds to spare I had refactored and re-tested it with a note that (/* here is the function you asked for */). Well, they failed me. Why? Because I took way too long to complete such a simple task... Now, if I had to take another one of these today, I'd read the instructions very carefully (I'd probably spend the first minute reading and making sure I didn't overlook anything - which of course we should always do anyway) - but it struck me how infinitely game-able and simplistic that portion of the modern job interview is. It doesn't much measure programming ability so much as your familiarity with that sort of exam, which us old folks ain't.
• bitL 9y ago
  Many recruitment agencies won't even talk to you until you pass some FizzBuzz test on HackerRank or similar. Even Facebook strongly suggest you to take their own training based off similar platform and Google does something similar. So it seems that even entry level jobs these days require Googlesque excellence just to get your foot in the door. It's similar to law firms requiring you to take parts of bar exam during your interview or physicians to perform autopsy during interview. Even worse situation is with Machine Learning now, where you are expected to answer PhD exam-style questions for entry level data augmentation jobs. Unless you are from Top 10 school your credentials don't matter at all. It's IMO complete insanity and I am throwing such companies out of the door instantly unless they offer $500k+/year. Then we can talk that way.
  • Arubis 9y ago
    If "Googlesque excellence" is passing FizzBuzz then I am severely undercompensated.
    • merpnderp 9y ago
      That was exactly my thought. I was doing more complicated code than FizzBuzz at 7 years old and I don't consider myself even a mediocre programmer.
    • bitL 9y ago
      FizzBuzz is a bit of understatement, most of those tests are alike once you practice a bit and sink into trivial category; some companies actually give you way more difficult questions than what you get at Google/FB etc. and after you pass that terror then present you with an offer where you don't know if you have to laugh or cry. I haven't seen a single company doing that outside top 5 to compensate you properly for it. Everybody wants the best, everybody thinks they are the next Google (well, they are far from it), and everybody thinks coders are stupid and don't value their craft (which they don't it seems).
      • dsacco 9y ago
        > I haven't seen a single company doing that outside top 5 to compensate you properly for it. There are small financial firms which will conduct significantly harder interviews than Facebook/Google. The offers are also commensurately higher (significantly so).
• s3nnyy 9y ago
  Programmer and owner of a technical recruitment agency here. I forked and rewrote the whole thing: https://gist.github.com/iwangu/b0d8b8e140afdd4e30bb7e401babcbbc https://gist.github.com/iwangu/b0d8b8e140afdd4e30bb7e401babc... I made it more generic so more people can use it and removed things that make no sense to me as a recruiter. Also, I deleted all the patronizing parts and made the English simpler. If you start quoting authors and even think I am going to read articles linked in footnotes, you're wrong. I think many HR people will just ignore you if you e-mail this. They won't want to talk to you because you signal that you will be hard to work with and you clearly don't value time of others. Your e-mail is way too long. Seven paragraphs with bullet-points, are you kidding? RIGHT NOW, I have 197 other e-mail conversations in my inbox that are easier to read than this essay. I wrote a blogpost why programmers don't get jobs due to random factors (https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/why-software-engineers-dont-get-jobs-three-horror-stories-77fd1ae3b875 https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/why-software-engineers-dont...), but this is one of these things where just shoot yourself in the foot by being too demanding too early in the process. (You can be demanding ONLY AFTER they told you that they want to hire you, but not before)
• bobbytherobot 9y ago
  I have no allegiance to the HackerRank or the current hiring process of most Bay Area tech companies. The basic formula is: first a chat with the recruiter/hiring manager to establish interest; follow up with a screener that is a take-home exercise, HackerRank exercise, or phone interview with an exercise; then a four to five hour on-site. This is a lot of time for everyone involved. What are the alternatives? They need to minimize time, give everyone a fair chance, and improve the signal. I certainly wouldn't say the current method is great at meeting those criteria.
