Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 155 posts

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#121

Post by rajeshmr »

imjustsaying wrote: post #39
rajeshmr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the same way. Mostly biased towards jr. And management seems like a good option for long term career growth.

Isn't it a bad omen for any industry when the most realistic career advancement path is management?

If we had a sane choice we would still stick to tech - tech is like the first love that is going through a rocky phase!

I believe there is the "collective stupidity" problem in the tech industry where a new framework pops up almost everyday, a new language every now and then and the sheer volume of knowledge to accumulate to stay relevant is abysmally high! With the realities of life taking over, the path is inevitable to most senior people.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#122

Post by rajeshmr »

bshimmin wrote: post #49
imjustsaying wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it a bad omen for any industry when the most realistic career advancement path is management?

Isn't that how most industries work, from flipping burgers to the legal profession? Why should tech be any different?

True, also the industry prefers younger population coz they can burn more hours and are available for a cheaper than the experienced folks.

Also, the industry somehow seems to stereotype a developer as some younger geeks. The stereotype works against experienced folks sometimes (not always).

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#123

Post by nine_k »

raverbashing wrote: post #68
nine_k wrote: post #13

Went through this a couple times lately. No pain. And the battery of automated tests helpfully written for you saves a lot of time. If the companies you interview with choose problems you don't find relevant, it may be their fault, not HackerRank's. Or even not a fault: they have to screen out a number of applicants who are good at boasting but can't actually code. You obviously can. It can be a bit boring, bit it ge…

Yes, the test itself is fine, however the issues I've seen: - Hidden tests/metrics that also get evaluated - Companies with an exaggerated sense of self-importance and unrealistic expectation of results This is a test, you don't have the feedback that you have on a company (code reviews/talking to a colleague/better understanding of the conditions/real data tests/etc). Don't expect me to guess your conditions. Also,…

Exactly. State the conditions and evaluate conformance to the stated conditions, not something else.

It may be a good idea to ask for clarifications before or even when you've started the assignment. (Applies to real work as much or even more.)

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#124

Post by nine_k »

twic wrote: post #96
nine_k wrote: post #13

Went through this a couple times lately. No pain. And the battery of automated tests helpfully written for you saves a lot of time. If the companies you interview with choose problems you don't find relevant, it may be their fault, not HackerRank's. Or even not a fault: they have to screen out a number of applicants who are good at boasting but can't actually code. You obviously can. It can be a bit boring, bit it ge…

Using something like HackerRank as a screen to check that candidates can actually code seems like a good idea to me. But that means setting problems which depend on that, and not specialist knowledge. For example, an old employer of mine used something like "write a function which, given two strings representing durations down to a hundredth of a second in the format HH:MM:SS.SS, prints the difference between them, i…

Frankly, coming up with an inefficient but simple algorithm for finding primes from first principles should work. That is, accumulate primes found so far, check if the next number is divisible by any of them, or even by any number lower than the latest scanned, if you're really bad at number theory, but fine with logic.

Many Project Euler problems are about such special things that you likely didn't know before encountering the problem, but the definition suffices.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#125

Post by thedufer »

spitfire wrote: post #74

I'll post to this thread because this is very relevant for the hiring companies. Hunter and Schmidt did a meta-study of 85 years of research on hiring criteria. [1] There are three attributes you need to select for to identify performing employees in intellectual fields. - General mental ability (Are they generally smart) Use WAIS or if there are artifacts of GMA(Complex work they've done themselves) available use th…

> Using IQ is effectively illegal[2] in the US, so you'll have to find a test that acts as a good proxy.

You've posted this before and been called out on it. Please stop spreading misinformation.

