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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.

#181

Post by foo101 »

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…

> Also, if you're good, then why does a low bar for entry scare or offend you?

It's not a matter of fear or offense. It's a matter of judiciously investing my time on the right opportunities.

I get about 3 to 4 calls from recruiters everyday. If I agree to go through this kind of interviewing process every day (even if the bar is low), I would be spending more than 20 hours every week just doing HackerRank tests. This is not feasible for me. Therefore just like the recruiters need a way to filter candidates out, I need a way to filter recruiters out.

Requesting a HackerRank test is just one of the many filters I use.

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

#182

Post by dahart »

bitL wrote: post #157
dahart wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

FWIW, I have a patent and do public speaking, recently sold a startup, and I gladly take the coding quizzes for all my interviews.

They are fun, and they give me a chance to shine. The coding quizzes actually saved me once when I did really badly in another part of the interview. That company hired me, and gave me what others there thought was the good job.

I also administer coding quizzes to people I hire, and I find them a small but useful part of the larger interview process. I'm giving an assembly language coding quiz to someone later today.

> She basically interrupted you from working on something benefiting humanity

That seems a little hyperbolic. Do you want the job? You have to spend time interviewing. Simple as that. Don't do the quizzes if you don't want the job.

> Then you see the same company awarding their good jobs to friends of higher ups

Most companies try to promote from within, and many people think that's a good thing. The alternative is you hire unknowns from outside the company over people who've been there putting in the time and know the system.

> just because she was lazy to check your CV and ignorant of the industry

It's both presumptuous and pessimistic, and also likely wrong, to assume that a coding quiz implies any laziness on anyone's part.

> Imagine the same doing in other areas of industry

Other jobs have it much worse, you have to get bureaucratic certifications for a lot of jobs that are a lot less fun than Hackerrank, and take months and months. Or you could be a lawyer or doctor, and you have to raise money and bring in clients in order to get the good jobs.

What jobs are you thinking of that have it so much better than programmers?

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

#183

Post by nilkn »

shkkmo wrote: post #180
nilkn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Real world conditions like the one that you edited out of the sentence you quoted. The point is that neither exercise perfectly mimics the job the OP is being considered for, and they fail to do so in different ways.

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

#184

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

organsnyder wrote: post #153
hnrodey wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rec…

> ...assumption that firing the wrong person is more costly than not hiring the right person.

I take it you've never had to hire or fire anyone. At mid-sized and large companies, it's a cumbersome process and, unless they're complete sociopaths, firing is also unpleasant for the firing manager and the team. It also means taking on the work and cost of doing a new candidate search and another new hire ramp-up.

If easy-hire/easy-fire worked, everybody would be doing it.

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

#185

Post by dlgeek »

renegadesensei wrote: post #36

It's an interesting idea. Phrased politely I think it's fine to suggest. Still I can understand why people would refuse your approach. There's an obvious risk involved letting the applicant dictate the terms of the evaluation. The point of coding tests is that you can't prepare or easily Google an answer. The employer wants to gauge your unscripted in the moment programming knowledge. Also as someone else said, you n…

> Also as someone else said, you need a way to compare apples to apples.

This is really important. For any company that does business with the federal government (even if it's only a small part of the company), they're required to keep records to prove that they don't discriminate in their hiring practices. The way almost every company does this is ensure that their practices are standardized and no candidate has any sort of different experience.

If they let this candidate have a non-standard interview, then hire them over someone who is in a protected class, they'd be opening up a TON of liability.

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

#186

Post by dovdovdov »

phkahler wrote: post #83
dovdovdov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, silly people are living in the misconception that companies are any way interested in their personality. While it's really just about to obey, and follow command. People have to understand that they have to fit the soulless masses and have to be tested accordingly...

If that wasn't sarcasm, you should find a better employer ;-) p.s. Even at the best companies there is some truth in what you say, but it varies a lot.

yep, it was, and yes it's a mix. :)

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

#187

Post by foo101 »

I have had the misfortune of doing a few HackerRank tests where the problems were not prepared well.

For example, the correct answer does not appear in the list of available options, or where the problem statement is not precise enough to solve in an unambiguous manner.

There is no human I can talk to and ask clarifying questions to resolve the ambiguity because, you know, it is a HackerRank test!

After going through these experiences, I have decided that HackerRank test is just not worth the time. As a rule, I decline any request to take a HackerRank test citing my reasons as politely as possible. Surprisingly, more often than not, the recruiter is happy to setup a telephone round where I can talk to an actual human.

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

#188

Post by dahart »

crdoconnor wrote: post #166
dahart wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>There is always a shortage of good jobs. If their hiring process involves jumping through hoops before being granted permission to interview and if the tasks assigned to you bear almost no relationship to the job at hand, the chances of the job actually being good are low . Employers that do this kind of thing typically have an entitlement complex and not the smartest. People with an entitlement complex who are not…

I'd love to hear examples of how to do it right, without taking all my time. I'm genuinely interested in how to hire people without wasting their time or mine. I'd love to screen people with a day of pair programming or a 2 week paid internship, or whatever other good ideas are floating around. I can't.

You have just dismissed most tech companies. All the large ones (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) give coding puzzles as part of their interview process.

If you don't want to work for one of those companies, that's absolutely your choice, but you'd be wrong to say they have an entitlement complex or aren't the smartest.

> In my case because I have a bunch of open source available that they can just read.

I do read people's OS projects, but I simply can't do that for every candidate before I screen them, I don't have enough time. If the coding tests are easy, and you want me to see your open source project, then just ace the coding test and move on.

If you don't want the job, then don't do the coding test. It is your choice.

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

#189

Post by shkkmo »

nilkn wrote: post #183
shkkmo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Real world conditions like the one that you edited out of the sentence you quoted. The point is that neither exercise perfectly mimics the job the OP is being considered for, and they fail to do so in different ways.

> It asks for small algorithmic coding puzzles

There is no mention of "working on a pre-existing codebase that they know nothing about" in the description of the HackerRank test... so I don't know how your point applies?

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

#190

Post by foo101 »

chadash wrote: post #174
bushin wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

I am with you. Although most modern languages would offer shortcuts to reverse a string but the spirit of this question is to see if a candidate has the mental agility to come up with a solution purely from ones knowledge to use a programming language and common sense.

One should be able to devise a solution to a simple problem like this without any CS course at all.

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