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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.

#171

Post by brooklyn_ashey »

StavrosK wrote: post #161
brooklyn_ashey wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, washing cars turned out to be the point for The Karate Kid... and humility before technique. I agree that few employers will be like Mr.Miyagi though ;

Ah, but Daniel was training, not interviewing :P

It's a kids' movie. But the point was humility before the art. Always in training. Shoot, Mr. m practiced teaching better by tending tiny metaphorical bonsai trees and catching flies with chopsticks, so he was not above being a student in training himself. I'm not saying it is everyone's philosophy or should be- it just cracked me up- the car washing reference- not to say that I disagree that these tests are more a sign of an employer I would not work for. Hey- someone removed the car wash analogy I was responding to! I thought it was funny. I think swe should push back against this kind of treatment when it's worth it to them. It is insulting.

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

#172

Post by foo101 »

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…

> 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

Looks like it is a difference in culture that I am used to and the one that you are used to.

At my workplace, it is perfectly acceptable for someone to suggest a complete change to our CI/CD process. In fact, we have changed our complete CI/CD process twice (SVN/build scripts -> Mercurial/Jenkins -> Git/Travis-CI) already with minimal loss in productivity because someone questioned the existing CI/CD process and suggested a well thought plan to switch to a new one.

But I get your point that sometimes it may not be feasible to carry our such a drastic change in process, infrastructure, etc. But suggesting such a change is going to be acceptable and we refusing to accept such a suggestion is also going to be perfectly acceptable and both this person and us working in harmony even after this disagreement is also going to be acceptable.

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

#173

Post by hysan »

s3nnyy wrote: post #140
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 agree totally with what you said, but you're confusing macro- and micro-economics here. On a macro-level it is true, HR people should be treating programmers like gods at all times, but on a micro-level, the HR person sitting in the cubicle doesn't care about one programmer more or less. There might be ten other CVs of "okay'ish" engineers in HR's inbox and your interview will end by never hearing back the firm. Or…

There's a distinction to be made here about the level of the position being discussed and the particular skillset. What you're saying makes more sense on the junior to mid-level dev positions or for more common skillsets. However, this is the Hacker News audience and you're clearly replying to someone who has already narrowed it down to senior dev positions. Given that context, I'm going to have to disagree with your assessment. If you're hiring for the best, then it's up to HR to respect their time. Otherwise you are just perpetuating the belief that recruiters add no value to either side of the equation.

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

#174

Post by chadash »

bushin wrote: post #155
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.

Of course the question is biased against certain programming languages. For example, in python:

  def reverse_str(x):
      return x[::-1]
works. If you remember this notation, then you'll have this problem done in 30 seconds or less. But even if you don't remember this notation, I expect a candidate to figure out some way to reverse a string within 5 minutes in some language. I can think of engineering roles that rarely work with strings, but in the roles I hire for, we use them a lot and so I want to know that you have the basics down. If you know that:

  * strings are simply arrays of chars
  * how to access an item in an array
  * how to write a for loop
Then you have the tools you need to solve this problem. Are there any common languages where this is a particularly difficult problem (I'm genuinely curious, not trying to be obnoxious... if so, then I might consider changing the question for the future)?

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

#175

Post by crdoconnor »

fragmede wrote: post #77
chii wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a homogenous culture of a large corporation, where each dev is a cog in the system, yes, i would agree that this person will not fit. If i had a start-up, i would definitely give this person a good old try, because i can tell that he/she is capable enough to churn out rather advanced projects with complexity higher than just CRUD. Programmers of this type is what i'd call 10x, and one should never dismiss a 10x!

I'm afraid I have to disagree. They're called 10x engineers because they're 10x as productive, not because you have to take 10x as long to talk them into not using Haskell for a basic CRUD frontend (remember, it's a startup, someone has to do that part - not everything is gonna be sexy to code). If they're too cool to waste a single second conforming to a basic FizzBuzz test to assert that their resume isn't a lie, t…

>If they're too cool to waste a single second conforming to a basic FizzBuzz test

I'd be willing to waste 5 minutes tops, unless the employer has put some skin in the game (fizzbuzz is ok - nothing much more than that tho).

