31–40 of 55 posts
their code editor is a joke. ui doesn't make it clear switching tasks will lose your work, and to make it worse they silently break the clipboard so you can't "cheat" thus preventing you from storing your code anywhere. makes experimentation really awful as you have to keep commenting the whole thing every try
I've been on both sides of HackerRank. I helped develop/configure a HackerRank test for candidates for my team, and recently I've taken a HackerRank test while applying for a position at another company. HackerRank is just a tool. Its effectiveness depends on how well the company interviewing candidates configures it. I think algorithmic questions are the most popular, but it's completely configurable; you can have i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting - how would you flag it? In what way was their code gibberish? In my experience people who understand complex concepts can also understand how to write clear code. Maybe those that you are writing about were not motivated to do that - or maybe it never occurred to them that this was needed? Would you mind also explaining what you mean by this in "this is not always the case"? Because it does not seem to r…
I guess that concise implementations (e.g. in a one liner) are often a complete bitch to debug when someone else comes back to it to fix a problem years later. It is much more difficult to debug and fix existing code than develop it from scratch. Hence, if you found the problem hard to code in the first place, then when you come to debug it again later you've just screwed your future self.
This leads me to think that conciseness is not necessarily as simple as we tend to think. Sure, overly concise code with clever hacks are often a nightmare to debug, but that's mostly because they are the wrong abstraction and not capturing the problem well enough.
In my opinion they test the wrong things for the majority of software developers. Most people who write code don't need the ability to solve especially hard algorithmic problems. Ranking solutions to hard problems is probably useful if you're Google but there aren't many Googles out there. We like to think that we're solving hard problems (and actually, on HN, we're more likely to be), but most companies aren't. A la…
You are right that the biggest part of the job is easy - but testing the easy parts is useless - all programmers would pass it. A test must be hard in some way if it is to filter people. Disclaimer: I have a stake in https://codility.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are right that the biggest part of the job is easy - but testing the easy parts is useless - all programmers would pass it. A test must be hard in some way if it is to filter people. Disclaimer: I have a stake in https://codility.com/
if programmers are not actually solving similar problems as part of their jobs, sites like codility provide little value over standard IQ tests. all they do is waste the candidate's time and employer's money.
I failed an interview a couple days ago, from a hackerrank challenge. The tools was awesome, but could be better. I got really nervous, and could clear the challenge 10 minutes after the stipulated time in fact. One of the things that made me most nervous was that i was not able to debug my code as i can easily on chrome console. The "click to run your code" gives you a bit of a harder time. (my opinion)
This gave the benefit of a familiar working environment, and I could quickly TDD as needed. I highly recommend this approach when faced with these tests. That and working out in advance an appropriate way to accept input.
I think HackerRank is a great platform for challenges but I personally believe it only shows a small part of your skill set. I am a developer myself but also have hired a lot of engineers in my career. I believe that looking at existing projects you've done on Github gives a much better overview of your coding style, knowledge and your ability to learn. It also exposes some of the biases I know that we have in our ow…
From experience it's very hard to know how a candidate will perform when hired, irrespective of the hiring process. A better recruiting model IMO would be to recruit people on short-term contracts (e.g. 6 months) with the contractual agreement that the worker will transition to a permanent job at the end of the 6 months providing their performance is inline with expectation. I do use code exercises myself, but it's n…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From experience it's very hard to know how a candidate will perform when hired, irrespective of the hiring process. A better recruiting model IMO would be to recruit people on short-term contracts (e.g. 6 months) with the contractual agreement that the worker will transition to a permanent job at the end of the 6 months providing their performance is inline with expectation. I do use code exercises myself, but it's n…
Your solution looks good on paper but if a candidate has two offers one permanent and the other the 6 month to permanent , I am pretty sure most would go for the permanent offer.
In my opinion they test the wrong things for the majority of software developers. Most people who write code don't need the ability to solve especially hard algorithmic problems. Ranking solutions to hard problems is probably useful if you're Google but there aren't many Googles out there. We like to think that we're solving hard problems (and actually, on HN, we're more likely to be), but most companies aren't. A la…
In my opinion they test the wrong things for the majority of software developers. Most people who write code don't need the ability to solve especially hard algorithmic problems. Ranking solutions to hard problems is probably useful if you're Google but there aren't many Googles out there. We like to think that we're solving hard problems (and actually, on HN, we're more likely to be), but most companies aren't. A la…
You are right that the biggest part of the job is easy - but testing the easy parts is useless - all programmers would pass it. A test must be hard in some way if it is to filter people. Disclaimer: I have a stake in https://codility.com/