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Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

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Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#41

Post by xtracto »

We faced exactly this problem at the current company I work for. When the company was just starting, we had the great idea to use interview questions "like the ones they make in SV", thus used algorithmics-heavy problems when interviewing candidates.

Fast forward 4 years, and I realized that the dev team we have is basically a group of just-graduated Engineers or people with at most 1 year of experience.

My "eye opener" moment was when I realized that by asking for difficult algorithms (tree and graph traversal, subsequences, etc) the following was happening: The people that know the most about how to solve these types of problems are students, or people that had graduated recently. Not only that, but this groups is a very reduced sub-group from the recent graduates group, because these people dedicate their Uni free time to solve these problems and get in ACM, IOI competitions. Thus, they don't play with different technologies, they oftentimes don't feel confortable with shell, and finally, the type of systems they develop are optimized to be "used and thrown away".

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#42

Post by Spoom »

olympus wrote: post #13
gberger wrote: post #6

These are all good points, but how does the author reach the conclusion that the coding tests are ageist? Ageism was only mentioned in the headline.

When he says the tests favor people that just graduated from school. Those that have been in the workforce for a while (older people) are focused on "real world" problems and not the academic problems seen on HackerRank. Any system that favors young people over old people is ageist. I'm not saying I agree with the argument (old people have been complaining about young people for a very long time), but the logic is ea…

Bigger software companies also typically require "experienced" candidates (read: not new grads) to pass a systems design interview, which is very subjective and typically fairly difficult. This essentially makes the bar for new grads lower.

The argument is that this is because they expect experienced developers to be able to enter at a higher level, but the cynical side of me thinks that it's because they really prefer new grads, and this tips the scales in their favor.

Remember, Zuckerberg said, "young people are just smarter". I fear that attitude is pervasive, but hidden under the surface; they're not going to just come out and say it, as that would be illegal.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#43

Post by shados »

carlmr wrote: post #4

> Exactly on point. Also one gripe I have with hackerrank (I did some of the challenges to brush up on some language knowledge), is that a lot of the questions are poorly designed and from obvious amateurs. I still think that neither whiteboarding nor hackerrank selects for good developers. In the end you get people that studied hard to solve a certain class of problem that you'll never need in the real world. It's w…

> similar tests aren’t necessarily relevant to the work actually done in finance technology roles

IMO, what's relevant for a role is the skill set most people currently doing that role have and that's not always a good thing.

I've been the first shouting on top of a roof that we shouldn't ask people to know stupid little algorithm trivias to get a job. But the narative for that quickly devolved to "data structures and algorithms are not important for day to day work". To which I honestly say bullshit. The industry is managing without it: between people who forgot everything from school, bootcamps, self taughts, and people with alternate degree, people who can do actual computer science on the job are a tiny, tiny minority. So the solutions those people come up with to day to day problems are considered a speciality (eg: "machine learning!", "data science!").

But if doing that shit was just second nature to everyone, how would it change the way we do things? What if category theory wasn't so scary? What if people weren't scared of threads? What if hashmaps were not magical black boxes people use because the person who wrote the code before them did?

The foundation is becoming pretty darn weak if you ask me.

I totally agree shit like HackerRank is poorly done. But I'm not sold that the skillset it tries to assess (poorly!) is that useless. We, as a community and an industry, essentially did everything we could to MAKE IT useless. That's different I think.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#44

Post by bsenftner »

I'm in my early 50's. I've been getting paid well writing code since 15, and have been employed at (arguably) the top of the industry in my fields. Nobody at my level takes tests; none of us would pass them as they deal with utter bullshit. Work for a few decades, at the highest levels of the intersection of business and technology, and you'll find complex and/or sophisticated algorithms often get removed due to support difficulties. Sophistication occurs within the core of the product, which needs to embody cutting edge features and performance, so unless you are the product's core architect, sophisticated algorithms are taboo. The vast majority of software is user interface, import/export logic and other aspects that are not the core of a product. Those non-core features and facilities need to be nimble and simple because they are transitory, and operated by juniors. Frankly, the world where HackerStank is valid is a type of software company that is best avoided, as they treat you 100% like a cog, and not a human.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#46

Post by joncrocks »

wolfgke wrote: post #20
andrewvc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a successful working programmer you shouldn't need to study to pass your next interview only to forget it all again after a couple more years on the job. That is why these tests are bogus. If they measured useful skills they wouldn't require any study. I've been working with a lot of graph algorithms lately. I've already forgotten several I learned a couple months ago. That is OK. The more interesting quest…

> If they measured useful skills they wouldn't require any study. I would be careful with this kind of statements. It can also show that most programming jobs don't actually require a sophisticated level of knowledge.

