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An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.

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Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.

#151

Post by 0xfeba »

Arubis wrote: post #88
bitL wrote: post #82

Many recruitment agencies won't even talk to you until you pass some FizzBuzz test on HackerRank or similar. Even Facebook strongly suggest you to take their own training based off similar platform and Google does something similar. So it seems that even entry level jobs these days require Googlesque excellence just to get your foot in the door. It's similar to law firms requiring you to take parts of bar exam during…

If "Googlesque excellence" is passing FizzBuzz then I am severely undercompensated.

Yeah, here I was, just happy it's moving from whiteboards, and all these people are complaining about it...

Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.

#152

Post by StavrosK »

dahart wrote: post #71
ElatedOwl wrote: post #31

As someone responsible for hiring developers, these quizzes seem like an absolute waste of time. As an applicant it's almost insulting. I've been a part of two great alternatives: a pair programming session with the lead dev and adding some features/refactoring a sample project. I'd be curious if anyone here is responsible for hiring devs and finds hackerrank type tests useful.

I've interviewed and hired many devs. I find hackerrank style coding questions very useful in interviews and I agree with the superiority of your alternative suggestions. Keep in mind that these quizzes are only one single part of a multi-part interview. Also keep in mind that acting offended by whatever style of interview you get may reduce your chances of getting the job you want. You might be amazed how different…

> how deep of a discussion you can have over a single line of code

That's the problem with HackerRank: You can't! Every single time I've tried one, it was a dismissive "do this on your own time and we'll check your answers".

Not to mention that their question sets tend to be full of puzzles, which are the type of thing where I'll have an epiphany over lunch, rather than something I'll figure out how to optimize in the ten minutes I have to code the solution.

Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.

#153

Post by organsnyder »

hnrodey wrote: post #137
bitL wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your approach would work if there was a shortage of jobs; there is exactly opposite situation right now and HR should adapt or they would end up with a very narrow dissection of what is available. You are often asking accomplished individuals to waste their time on badly compensated job proposals, just because it makes your life easier. No wonder so many programmers think recruiters in this industry are a jok…

There seem to be an abundance of "openings" but a shortage of offers. At least that's if you believe the whining on boards like here, Reddit, etc.

That's been my observation. Tons of openings, but many companies lean toward denials, under the assumption that firing the wrong person is more costly than not hiring the right person. It also seems that many companies are looking for ready-to-go engineers, rather than being willing (or able) to build talent in-house. The only door open to many junior devs is the internship-to-hire funnel.

This reminds me of this recent HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16337434

Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.

#154

Post by commandlinefan »

DominikD wrote: post #113

This tells me that author was never involved in recruiting people. He may be smart (even exceptionally so) but that can only be validated through a direct interview. However since a lot of people (and I mean A LOT) cheat in their CV and even GitHub portfolios, getting upset over "show us that you can do anything" minimal bar test is something I'd rather not get in my mailbox. It's polite and well worded, that's true,…

Well, although I'm not one of these types that is insulted by online coding challenges as a hiring prerequisite, I think they're probably a lot more pointless than you believe. I've been working as a developer now for a little over 25 years - although online coding "challenges" are a relatively new thing, I've been given actual sit-down, pencil-and-paper, quiet room for an hour aptitude/language trivia tests as prerequisites for jobs in the past. This was actually the sort of thing that certifications (remember Java certifications?) were supposed to obsolete but never really did.

Last year I found myself back on the market for the first time in quite a while and was presented with an online coding "challenge". It was actually really trivial, but I failed it anyway, because I'd never done one before. I'm used to coding in an IDE (or just in good-old vi), not in an online editor, and not with a ten minute time limit. The "challenge" was to write a Java function that would take in a number in words (like "four") between one and ten and spit out the numeric value of that number (like "4"). Well, it was timed, and I sort of panicked, thinking I wouldn't have enough time, so I jumped into it without reading the description. I skimmed over the description, and though I had to write a Java _program_ that would accept a _list_ of numbers, parse the list, and output their numeric values. So I hurried up and started coding in the (completely unfamiliar) online editor. Then I copied and pasted the whole thing into an editor on my local machine so I could compile it and run it and check for silly mistakes (since I was under the gun). Only after I had verified and tested it locally did I re-read the description and realized I had done the wrong "challenge"... so I tried (with three minutes on the clock) to refactor it so that the part that read in the number in words was a function inside my overall program. With maybe 30 seconds to spare I had refactored and re-tested it with a note that (/* here is the function you asked for */). Well, they failed me. Why? Because I took way too long to complete such a simple task...

Now, if I had to take another one of these today, I'd read the instructions very carefully (I'd probably spend the first minute reading and making sure I didn't overlook anything - which of course we should always do anyway) - but it struck me how infinitely game-able and simplistic that portion of the modern job interview is. It doesn't much measure programming ability so much as your familiarity with that sort of exam, which us old folks ain't.

Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.

#155

Post by bushin »

chadash wrote: post #47

As a hiring manager, I personally don't use HackerRank (or anything similar), but I'm thinking about it. My issue is that many of the people who I come across (most of whom claim to have backgrounds in CS) don't have even basic coding skills. For example, "write a function to reverse a string in a language of your choice" baffles them or takes 20 minutes to write, even though it was meant to be a quick warm-up questi…

Coding questions are not language independent though. You might as well ask to write a monad transformer in a language of their choice.

Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.

#156

Post by crdoconnor »

tty7 wrote: post #94
foo101 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you really want someone to take a task and complete with minimal issues if the task does not add value to the organization or is counterproductive? I don't know about you, but I would not want to hire someone who can take any task and complete with minimal issues. Where I work, one is encouraged to argue about what is not right in the meetings and offer better solutions. This candidate is doing exactly that: Ar…

Let me explain a little better, and again I am only basing this all off the small amount of data we have. Let me give an example as I am not the best at articulating. hopefully this helps. Lets say I hired this engineer as Senior or Team Lead. Now I want the base docker image we use for node bumped a major version. I checked the changelog for the nodes releases and knowing our codebase I think its safe. I could ask a…

>But this Email in response to hackerrank - would make me perceive this to be someone who would respond with a complete change to our CI/CD processes, to our infrastructure, maybe to even using Node - as this sort of task is beneath him.

This makes me think that you're a poor judge of character and of a slightly authoritarian mindset.

This email is one of many protesting an industry interview culture that prioritizes badly thought through exercises that bear little relationship to the job being interviewed for.

>What I want is the node version updated

And do you really think that seeing candidates reverse a binary tree without protest will tell you how well they can perform at this kind of role?

Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.

#157

Post by bitL »

dahart wrote: post #144
bitL wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your approach would work if there was a shortage of jobs; there is exactly opposite situation right now and HR should adapt or they would end up with a very narrow dissection of what is available. You are often asking accomplished individuals to waste their time on badly compensated job proposals, just because it makes your life easier. No wonder so many programmers think recruiters in this industry are a jok…

> I think your approach would work if there was a shortage of jobs There is always a shortage of good jobs. You can fight the process all you want, if any job at all will do, and you don't care how long it takes to get it. > You are often asking accomplished individuals to waste their time on badly compensated job proposals What do you mean by badly compensated? Why would you assume someone else knows anything about…

Alright, imagine you worked for top engineering company, have github full of bleeding edge stuff anyone can observe, wrote books, have patents under your belt, do public speaking, teaching at universities etc. and some HR person comes in and wants you to do trivial HackerRank stuff. She basically interrupted you from working on something benefiting humanity just because she was lazy to check your CV and ignorant of the industry. Then you see the same company awarding their good jobs to friends of higher ups and all they have left are generic jobs they need to fill that would end up with all the work, complaining "where have all the good programmers gone?". And then you read on HN post like this and wonder why there is so much resistance to acknowledge one's qualification from what they provided in their CV. Imagine the same doing in other areas of industry - we don't care you won these multi-million law cases in the past, all we care is how the history of US North-East affected common law between years 1870-1893.

Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.

#158

Post by StavrosK »

nine_k wrote: post #99
PakG1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication seems to be that gp has never interviewed and hired people who "had this sort of independent and outside-the-box thinking".

If the implication is true, that would be a data point. If the implication is false, it would be an exciting data point! HN being what it is, here is quite a non-zero chance to meet a person with real hiring power who really could have made an offer to the person in question.

The GP's sentence was in the conditional perfect (would have), which means he never met someone like that (otherwise he would have said "did").

Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.

#160

Post by StavrosK »

dfabulich wrote: post #149
StavrosK wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are you looking for jobs if you are too busy to spend 90 minutes of effort on applying for that job? I didn't say I'm too busy to apply, I said I'm too busy to spend 90 minutes on useless tests. > but how you react to being asked to do something you feel is beneath you... You know what a great test for that would be? Ask the applicant to wash your car.

> useless tests These tests aren't useless. Tons of candidates have never seen a REPL before and are totally unable to solve even a trivial coding assignment. I suppose your company is too clever to waste their time on such useless tests? Who at your firm wastes hours interviewing candidates who have no ability to code?

If someone has never seen a REPL before, it'll take us less than 90 minutes to figure it out, so we don't tend to waste applicants' time with those.

Going through someone's Github (or any other project they feel is worthy of sharing) and asking them questions about why they made the decisions they made has been orders of magnitude more illuminating than asking them to come up with an algorithm for solving the subset sum problem without Googling.

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