Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

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 were employed by the same company. This takes away most of the stress of interviewing, which I know via candidate surveys.

My advice would be to steer clear from employers who use a soulless cookie cutter process that makes people feel like a commodity. This is how you'll also be treated during daily interactions and in conversations about your career development. Don't be under any illusion that you'll be able to find yourself on the right side of such a situation.

Recruiting and hiring are garbage right now in the industry. Part of the problem is easy to recognize -- idiots designing interviews. This is where the puzzle crap comes from, as well as theoretical stuff that's far removed from the day to day of what a person will be doing.

The other problem is that the people who could be designing better interviews aren't stepping up. There are plenty of intelligent people who aren't 1) taking the time and effort to introspect and think about why they are effective as people and 2) taking those insights and translating them into an interview process that selects for important traits in simple, reproducible ways.

It's bizarre. A job could require years of experience with linux, programming, and networking, all of which could be tested with a multiple-choice style test to get a sense of where a candidate stands. Instead, we look at their resume, check off that they have our requirements buried somewhere in the forest of buzzwords, and then move onto whether someone can finger-paint their freshman year CS lectures onto a whiteboard. Then when we end up hiring a completely ineffective person who spent their entire time trying to game the interview system, we are surprised, even though we've been selecting for that kind of person all along.

As an aside....

I find it ironic that almost all companies talk about "culture, family, work-life-balance" yet they treat recruiting as robot selection....

IQ Hazing is a good way to put it...

but how do you measure, "Do I even want to fucking work with these people/this company???"

> I'm an experienced developer with 5 years of thorough product experience in the domain. I'd completely appreciate the importance if the role actually did involve trying to eek out efficiency in a distributed system with high throughput... but 9 times out of 10 it's boilerplate business logic.

This is what I don't understand about software engineer hiring. They are ignoring important criteria about fit for the actual job, and focusing on criteria that is either orthogonal or completely irrelevant.

It's worthwhile to ask in these situations if the exercise is representative of work you'd be doing. It almost never is, but they tend to excuse it as...

> it normalises the application process against prejudice

But does it? By ignoring the actual criteria relevant to the job, they're dumping qualified people who don't do well with the hazing, and delaying evaluation of everyone else until after they're hired. That evaluation tends to be a lot less objective, because "hiring is expensive"; it selects for people who do well with the hazing, and reproduces the problem for the next round.

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