I think this is unfair.

As a crude comparison, it would be like a mathematician being asked to recite his times tables. Something he could probably do, given a bit of time and practice, but so outside the normal day-to-day stuff they normally do that it doesn't tell you much other than they spent time preparing. Which is fine if that's what you're looking to measure.

I think the point that the grandparent is trying to make is that if you take a group of developers with a good amount of experience and who everyone agrees are skilled in their field and administer a test with no warning/preparation, and none of them score very well, are they suddenly not very good developers or is the test not a very good predictor of whether someone is a skilled developer?

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#47

Post by Xoros »

As I understand that having a first selection maybe a good idea to sort out if a person can program or not, it amazed me that that sort recruiters seems to not read the applicant resume.

I do relate with the article. For experienced developers, it's probably not the best way to recruit. Ask something related to the job, not the degree.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#48

Post by noxToken »

jordanpg wrote: post #9
carlmr wrote: post #4

> Exactly on point. Also one gripe I have with hackerrank (I did some of the challenges to brush up on some language knowledge), is that a lot of the questions are poorly designed and from obvious amateurs. I still think that neither whiteboarding nor hackerrank selects for good developers. In the end you get people that studied hard to solve a certain class of problem that you'll never need in the real world. It's w…

Agree, but what is the alternative from the standpoint of the interviewer? These types of challenges are simple to state, self-contained, easy to timebox. For the interviewer for a say intermediate-level enterprise software backend position who needs to quickly sift through 50 applicants, what is the better option by way of code challenges?

Take some Real World™ problems that are applicable to the positions are create your own. I don't mean come up with something completely from scratch; literally comb through your code base to see what kinds of design patterns and algorithms you're using. Then generalize it.

It could be as simple as: Given a list L of accounts, return only accounts from L that match key K. That's programming 101 type stuff that is applicable to the job.

Or it could be more abstract and open ended: Given some user-submitted form data, what steps would you take to move the data from the browser's front-end to the database. Assume the database has been created. Tailor the question to the technologies on used on the job (Spring, .NET). This type of question gives you a whole host of information about the candidate such as their overall knowledge of the framework, their areas of expertise, potential weaknesses, as well as the ability to nudge the interviewee in the correct direction if they're stuck.

Interview questions don't have to be clever. They don't need to have obscure edge cases to trip people up. I firmly believe that interviews should be about gauging candidate ability to be functional on the job rather than solve the riddle (how many piano tuners are in Chicago?) or non-applicable CS (create a script/program that can output the nth row of Pascal's Triangle [ignoring int overflow]).

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#49

Post by jondubois »

HackerRank tests are very effective for companies in that they capture candidates who:

- Have great problem solving ability.

- Low emotional intelligence or self-esteem (don't realize that the kinds of companies that make you do these tests are exploitative and will treat you like livestock).

- Don't have specific ambitions and don't place much value on their own time (prepared to spend tons of time studying/practicing for the tests).

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#50

Post by chewbacha »

barrkel wrote: post #40
pizzaman09 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credentialing. Seriously. Have a Bar Association for developers. When anyone can do a few weeks of Googling and claim to be a software developer, you're going to get mostly crap candidates. Offload that process to a formal body, like lawyers, doctors, and engineers do. You can hire unlicensed developers, but you do so at your own risk. Then once you're talking to someone licensed in an interview, you can focus on jus…

Part of the problem is that the discipline is very wide, and there's different mixes of skills needed: +-----------+ |\ business | - excel macros | \ + | | \ users | - web dev | \ | | \ | - back end dev | \ | | \ | - framework dev | \ | | \ | - tooling | \ | | coding \| - OS / compiler / database dev +-----------+ There's no simple cutoff that can mark someone out simply as a developer. And the diagram above doesn't…

Conjoined triangles of success!
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