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Developer Skills Report

research.hackerrank.com

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Re: Developer Skills Report

#111

Post by expertentipp »

scarface74 wrote: post #109
expertentipp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can, but there is significant language and cultural barrier, one is paying awfully high social contributions while the person's family stays in a different country. Plus many in developed countries are prejudiced against employees from developing countries ("you have to agree for less, to put your foot in the door and learn our superior ways of doing things" kind of stuff).

Still trying to understand. You're a citizen of the EU as is your family. Why leave your family behind? Not having been to Europe so I don't know, but if you speak English does that help make mobility easier?

Family might not be willing to suddenly be surrounded by completely different language? By completely different legal, administrative, and educational environment? Oftentimes, all these not exactly welcoming to their particular origin/ethnicity (e.g. who is considered an expat and who an immigrant). The chances of a 45-65 year old family member finding a job in new place is basically nil, from social and pensions systems they will receive only humiliation. Also, soon English will barely even be among official languages of the EU.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#112

Post by zimpenfish »

scarface74 wrote: post #93
dvt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might not give you a very good insight in to an applicant. I'd argue pointless whiteboard trivia doesn't give you good insight into an applicant, either. And yet, 90% of companies do it. > Most people's public code is of roughly equal quality (eg 'not great'). I disagree with this. Unless you're looking at a toy or unfinished project, most code that's released (on npm, maven, or something similar) is actually fa…

I've had to do one whiteboard coding exercise in my entire career. I knew two other devs that had interview at this company, so I knew what to expect. I accepted the in person interview on a whim. I already had accepted an offer as the dev lead for another company. The whiteboard interview was to write out algorithm for a merge sort. I thought it was the silliest thing in the world. I had already accepted a position…

> The whiteboard interview was to write out algorithm for a merge sort. I thought it was the silliest thing in the world.

Last one I had was to implement QuickSort. Had a -huge- argument with the interviewer who insisted there was an off-by-one error and it would never work. Needless to say, he was thoroughly wrong once it was coded up and I didn't get the job. :)

> It was such a turn off

It's pretty much an automatic "no" for me now too.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#113

Post by sethammons »

learc83 wrote: post #66
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never understood the point of HackerRank. I even got into it with fairly high-up executives at my last job for refusing to fall in-line and use it as a tool. As far as I'm concerned all it does is exacerbate the already terrible hiring practices and hiring biases that plague the software industry. I'm now CTO of a company operating a space that's as challenging as it is esoteric. We make hardware for adding by…

>4. I have candidates pair with someone or someones they'd actually work with on an actual problem being actively worked on by the team. Why contrive a pointless artifice like programmer-trivia---to guess at what the person would be like on the team---when I can make them an honorary member of their actual future team for a couple hours on-site or over video/screenshare? This is the absolutely best skills test I've s…

The counter argument is how does this provide a level playing ground upon which to compare candidates? Some days, what a team works on is grunt work or trivial. Some days it is designing new, high scale software. And some days it it working on something requiring esoteric knowledge or cracking a difficult bug. There is so much variability depending on when the candidate comes in. Compare this to a set of interview questions or tasks that touch on how an applicant deals with many facets of the above, which is what I'm familiar with.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#114

Post by kod »

collyw wrote: post #91
onion2k wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue pointless whiteboard trivia doesn't give you good insight into an applicant, either. And yet, 90% of companies do it. The fact that some companies use bad practises for hiring doesn't change how hard it is to judge someone's code from their Github repo. I agree that whiteboard tests are horrible, but switching to a different bad idea wouldn't help. Unless you're looking at a toy or unfinished project, most…

"As he says himself, Homebrew is a successful product but not necessarily great computer science. He 'failed' a computer science question. " Maybe Google is different but I usually need to do computer cine type stuff about one a year.I have used recursion on maybe 4 different occasions in my carreer, but that's the sort of thing that comes up regularly in coding tests. Why not test for things that are actually being…

So you've only used json, or html, or (insert recursive data structure here) 4 times in your career? Seriously, recursion is everywhere.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#115

Post by scarface74 »

scarface74 wrote: post #93
dvt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might not give you a very good insight in to an applicant. I'd argue pointless whiteboard trivia doesn't give you good insight into an applicant, either. And yet, 90% of companies do it. > Most people's public code is of roughly equal quality (eg 'not great'). I disagree with this. Unless you're looking at a toy or unfinished project, most code that's released (on npm, maven, or something similar) is actually fa…

I've had to do one whiteboard coding exercise in my entire career. I knew two other devs that had interview at this company, so I knew what to expect. I accepted the in person interview on a whim. I already had accepted an offer as the dev lead for another company. The whiteboard interview was to write out algorithm for a merge sort. I thought it was the silliest thing in the world. I had already accepted a position…

And the rest of the story....

After the contract was over, I was able to negotiate a higher pay to convert to perm than the job I declined offered even with the signing bonus.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#117

Post by tenaciousDaniel »

expertentipp wrote: post #85
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I believe that "most often" employers want this. I did quite a few interviews last year, and I was freaked out because I didn't know any of the latest frameworks. I didn't even know Angular. But no one cared. As long as you understand the problem frameworks are trying to solve, then you're good. And btw, I interviewed with some relatively big tech names - Squarespace, Blue Apron, etc. Edit: most of them…

Believe yourself being lucky or sheltered because over here it's "HOW MUCH OF EXPERIENCE DO YOU HAVE WITH ANGULAR WHICH VERSION OF IT WE ARE MIGRATING EVERYTHING TO REACT ALL FRONT END DEVELOPERS HAVE LEFT THE COMPANY WE ARE SENDING RIGHT NOW CODING CHALLENGE TO BE DONE IN RXJS!". Then rejection email regardless of solving the challenge or not. I think I'll start simply disconnecting on such calls.

Jesus, that's terrible. I do live in NYC, so my options are considerably greater than elsewhere. What a stupid set of requirements. Sorry you have to go through that.

Really makes me want to stay at my current job for as long as possible. I'm not interested in that bullshit.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#118

Post by bryanrasmussen »

dvt wrote: post #24

> What’s the biggest challenge when hiring talent? "Hard to assess skills before onsite" -- That's funny, I've never had a hiring manager or interviewer look at my literal hundreds of thousands of lines of code on GitHub or several of the OSS projects I've contributed to. Not to mention the actual book I co-wrote.

I have an anecdote somewhere here about a developer I recommended hiring on our startup while I was off doing consulting work who was competent and basically ruined the company and destroyed a couple years worth of work because he knew how stuff just had to be.

I recommended hiring him based on a github profile.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#119

Post by barrkel »

What's missing on the "core competency" is communication. Honestly, communication and ability to turn a communicated idea into code is more important than problem solving ability. If someone is solving the wrong problems, they're not creating value. Whereas if someone is stuck on a problem, we can fix that by talking about it - as long as the discussed solution can be turned into code.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#120

Post by pennaMan »

kod wrote: post #114
collyw wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As he says himself, Homebrew is a successful product but not necessarily great computer science. He 'failed' a computer science question. " Maybe Google is different but I usually need to do computer cine type stuff about one a year.I have used recursion on maybe 4 different occasions in my carreer, but that's the sort of thing that comes up regularly in coding tests. Why not test for things that are actually being…

So you've only used json, or html, or (insert recursive data structure here) 4 times in your career? Seriously, recursion is everywhere.

Am I flexing my electrical engineering skills when I turn the TV on with a remote control? Parsing a json tree uses recursion under the hood but unless you are writing a new json parsing library each month you won't get the chance to use those recursion skills too often when dealing with json in day to day code.
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