There is nothing special about IQ tests specifically. Any proxy test will have exactly the same legal ramifications. As long as you can show that the results of that test are relevant to job performance, it is fine. Whether it is labeled an "IQ test" is irrelevant.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#126

Post by eastindex »

maxaf wrote: post #22

I hire engineers for a living, and find intellectually dishonest any interview practice I wouldn't enjoy myself. Paper coding, whiteboard coding, brain teasers, and algorithmic beatdowns are out. Representative take-home work samples and conversational problem solving are in. My candidates are told throughout the process that what we're looking for is a demonstration of how technical collaboration might work if we we…

Full stack engineer here. Are you currently hiring ?

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#127

Post by jandrewrogers »

greglindahl wrote: post #118
jandrewrogers wrote: post #92

It could be worse. My personal recruiting peeve is what I call the "Dunning-Kruger interview", where they ask algorithm questions they don't understand and don't even realize that fact . It is unfortunately common, and made doubly worse when it is plainly my area of expertise and the reason I was recruited in the first place. More than once, I've been recruited by executives at Famous Tech Company to run major new in…

... maybe the point of putting you in with the shockingly ignorant Principal Engineer was to figure out if you could work with them?

Heh, possibly, but in practice it usually appears to stem from complete disinterest -- it is an assignment and they do minimal background investigation. I go along with it, but in one extreme case I had a PE-type flatly accuse me of not understanding the theoretical details of a particular algorithm, being unaware that I invented it (and I never mentioned that). When it gets to that point, it is a lost cause.

Some computer science domains are worse than others. Spatial is particularly bad because very few computer scientists realize the theoretical foundations of spatial data structures are completely different than the more ordinary ones they are familiar with -- their intuitions don't apply.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#128

Post by passiveincomelg »

jacques_chester wrote: post #63
0xmohit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a fantastic way to see how one thinks, one's problem solving approach, debugging skills and the like.

It is! I hasten to add that it isn't perfect. We hire across the intro-extraversion spectrum, but there's an ongoing concern that we're biased towards extraverts. Especially in Labs, which is the consulting wing. Another problem is that many candidates are just plain nervous. We do our best to set people at ease and to be upfront that there's no right or wrong or trick answers. But interviewing is just scary. I expec…

FWIW, I had a very positive experience with the Pivotal Labs interview process last year. Really enjoyed the pair programming sessions and got a very good idea what the job would be like day to day.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#129

Post by go_go_ »

skybrian wrote: post #78
go_go_ wrote: post #4

This is one of the reasons I'm eyeing management for long term career growth. I've learned that the problems given to sr. and jr. engineers are roughly the same, and that the interview process is biased towards jr.

I think you're underestimating how hard interviewing can be for new grads. There are some that are good and others who lack the background or the confidence. It also seems a bit weird to give senior engineers easier questions. Do you really think people get worse with experience?

I think the skill set changes with experience but the problems given in interviews don't vary much. For example, a fresh grad is more likely to be able to correctly implement merge sort from memory than a sr. engineer because of how recently they were asked this problem before. Whereas a sr. engineer should be able to better think through "soft skill" problems like estimations, expectation alignment, and how to deploy complicated changes with little impact to the business.

I've come to learn coding is the easy part. Where it gets tricky is when you introduce other people.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#130

Post by passiveincomelg »

retreatguru wrote: post #112
jacques_chester wrote: post #46

Here's how I was assessed for my job at Pivotal: 1. I did a simple tech screen (the RPI). 1 hour. My interviewer had a laptop and asked me questions about what to do next in the scenario. 2. Hey, come pair with this engineer on this real code on a real project on a real task. 3. How about lunch? 4. Hey, let's have you pair with this other engineer on real code on a real project on a real task. 5. Get offered a job on…

I really like this approach and I reading about it here makes me inspired to try it on our next hire. We do pair programming, so it would work well for us. What I've been doing which is similar is hiring the dev on contract for a short term to see if it works out. But I think this approach is much more efficient. Do you get and check references?

I suggested a try-before-you-buy contract to a few companies that I applied with and none of them were interested. Maybe it is because the company is afraid of the contractor saying "What is the upside for me to join you as an employee? Just extend my contract if you want to keep me around." :-P
Post reply on HN