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Doesn't accept my (NZ) mobile number as valid :(
You can also email test-help AT a16z DOT com and we can send you a direct link (where you won't need to receive credentials by phone)
Also, who even worries about spam any more? I haven't seen actual spam in my inbox in years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like the obvious (if dishonest) thing would be to use a throwaway phone # to get the test, then spend a day or so solving it, then type it in (with plausible delays) using your real number a day later. Assuming the test is roughly the same each time (even if details are different, it's probably of the same general class). In grading, the results of 6-8h of work entered in 2h would look more impressive than 3h o…
Credentials through phone # is more of a deterrent. We're also going to have an in-person coding exercise as a next step, which would be much harder to game :)
HN policy for years has been to allow two kinds of job ad: (1) job posts by YC startups, and (2) the Who's Hiring threads. We kill job ads that are neither of these. (Incidentally, PG designed the /jobs posts to be the one privilege that YC startups get on HN. Other than that, the site policy is to treat them the same way as everybody else.) It's not uncommon for posts to be in a grey area between job ad and story. A…
If you're Andreesen Horowitz, you have access to a nearly-unlimited supply of capital. You also have incredible access to information and dealflow throughout the industry. In situations in which you are not capital constrained, the most efficient way to establish a workforce is to acquire it from somewhere else; that's why acqui-hires make so much sense, because you've basically had someone else do the hard (and often completely unpredictable) work of figuring out if people can work together in a successful manner (which, I should note, is different from determination of whether the thing they're working on is successful). If I were A16Z, I would arbitrage my information advantage to secure a high quality engineering team by acquiring a company that had smart people but a lame product; going through a traditional hiring process would be a waste of my time (and since everyone is throwing money at my firm, it would also be a waste of time that could be better spent on figuring out where to deploy my capital).
A16Z is rich enough to buy people, if it really wants people, for internal use (whether it is for their own company needs, or for some idea that they want to incubate inside of the firm). And even if they don't want to buy a whole set of people, they have enough wisdom and experience to know that you want to hire within a cohort of successful people rather than randoms (to see this in practice, take a look at Don Melton's post about Eazel alumni ending up at Apple on the front page right now). This tells me that their programming test has more to do with some sort of evaluation of this Hacker Rank service ("tell you what, we will run our own test on the service to see what happens!") or some other sort of analytical adventure.
Or, you know, maybe it is really a programming test after all. Maybe they are hoping to find some sort of diamond-in-the-rough engineers who are socially and career-wise disconnected from an existing network. Some sort of "black swan programmer" or something. But I highly doubt it.
So basically, if you go through this test, you're helping A16Z evaluate something; that something, however, probably isn't you.
Cool, but... Why is A16z building an engineering team?
My guess is to have an in-house team that can help out the companies they fund. I know that Netflix's cloud architect, Adrian Cockcroft, left to join a venture capital firm to advise on scaling issues for companies that firm funded[0]. 0 - http://gigaom.com/2014/01/07/netflixs-cloud-architect-adrian...
HN policy for years has been to allow two kinds of job ad: (1) job posts by YC startups, and (2) the Who's Hiring threads. We kill job ads that are neither of these. (Incidentally, PG designed the /jobs posts to be the one privilege that YC startups get on HN. Other than that, the site policy is to treat them the same way as everybody else.) It's not uncommon for posts to be in a grey area between job ad and story. A…
I wonder if this could act as a negative filter for good programmers. Who worth their salt is going to invest 3 hours of their time just to submit a resume? Wouldn't you want to talk to the employer first to see if they're a good fit? In a tight labor market, people willing to do this are more desperate than others. So it's going to filter for desperate developers who passed a 3 hour basic skills test. Old fashioned…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, empirically we're getting quite a lot of people attempting it! :) Three hours is pretty lenient (you could blaze through it in less time), though the last question is challenging. We think the questions are kind of fun as well. Without something like this we'd just have 100s-1000s of unstructured resumes in different formats to rank against each other. This process is more fair and (IMO) allows someone without…
> Well, empirically we're getting quite a lot of people attempting it! > Without something like this we'd just have 100s-1000s of unstructured resumes in different formats to rank against each other. So instead of hundreds or thousands of unstructured resumes in different formats, you have hundreds or thousands of completed programming tests. Even assuming that you automatically filter out submissions that fail testi…
I'm guessing the MVP of hackerrank was the web code editor + lint/findbugs/whatever for filtering. A lot of people have spent a lot of time writing open source projects that convert code to metrics, so making a reasonably prioritized list is probably fairly easy.
> There are lot of really smart developers out there with advanced degrees who could solve programming quizzes all day long but couldn't design and implement a useful dashboard application.
Agree!
I think this is a great critique of HackerRank as a business idea -- while they are new, it's just a hurdle that weeds the busier coders out of your hiring pool... if they become established there will be books on cramming for it, and will no longer separate the wheat from the chaff.
(ie https://web.archive.org/web/20130114163457/https://raganwald... meets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law)
This doesn't quite make sense to me. Or, it makes sense, but not for the reasons presented on the surface. If you're Andreesen Horowitz, you have access to a nearly-unlimited supply of capital. You also have incredible access to information and dealflow throughout the industry. In situations in which you are not capital constrained, the most efficient way to establish a workforce is to acquire it from somewhere else;…
Why acquihire someone who knows how much they can ask if you can pay close to nothing to that test website (it's a genetic service) and get a clueless buy competent nerd that will be glad to work alone on a project for peanuts?
That's why we're poor and they have "unlimited capital"