• bootsz 9y ago
  You are not alone in your frustration, and I suspect most people here will sympathize with you as this topic comes up quite often in the software community. Just be aware that drawing this kind of line in the sand is going to greatly limit your options. If you want to be evaluated in a more holistic manner (including side projects) you'll probably have better luck with very small companies. When the people in charge will actually be the ones working with you every day, and they are only filling a small number of positions, they will be more likely to find it worthwhile to get to know you as a whole person during the hiring process. Unfortunately, once a company is beyond a certain size this just isn't possible because it doesn't scale. They have to fill hundreds or thousands of positions and also maintain a universal set of hiring standards. Things degrade into a game of numbers. This makes cookie-cutter tests almost inevitable. While frustrating in their own right, for me what makes things worse is that you have to do one of these screens for every single company you apply to. And most companies have the same evaluation goals for the phone screen stage (e.g., do you actually understand data structures & algorithms). What I'd really like to see is the emergence of something like a "common app" for software hiring. Outsource technical screening to a reputable third-party, and once you've proven yourself by obtaining a good enough "score" you can move immediately to on-sites (what constitutes a "good" score would vary by company). This doesn't solve the problem of the efficacy of technical screens, but it at least cuts down on all the redundant effort. Two services I've tried so far that are doing something like this are Interviewing.io and A-List. Unfortunately it seems these services merely make it easier to get a phone screen, rather than replacing them. But it seems like a step in the right direction.
• hyperpape 9y ago
  I don't think I can find it right now, but I recall a comment by Patrick MacKenzie (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11) to the effect that companies that have onerous interviews often also have a "cheat code" path for highly accomplished candidates (well known figures, or someone who's strongly vouched for by someone highly trusted within the company) who find the normal interview process unwelcome. This response seems like an attempt to engineer that path out of nothing. Good luck, but you can also avoid these interviews if you can make those connections/build your reputation to the right extent.
• deleted 9y ago
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• KhanMahGretsch 9y ago
  In general, I find that assuming that other players will act rationally or in their own best-interests (according to my subjective definitions) is inadvisable. If OP has a major problem with the quality of their hiring process then, by extension, he could also have major problems with his potential co-workers and the organisation's culture. The value proposition of investing time and effort into interviewing with this company appears to be less than, say, interviewing companies whose priorities are well-aligned with OP from the get-go. That being said, these kinds of "coding puzzle" screeners aren't going anywhere, and may lock him out of great opportunities at great companies. "I'd rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it."
• s3nnyy 9y ago
  Programmer and owner of a technical recruitment agency here. I forked and rewrote the whole thing: https://gist.github.com/iwangu/b0d8b8e140afdd4e30bb7e401babc.. https://gist.github.com/iwangu/b0d8b8e140afdd4e30bb7e401babc.... I made it more generic so more people can use it and removed things that make no sense to me as a recruiter. Also, I deleted all the patronizing parts and made the English simpler. If you start quoting authors and even think I am going to read articles linked in footnotes, you're wrong. I think many HR people will just ignore you if you e-mail this. They won't want to talk to you because you signal that you will be hard to work with and you clearly don't value time of others. Your e-mail is way too long. Seven paragraphs with bullet-points, are you kidding? RIGHT NOW, I have 197 other e-mail conversations in my inbox that are easier to read than this essay. This is one of the things where just shoot yourself in the foot by being too demanding too early in the process. (You can be demanding ONLY AFTER they told you that they want to hire you, but not before)
• s3nnyy 9y ago
  Programmer and owner of a technical recruitment agency here. I forked and rewrote the thing to make it more appealing to recruiters: https://gist.github.com/iwangu/b0d8b8e140afdd4e30bb7e401babcbbc https://gist.github.com/iwangu/b0d8b8e140afdd4e30bb7e401babc... I mainly removed things that sound patronising to me. I think many HR people will just ignore you if you e-mail what OP posted. Once, I wrote a blogpost why programmers don't get jobs due to random factors ("Why software engineers don’t get jobs: Four horror stories" https://goo.gl/v4PUWV https://goo.gl/v4PUWV), but being patronising and "explaining programming to HR" is one of the things where you just shoot yourself in the foot by being too demanding too early in the process. You can be demanding ONLY AFTER they told you that they want to hire you, but not before. A tip for e-mailing HR and business e-mails in general: Try to never signal that you will be hard to work with. Always be kind and even a little bit submissive. Don't try to teach people something, don't quote authors and don't do footnotes. Imagine the person will take a maximum of 3 seconds per paragraph and 10 seconds in total to read your e-mail. There is a chance the reader is listening to an audiobook or is watching Youtube while answering e-mails in a cubicle. If you need to discuss something critical, invite the person for a phone call. Salary, negotiating or deviating from a standard process (like here) should be discussed in person/in a call. Hope that helps to get some insight from "the other side".
  • bitL 9y ago
    I think your approach would work if there was a shortage of jobs; there is exactly opposite situation right now and HR should adapt or they would end up with a very narrow dissection of what is available. You are often asking accomplished individuals to waste their time on badly compensated job proposals, just because it makes your life easier. No wonder so many programmers think recruiters in this industry are a joke and try to actively avoid them.
