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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.

#211

Post by epicide »

epicide wrote: post #199
foo101 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

If they are assuming they know more than everybody involved and making suggestions to a process they haven't even gone through 20% of, then yes, they are probably a bad fit. It's extremely hypocritical to criticize someone for the very thing you are doing (assuming the other person doesn't know how to do their job). Couple this with the fact that they are not asking for any advice on their hiring process, it's a pret…

Replying to myself as I can't nest further.

I never said raising issues is bad. Where I work, we highly encourage people to bring up issues as they see them.

However, when you bring something up as an issue, it usually helps to suggest a solution (which this original GitHub post fails to do) and we don't generally try to take unsolicited advice from people who aren't even part of the company yet.

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

#212

Post by StavrosK »

nilkn wrote: post #205
StavrosK wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But now your process is heavily biased against folks whose work has primarily been for their current employer, and they don't have any reasonable side projects to walk you through.

How so? It's not like I say "oh, that's too bad then, sorry". It just takes longer to interview those candidates because we don't have that shortcut.

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

#213

Post by bitL »

dahart wrote: post #206
bitL wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the large ones (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) give coding puzzles as part of their interview process. They are considered the best and give above average compensation. Is your company considered the best, properly paying top talent, to employ the same schema? Those tests were done to distill the top end performers with the accepted risk of huge number of false negatives. Now every mom-and-dad shop is…

> Is your company considered the best, properly paying top talent, to employ the same schema? Yes, this was true of every job I've ever had. Maybe I've been lucky. I don't really understand why asking someone to do a small amount of programming for a programming job interview, when they claim to be an experienced programmer, is any sort of "extreme" practice. You've expressed a lot of complaints about coding quizzes,…

Because if you have in your CV verifiable statements that you worked on some super tough engineering challenges, including advanced snippets of code/projects on GitHub demonstrating your dominance in that area, doing silly low-end coding quizzes seems like a total waste of time. Can't you really see that? It's literally like if I asked you if you ever ran a company and if you could handle preparing a budget, despite knowing you are a serial entrepreneur that sold multiple companies already. It's just super arrogant.

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

#214

Post by mywittyname »

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…

I see that you're receiving a bit of flak (which, given the audience, isn't unsurprising). But I wanted to let you know that I found this comment pretty insightful.

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

#215

Post by Caveman_Coder »

bitL wrote: post #210
Caveman_Coder wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "...working on something benefiting humanity..." I think you forgot to add the "/s" to this statement.

Maybe you are idealistic and work for non-profit dealing with human trafficking in your spare time and have to cut it to take a silly HackerRank test?

More likely it is watching Netflix and reading HN...let's not pretend we're all out there saving the world and volunteering our free time for selfless causes...

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

#216

Post by mywittyname »

bitL wrote: post #210
Caveman_Coder wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "...working on something benefiting humanity..." I think you forgot to add the "/s" to this statement.

Maybe you are idealistic and work for non-profit dealing with human trafficking in your spare time and have to cut it to take a silly HackerRank test?

Why are you interviewing if you're working your dream non-profit job?

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

#217

Post by nilkn »

shkkmo wrote: post #207
nilkn wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's very hard to fully approximate that aspect of the job in a quick coding screen. Small algorithmic problems don't come close in the grand scheme of things. But they still put you in an environment and context where you don't have the advantage of being an expert ahead of time.

> But they still put you in an environment and context where you don't have the advantage of being an expert ahead of time. Yet by forbidding the use of external research and libraries they remove the two main tools I would want some to use "in an environment and context where you don't have the advantage of being an expert ahead of time"

Sure, that's not ideal. And the more that I read about HackerRank specifically the more I'm convinced it's a step back from boring old phone screens. We do the latter with a Google doc, and while it's technologically primitive in comparison it gives us complete flexibility and ensures the candidate can always ask any questions they have, either about the problem or about the company/job/etc.

The problems should be chosen such that external research and libraries are not needed. For our phone screens, we don't even require the code to compile or successfully run. For instance, we explicitly tell candidates to just make something up that sounds reasonable if they need a standard library function that they know exists but they can't remember its exact name or type signature.

We've never used HackerRank, so I don't really know how customizable it is. From the comments here, it sounds like it's designed to be fully automated with no participation from any developers at the hiring company. I don't like that at all. When I wrote my original comment, I'll admit I was thinking of it as a more advanced Google doc for programming, not as a fully automated platform. That's my bad, and I should have done my research a bit more.

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

#218

Post by foo101 »

epicide wrote: post #211
epicide wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are assuming they know more than everybody involved and making suggestions to a process they haven't even gone through 20% of, then yes, they are probably a bad fit. It's extremely hypocritical to criticize someone for the very thing you are doing (assuming the other person doesn't know how to do their job). Couple this with the fact that they are not asking for any advice on their hiring process, it's a pret…

Replying to myself as I can't nest further. I never said raising issues is bad. Where I work, we highly encourage people to bring up issues as they see them. However, when you bring something up as an issue, it usually helps to suggest a solution (which this original GitHub post fails to do) and we don't generally try to take unsolicited advice from people who aren't even part of the company yet .

The original GitHub post offers pretty reasonable solutions.

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

#219

Post by s3nnyy »

mywittyname wrote: post #214
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…

I see that you're receiving a bit of flak (which, given the audience, isn't unsurprising). But I wanted to let you know that I found this comment pretty insightful.

Happy to help. When I was a full-time programmer I also thought writing ten paragraph e-mails with footnotes is smart but turns out it isn't (I learned this the hard way).

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

#220

Post by mywittyname »

bitL wrote: post #197
dahart wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 codin…

> All the large ones (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) give coding puzzles as part of their interview process. They are considered the best and give above average compensation. Is your company considered the best, properly paying top talent, to employ the same schema? Those tests were done to distill the top end performers with the accepted risk of huge number of false negatives. Now every mom-and-dad shop is…

Those "mom-and-dad shops" are the ones who have the most to lose by hiring the wrong person. A sufficiently poor performing person could cripple them.
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