There's a 1,000 other employers out there who might be a better a fit. I am not going to do a 1 hour, 30 minute or even 15 minute task if they can't at least even be bothered to pick up the phone to talk to me or glance at my github profile.

Companies that expect completion of a weekend-filling exercise before granting you an interview are universally run by entitled assholes. You're actually doing yourself a favor by screening them out: they'll be bad to work for, you won't get to work with other 10x engineers and the company will likely achieve nothing impressive anyway.

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

#176

Post by foo101 »

epicide wrote: post #111
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…

This is really taking it to an extreme. Just because you don't fight back against some entry test doesn't mean you won't fight the important things. > I don't know about you, but I would not want to hire someone who can take any task and complete with minimal issues. Sorry, I don't want to work with a bunch of pedants. You can have them.

> This is really taking it to an extreme

No more extreme than suggesting that someone who raises thoughtful questions on a broken hiring process must certainly be a bad fit for an organization.

> Sorry, I don't want to work with a bunch of pedants.

Now, this is taking it to an extreme!

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

#177

Post by s3nnyy »

hysan wrote: post #173
s3nnyy wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree totally with what you said, but you're confusing macro- and micro-economics here. On a macro-level it is true, HR people should be treating programmers like gods at all times, but on a micro-level, the HR person sitting in the cubicle doesn't care about one programmer more or less. There might be ten other CVs of "okay'ish" engineers in HR's inbox and your interview will end by never hearing back the firm. Or…

There's a distinction to be made here about the level of the position being discussed and the particular skillset. What you're saying makes more sense on the junior to mid-level dev positions or for more common skillsets. However, this is the Hacker News audience and you're clearly replying to someone who has already narrowed it down to senior dev positions. Given that context, I'm going to have to disagree with your…

You're right. The more senior the role, the more leeway there is for the candidate to tailor the process, but signaling arrogance is just bad.

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

#178

Post by spyspy »

fragmede wrote: post #77
chii wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a homogenous culture of a large corporation, where each dev is a cog in the system, yes, i would agree that this person will not fit. If i had a start-up, i would definitely give this person a good old try, because i can tell that he/she is capable enough to churn out rather advanced projects with complexity higher than just CRUD. Programmers of this type is what i'd call 10x, and one should never dismiss a 10x!

I'm afraid I have to disagree. They're called 10x engineers because they're 10x as productive, not because you have to take 10x as long to talk them into not using Haskell for a basic CRUD frontend (remember, it's a startup, someone has to do that part - not everything is gonna be sexy to code). If they're too cool to waste a single second conforming to a basic FizzBuzz test to assert that their resume isn't a lie, t…

> using Haskell > too cool to waste a single second

Why are you so quick to extrapolate an entirely new character based on this person not wanting to use HackerRank?

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

#179

Post by chadash »

Darkstack wrote: post #169
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…

> Even a short phone screen where I just ask someone to code a simple question takes 20-30 minutes of my time (plus however much time I need to get back in the zone), so HackerRank is appealing if only to weed out the very worst candidates. But you took 20-30 Minutes of their time too, the only difference is that you get a compensation at the end of theses 20-30 min, they don't. If someone told me, "OK , i m gonna wa…

I'm assuming that you don't expect companies to hire everyone who applies and therefore some candidates are going to have time wasted. What do you think is a fair amount of time to expect someone to give for an initial screening?

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

#180

Post by shkkmo »

nilkn wrote: post #17
codingdave wrote: post #6

I think that is a great response. But you also should be prepared for them to say no, not because your proposal is bad, but because many hiring managers want to put all applicants through the same hoops, to understand better how they all compare when having to decide between 5 people who all could do the job well.

Not just that, but doing a completely custom interview just for this one candidate is a lot of upfront investment to make in someone you may not even bring onsite for the full interview. All the caveats this candidate mentioned about standard coding screens are true, but they can all also be taken into consideration by qualified interviewers. There are flaws in this candidate's proposal too. In particular, their prop…

> In particular, their proposal does not satisfy their implicit criteria that the interview should mirror real-world conditions,

Real world conditions like these?

>> (1) time limits, (2) forbidding research on Wikipedia or StackOverflow, (3) forbidding collaboration, and (4) forbidding the use of libraries

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