    • hnrodey 9y ago
      There seem to be an abundance of "openings" but a shortage of offers. At least that's if you believe the whining on boards like here, Reddit, etc.
• fouc 9y ago
  Developers that are in high demand can help guide prospective employers on what sort of technical interviews are acceptable and which are a waste of time on everyone's parts.
• zbentley 9y ago
  There are very, very many comments here accusing HackerRank and/or puzzle/algorithm problems in general of being poor tests for how good a programmer someone is, or that people who use such problems just want "robot" workers to churn out meaningless code. These comments are completely missing the point. HackerRank's value is as a screening process. The point of such problems in the early phases of an interview is not to find out how good a programmer you are, but how bad a programmer you are. There are an ASTOUNDING number of candidates for programming jobs who can barely code. FizzBuzz eliminates a lot of them, but sometimes you need something just a bit more difficult. That's where HackerRank comes in. When talking to people that are "professional programmers actively seeking work" I find that the majority of them can't do simple tasks. "Simple" isn't meant in an arrogant way, either; examples include reversing an array (with no space constraint), iterating a dictionary/map (regardless of understanding map implementation, a lot of people don't understand that iteration order isn't predictable), and basic use of nested lists/non-scalar data structures. Those aren't esoterica that "nobody uses" on a daily basis, they're bread and butter of programming work. These people have hobby projects/OSS work, it's just . . . not sufficient, in many cases, to indicate basic competence on the job. I don't know why that doesn't correlate. I don't think most of these people are lying and publishing work that isn't theirs. It might be that they have a very long time to write the stuff in their GitHubs or whatever and can't do basic things in a hurry otherwise. It might be something else. Regardless, they turn out to be unqualified when tested on the basics. If you find the problems insultingly easy, choke it down and consider it equivalent to the question of "are you comfortable being asked to show up to work on time?"--patronizing, but an easy box to check, and not meant for you. There are companies that rely entirely on very hard/complex algorithms problems for interviewing, with the full knowledge of what they're testing for and why they're using those tests. I'm not talking about those companies; there are good and bad reasons for doing that. I'm talking about simple coding challenges presented early on in the candidate's process. There are also companies that get confused as to what they're using the HackerRank-equivalent tests for, and give really hard problems (or, worse, puzzle problems that block all progress and rely on some sort of "gotcha" trivia knowledge to even approach), but evaluate candidates' performance as if those problems were FizzBuzz++ basic competence screenings. That's a mistake, but also not what I'm talking about here.
• deleted 9y ago
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• alexandercrohde 9y ago
  One the one hand, I agree about the mismatch between hackerrank and engineering skill. On the other, I also suspect there are many engineers who can code amazing personal projects who lack the motivation/communication to handle the kinds of maintenance tickets you'd likely see in a mediocre codebase for a noname b2b (or whatever the job is). I tried to build my own coding test that is based on refactoring based on changing requirements: https://alexrohde.com/public/zennish/index.html#/challenges https://alexrohde.com/public/zennish/index.html#/challenges
• rovek 9y ago
  When looking for a new job I typically run a few applications at a time since companies are so unreliable and, frankly, I don't have the time or inclination for * 5 x 45 minute phone screens * 5 x 2-3 hour coding test (some of which will be the same) * 5 x 3 hour face-to-face interview Over the course of 2 weeks while attending my current job. Companies should consider this when trying to hire "exceptional" candidates who value their own time.
• calvinbhai 9y ago
  Way to go! IMO If employer is adamant to rely only on cookie cutter first round interviews, then it’s probably not worth joining such places. It’ll be filled with people who are great at cracking such interviews and believing that these cookie cutter interviews are the only way to go. There will be people on both sides of this debate, pro and anti. If you don’t believe in solving algorithms/ hackarank type initial interviews, it’s good to challenge such requests. If you are fine with it, that’s great. You and the employer have the same thinking. And it’ll/ May work great!
• rdiddly 9y ago
  In the time it took to write this, he could've finished the test. He might've even spent longer on this. Ideas for how to do hiring differently are cheap and plentiful.
• brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  It is difficult to believe that the person who knows how to sling slang like "chops" (technical command and facility in a given domain)is the same person who is only just hearing of HackerRank through an employer's request. Also saying condescending things like "cute little" in your response takes away from your earnestness cred and makes you seem angry. No one wants to start off angry with a new hire. That said, you have a right to be angry when an employer chooses to "batch process" you like just another piece of data. While your proposal is great and it shows you go above and beyond, and employer who uses HackerRank isn't looking for above and beyond. Use it to weed out employers who won't meet you halfway as a partner- the way you want to be met. If you are looking to work with a Willy Wonka, consider the thought and care that went into his job interview.
