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a16z Programming Test

hackerrank.com

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41–50 of 121 posts

Re: a16z Programming Test

#41

Post by pskittle »

numair wrote: post #34

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;…

Not to sound offensive , but you're not A16z. 1.> No one is rich enough to buy people , unless well if you're talking about criminals. 2.Most good engineers will tell you , that money is NOT the primary motivator for them to build great products.( So aqui-hiring won't work) 3. As for Hackerrank--> that's what they're supposed to do - find people with good technical skills.

Re: a16z Programming Test

#42

Post by gcb0 »

abalone wrote: post #8

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…

I'm saving it for the weekend. Will read about all the virtualization techniques for those spoj like sites and then have a go in 3hours trying to break that one :-)

Re: a16z Programming Test

#43

Post by lifeisstillgood »

My problem is I like taking these tests to find out what I don't know (quite a lot usually). To be fair though code reviews usually tell me more than tests these days.

The constraint that gets me is the honor code - I cannot use an IDE with code completion?! but that leaves nano or notepad ...

Re: a16z Programming Test

#44

Post by jheriko »

aside from the fact that tests generally don't work i find this hilarious.

"the most important requirement is significant independent programming experience as demonstrated by your GitHub account"

a great way to find newbie hipsters and not experienced and seasoned devs. or at least limiting yourself to one community

Re: a16z Programming Test

#45

Post by lifeisstillgood »

dlss wrote: post #39
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You'd still be stuck evaluating potentially hundreds of correct submissions. 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 wh…

To be honest I think it's the other way round - if you can do programming tests all day long you will succeed at most coding jobs. However there are a lot of developers who can't tackle an interview that with a nights sleep and no pressure can easily code a intuitive and effective architecture.

Sorry - programming tests raise far more false negatives than false positives (and this from a person who considers himself a false negative in most tests)

Re: a16z Programming Test

#46

Post by flylib »

rmmw wrote: post #25
rdl wrote: post #9

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 :)

are you saying you go straight to a in-person coding exercise as the next step? seems odd, there is no phone interview between then?

Re: a16z Programming Test

#47

Post by nostromo »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #43

My problem is I like taking these tests to find out what I don't know (quite a lot usually). To be fair though code reviews usually tell me more than tests these days. The constraint that gets me is the honor code - I cannot use an IDE with code completion?! but that leaves nano or notepad ...

I think you misread that.

"You may use reference language documentation or use an IDE that has code completion features. "

Re: a16z Programming Test

#48

Post by lifeisstillgood »

nostromo wrote: post #47
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #43

My problem is I like taking these tests to find out what I don't know (quite a lot usually). To be fair though code reviews usually tell me more than tests these days. The constraint that gets me is the honor code - I cannot use an IDE with code completion?! but that leaves nano or notepad ...

I think you misread that. "You may use reference language documentation or use an IDE that has code completion features. "

oooooooohhhhhhhhh

what's the first thing your teachers said ? Read the instructions carefully :-)

Re: a16z Programming Test

#49

Post by coffeemug »

gcb0 wrote: post #40
numair wrote: post #34

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;…

Rich people are cheap. 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"

Smart rich people are the opposite of cheap. They have more money than time, know it, and are perfectly happy to trade one for the other.

Building organizations is expensive, unpredictable and takes a long time. Buying organizations is more expensive in the short term, but also far more predictable and much faster. So if you have more money than time and need an organization to get something done, buying one is far more rational than "paying a clueless but competent nerd peanuts".

I'm not saying a16z is doing that here, btw. I'm just saying that you're wrong.

Re: a16z Programming Test

#50

Post by hesselink »

jheriko wrote: post #44

aside from the fact that tests generally don't work i find this hilarious. "the most important requirement is significant independent programming experience as demonstrated by your GitHub account" a great way to find newbie hipsters and not experienced and seasoned devs. or at least limiting yourself to one community

Who says they're not recruiting other kinds of people through other channels? This kind of test is appealing to some people, and I'd guess those people have a github account.
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