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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.

#251

Post by crdoconnor »

bitL wrote: post #246
crdoconnor wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain to me the justification behind using an interview process that deliberately placed no emphasis on realism. This guy wouldn't be using binary trees at Google. He hasn't used them before. They are of minimal relevance in his area of expertise.

I guess you need to talk to Norvig or whoever designed their data-driven process and the definition of good hire they wanted to achieve. It used to be that when you joined Google you had no clue what your project will be before your first day, so I guess they wanted to maximize success rate on blind assignments to teams/ideas. For that certain abstract skills are more important than your past accomplishments you migh…

So, to be clear, you thought good reasons for an unrealistic testing process were:

* Argument from authority (because Norvig)

* "We might want to put a front ender in a back end job and vice versa so we need an interview process that accounts for that"

* Tests of "abstract skills" - as in, skills you won't actually use - are more important than tests of non-abstract skills which you will.

* "It's their money"

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

#252

Post by bitL »

dahart wrote: post #248
bitL wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google doesn't waive their interview process They actually do. What they told me is that if you are an open source contributor for important open source, or you have 3 people within company that want you, you can skip the whole process. There are surely more ways to skip it. Not sure why they didn't do it for that Homebrew guy. > when you express interest in the company. I was mentioning that these days often Hacke…

> The deficiency in your approach I see is that you expect candidate to spend time in convincing you without you spending time on researching them, pushing all externalities to the candidate. You expect people to do research, but you clearly haven't listened to anything I've said about my process, which I've commented on multiple times in this thread. Your summary is a straw man unrelated to anything I do when I hire…

I think what you are looking for is confirmation bias. Can't help you and have to eject myself from this thread.

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

#253

Post by dahart »

crdoconnor wrote: post #242
dahart wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1 hour of pairing/programming during an arranged face to face interview. If the test is well designed, touches on a number of areas and self contained, I think this was sufficient for me to assess their skills. Sounds great. I've done this too, but I've never done it before screening candidates. I don't have enough time to screen candidates by programming with them. > "Mimic real life" means no puzzles (unless I've…

>I've never done it before screening candidates No me neither. I screened with a 5 minute fizz buzz like task and CV fits. Bad programmers slipped through the net (and were caught by the test) but I never got anybody who literally couldnt code. I was happy with that balance. I was afraid if I made it longer than 5 mins we'd filter out good candidates who couldn't be bothered with our bullshit. >One high profile false…

> It does imply that it just doesn't prove it.

@mxcl's experience doesn't imply it either. The only evidence for a widespread problem is the number of people who have that problem. I have never had an interview where I felt rejected for what I thought was a single dumb question, ever. And I've never seen it happen to someone I know personally, or at a company I've worked for.

> A wanton disregard for realism in interviewing is, in my experience, very clearly systemic and industry-wide.

I don't necessarily disagree with this, but could you elaborate more on what bad things are actually happening that affect people? Are good coders, by and large, not able to get jobs? Are good coders having statistically significant problems getting paid or finding enjoyable work? I don't think so. Please elaborate on what actual damage is being done, I'm not seeing any.

> Seriously wtf?

Seriously. I don't know what happened, but I'm not automatically on the side of @mxcl because he was turned down or because I'm a fan of Homebrew. He might be exaggerating what happened. Do you know for a fact that it was specifically the binary tree question and nothing else in his interview that lost his chances there?

For all I know, the binary tree question was put there just to see if he would scoff at actual programming questions given his high profile status, and he failed because he scoffed and not because he got it wrong.

> I think you're starstruck by Google and that is affecting your judgement.

Why? What have I said that suggests I'm a fan of Google at all? It seems to me like you're making wild assumptions here.

> Asking him about binary trees was dumb.

That's an opinion. One that is based on not knowing why the question was there, or what the other questions were. I do ask questions on topics that I don't expect the candidate to use in their job. I'm interested in whether they paid attention in school. I'm interested in what they know, regardless of their skill. I'm interested in what they don't know, and where their limits are. I'm interested to know if people are curious about software. I'm interested to know how people react to questions they don't know the answer to. And I have a rule to specifically reject candidates that get upset about being asked technical questions. Those are people I don't want to work with.

None of that precludes asking some realistic questions about things people will use on the job, in addition to any unrealistic ones.

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

#254

Post by crdoconnor »

dahart wrote: post #253
crdoconnor wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've never done it before screening candidates No me neither. I screened with a 5 minute fizz buzz like task and CV fits. Bad programmers slipped through the net (and were caught by the test) but I never got anybody who literally couldnt code. I was happy with that balance. I was afraid if I made it longer than 5 mins we'd filter out good candidates who couldn't be bothered with our bullshit. >One high profile false…

> It does imply that it just doesn't prove it. @mxcl's experience doesn't imply it either. The only evidence for a widespread problem is the number of people who have that problem. I have never had an interview where I felt rejected for what I thought was a single dumb question, ever. And I've never seen it happen to someone I know personally, or at a company I've worked for. > A wanton disregard for realism in inter…

>I have never had an interview where I felt rejected for what I thought was a single dumb question, ever.

This is moving the goalposts. That is not the same thing as a wanton disregard for realism.

Have you been asked interview questions and set tasks which were not related to what you actually do day in day out? I have. LOTS.

>I don't necessarily disagree with this, but could you elaborate more on what bad things are actually happening that affect people? Are good coders, by and large, not able to get jobs? Are good coders having statistically significant problems getting paid or finding enjoyable work? I don't think so. Please elaborate on what actual damage is being done, I'm not seeing any.