• justinhj 9y ago
  I worked in a job a couple of years ago with a small team that was hiring quite fast so it was typical to have to evaluate 10 applicants a week. Since as leads and seniors we were very busy Hackerrank was a useful way to evaluate lots of people without much effort and easily compare them by “score”. That said I regret it because the results were not as good. Every candidate is different enough that each interview turns out completely different. I think a better policy is if you’re too busy to give people the attention they need as they go through the pipeline - just wait until you’re not busy if possible.
• harlanji 9y ago
  I wonder what happened to human discernment. It’s like people think liars get away without detection. The only reason a person who bullshits an interview gets hired is because the interview was a formality to begin with; eg. Friend of management who the whole interview board knew was BSing but also value their paycheck too much to object. Yea, we don’t want that situation, and clamping down on nepotism etc. at the candidate level is just wrong. “Boo hoo, too many candidates, lets engineer a rube goldberg machine to make us feel objective.” Just treat candidates as people... I can’t imagine hiring to scale product development inside such a dirty room. The most successful businesses I know of simply don’t complain about these things, nor have personnel problems; people do the work that needs to get done with a good attitude etc, with little awareness of title... acting more like “mom and pop” businesses who value relationships. How is any company building an awesome thing with an awesome team, with word of mouth not bringing a torrent of personal references from the rank and file? The good ones have that going on in my experience, there is just a glut of shit rung employers (and candidates) here shaping our views toward defensiveness.
• StreamBright 9y ago
  I skip all the companies requiring something like HackerRank. Not worth the effort.
• dahart 9y ago
  > I'm hoping ABC's recruitment policy is flexible enough to let me offer alternative, or at least parallel, routes to quantifying my skill in coding [...] Would ABC be willing to work with me to define a better way to check my technical qualifications by choosing one of these projects? It's good to see someone take the initiative to express this, but IMHO, it would be even better to just take the initiative to contribute to one of the proposed open source projects and put it on your resume, and participate in the Hackerrank part of the interview. I like the proposals, and I'd probably land on the side of impressed if a candidate I was interested in sent me a letter like this. But, I still need a quick way to screen people, and I also need a set of standard questions that all candidates get so I can compare & rank them. I don't use Hackerrank, but I do ask easy weeder questions in the same style. Then, after the candidate passes the easy part, I look at their portfolio of work projects and side projects, and consider everything they have to offer.
• mseebach 9y ago
  Evaluating someone based on their GitHub repos isn't trivial at all, and it's not something a (non-developer) recruiter generally can do effectively. At the stage when HackerRank is relevant, the recruiter is trying to decide who to put in front of a technical interviewer. It's important to keep in mind the big advantage of tools like HackerRank: They're scalable for the employer, allowing the employer to take a chance on more candidates. Without something like HackerRank, recruiters will tend towards lesser heuristics, such as top schools or top firms on candidates' CVs. While HackerRank has its issues, it's certainly a vastly superior heuristic than the alternative for those many of us that don't have that kind of CVs. It's also relatively scalable for the applicant, because it is asynchronous, and can be taken whenever convenient. For many people in jobs, taking a phone interview during business hours isn't easy.
• foo101 9y ago
  I have had the misfortune of doing a few HackerRank tests where the problems were not prepared well. For example, the correct answer does not appear in the list of available options, or where the problem statement is not precise enough to solve in an unambiguous manner. There is no human I can talk to and ask clarifying questions to resolve the ambiguity because, you know, it is a HackerRank test! After going through these experiences, I have decided that HackerRank test is just not worth the time. As a rule, I decline any request to take a HackerRank test citing my reasons as politely as possible. Surprisingly, more often than not, the recruiter is happy to setup a telephone round where I can talk to an actual human.
• dsr_ 9y ago
  One of our hiring managers uses HackerRank as a basic filter. (If you are applying for a position called Data Scientist and you cannot do a linear regression, you are applying at the wrong company.) I think an email like this would be just fine, for them. I think it would go over badly at companies where HR runs the hiring process.
• mindhash 9y ago
  always thought candidates with side projects could be spared of Hackerrank tests. Yes, side projects can be fake but thats why you interview for multiple rounds. Think even there is no proof a candidate really took the HRank test.