Um, more false positives and more false negatives. It honestly feels weird having to justify why realism in testing is important. It feels so damned obvious to me. Would you design a purposefully unrealistic scientific experiment? Create a deliberately unrealistic automated test? What's special about interviewing that realism is of secondary or tertiary concern? What is more important than realism?

>I'm not automatically on the side of @mxcl because he was turned down

It feels kind of like you're automatically on Google's side.

The part that made me go what the fuck was when you said "he makes it sound like he expected to get the job without an interview" when he neither said nor implied anything of the sort.

And, earlier you took it as a kind of article of faith that everybody at google was obviously super smart, because Google.

There's definitely some bias there.

>I'm interested in whether they paid attention in school.

That's cool. I'm interested in whether they can do their job and I think it's kind of weird how people are seemingly so keen on setting tasks that test anything but that.

>None of that precludes asking some realistic questions

Strictly speaking asking what their favorite kind of chocolate is doesn't preclude that either, but there's a limited time available to interview and a limited amount that can be learned from asking them that - or indeed - anything else of tangential relevance.

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

#255

Post by nilkn »

bushin wrote: post #229
chadash wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> strings are simply arrays of chars or code units/code points/grapheme clusters/emojis. Thanks to hard work of many developers string handling becomes easier over time, but I don't think it's trivial if you don't exactly specify what you mean by "string" and "character".

I can't speak for chadash, but I'm pretty sure most folks who know to ask questions like this are probably going to pass the interview. They'll ask the right questions, and the problem will be simplified to a form that is solvable in a few minutes. So I don't think this is any major hurdle.

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

#256

Post by bitL »

crdoconnor wrote: post #251
bitL wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you need to talk to Norvig or whoever designed their data-driven process and the definition of good hire they wanted to achieve. It used to be that when you joined Google you had no clue what your project will be before your first day, so I guess they wanted to maximize success rate on blind assignments to teams/ideas. For that certain abstract skills are more important than your past accomplishments you migh…

So, to be clear, you thought good reasons for an unrealistic testing process were: * Argument from authority (because Norvig) * "We might want to put a front ender in a back end job and vice versa so we need an interview process that accounts for that" * Tests of "abstract skills" - as in, skills you won't actually use - are more important than tests of non-abstract skills which you will. * "It's their money"

Nope.

> * Argument from authority (because Norvig)

No. I suggested you might want to ask Norvig why did they decide so

> front ender in a back end job

I think it's a bit different. It's like you are creating completely new stuff like Big Data 15 years ago where frontend/backend separation didn't exist yet. Likely the same holds for various machine learning roles right now. So those categories we will be using in the future have to be invented first, and for that you need slightly different approach

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

#257

Post by pastage »

dahart wrote: post #249
WDCDev wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite on your suggestion of a different process. Bring the candidate on site for a 4 hour coding session. Provide a standard list of questions the scale in difficulty. Think: 1) Fizzbuzz 2) Reverse a string 3) Write a calculator class/script ... 100) Write an algorithm that can search compressed text without decompressing it So you see how far and correct they can get with an IDE ... and maybe no internet connect…

I love this suggestion, and thank you for elaborating! FWIW, the interviews that I've talked about taking as a candidate actually used this approach. And, when I give interviews, I use this approach too. The only thing I'm really defending here is using a 2nd stage screening process that only takes 30 minutes, before I go to the 3rd stage that takes a half day or full day. @BitL seems to be fighting the screening pro…

You do not know how many good candidates are filtered out because you have bad hiring practices.

I was tricked into a code golf challenge which was a hiring test. The result was good I was surprised that slacking off could get me a nice discussion, and the company got to pitch their positions. I've never done a hacker rank thingy for hiring and probably never will, I loathed them in school. They do not tickle my mind nor can I scratch my itches with them.

I know this sentiment is shared by many high value employers I've had the pleasure to work with.

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

#258

Post by renegadesensei »

dlgeek wrote: post #185
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…

This is an important point that people defending the author need to consider. I agree that hiring is a two-way negotiation. Flexibility is great. But there is a significant moral (and legal!) hazard when you let some people skip the code test because they have an amazing Github and others get rejected for not passing the screen. You're filtering out everyone who isn't privileged with the free time to build up an amazing portfolio. People will argue that this disproportionately hurts minorities, women, and lower income people.

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

#259

Post by pastage »

chadash wrote: post #232
bushin wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> strings are simply arrays of chars or code units/code points/grapheme clusters/emojis. Thanks to hard work of many developers string handling becomes easier over time, but I don't think it's trivial if you don't exactly specify what you mean by "string" and "character".

I think you and I are arguing semantics then. The very question "what do you mean by a string?" already indicates that you might be familiar with some of the differences between unicode and ascii, for example. In that case, I'll clarify what I mean depending on the language the candidate is most comfortable with. For example, if they plan to use C++, I might clarify that they can assume that the string is an array of…

You can't give those answers on computer aided code testing sites. That's why those tests needs to be long, verbose and boring so the questions will be obvious.

The human touch.

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

#260

Post by flukus »

renegadesensei wrote: post #258
dlgeek wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is an important point that people defending the author need to consider. I agree that hiring is a two-way negotiation. Flexibility is great. But there is a significant moral (and legal!) hazard when you let some people skip the code test because they have an amazing Github and others get rejected for not passing the screen. You're filtering out everyone who isn't privileged with the free time to build up an amaz…

The recruitment process is not the place to address economic inequality.
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