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Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

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Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#51

Post by Bahamut »

tony wrote: post #31

For their own expedience. It's an employer's market. It costs 2.5k/yr to keep an SO posting up and get thousands of resumes in your inbox. I'd also say a fair share of those in Who's Hiring on HN aren't in dire need of filling seats, but just trying to see how far people with fling themselves through the mazes. Blissfully unaware they're not the only startup and have no way of offering the stability of a large compan…

As someone who has been on both ends, it definitely is not an employer's market for engineers. The ones who meet a high quality bar usually can get an offer almost anywhere they want, and can easily choose to dismiss the employer wooing them if they don't meet their bar.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#52

Post by peruvian »

akerl_ wrote: post #7
sotojuan wrote: post #2

The worst part of Hacker Rank is that it takes arguments as STDIN, forcing you to to a "read from STDIN" ceremony before actually getting to the problem.

If reading from STDIN is something that's considered a "ceremony", I'm already concerned about the rest of the code. STDIN is one of the most common input methods I use for most of the commands I interact with on a daily basis. It would be like discovering that somebody found "logging errors to STDERR" to be a "ceremony"

In real life, I agree. But if I'm trying to solve an array sorting problem, why can't they just give me an array? LeetCode does it and it works fine. I get to focus on how to sort the array.

The other commenter (natdempk) makes some good points though.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#53

Post by h43k3r »

banachtarski1 wrote: post #37
nicksergeant wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, now you have no idea if a developer is any good, because all they have to do is memorize a bunch of garbage interview algo techniques / questions.

I think this mentality is actually wrong. I've definitely met good engineers who were rejected for jobs they were qualified for because of these questions, but I've never met someone who was extremely good at these questions who turned out to be a dud after hiring. I don't disagree with the hate towards the current interview process at larger companies, preferring take homes myself, but I think it's harmful to say th…

I have met many people in my life who are/were way better than me in chalking out algorithmic solutions but didn't even had a single bit of knowledge how computers and real softwares work. Many of these people are not good team players, don't understand the importance of delivering things, or simply aren't interested in the work they are doing.

On other side, I have also met many people who are extremely good at competitive programming and extremely good at their workplaces also.

So taking these two as suppositions, I have concluded that competitive programming skill is not something which can't be relied upon as a judgement factor for a good candidate.

Note- I once used to be a good competitive programmer during my college so I have seen both sides of it.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#54

Post by 0xmohit »

jacques_chester wrote: post #46

Here's how I was assessed for my job at Pivotal: 1. I did a simple tech screen (the RPI). 1 hour. My interviewer had a laptop and asked me questions about what to do next in the scenario. 2. Hey, come pair with this engineer on this real code on a real project on a real task. 3. How about lunch? 4. Hey, let's have you pair with this other engineer on real code on a real project on a real task. 5. Get offered a job on…

It's also a fantastic way to see how one thinks, one's problem solving approach, debugging skills and the like.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#55

Post by catscratch »

maxaf wrote: post #22

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 we…

> soulless cookie cutter process that makes people feel like a commodity

I agree most should steer clear from them, but the interview process is often an accurate representation of the level of the team:

* If the interview involves a copied a set of questions off the internet, verbal or written, they don't have the skills on the team to have a dynamic discussion.

* If the interview doesn't have enough standard questions, then they're either inconsistent or might rely heavily on certain people's intuition, the latter which could go either way but the former could mean complete disorganization.

* If they expect you to know the circumference of the Earth (equatorial 24874 mi/40030 km, meridional 24860 mi/40008 km) and capital of Sumer in 2281 (Uruk), then they could be interested in someone that has a scientific mind, great memory, and likes trivia or is very into history.

* If they give you problems to solve, they want to see and hear how you think.

* If they give you homework, they probably just want you to provide solutions in code and figure things out on your own to some extent, and the amount of time they give you to do that is indication of how they estimate tasks.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#56

Post by matthewowen »

jacques_chester wrote: post #46

Here's how I was assessed for my job at Pivotal: 1. I did a simple tech screen (the RPI). 1 hour. My interviewer had a laptop and asked me questions about what to do next in the scenario. 2. Hey, come pair with this engineer on this real code on a real project on a real task. 3. How about lunch? 4. Hey, let's have you pair with this other engineer on real code on a real project on a real task. 5. Get offered a job on…

Pairing for interviews is a good idea if you pair. But it's not a good idea if you don't: I don't like pairing, and I don't really want to work somewhere where it's a big part of what they do. I won't perform as well in an interview pairing, which ksbisfil info of you do pair, irrelevant if not.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#57

Post by bunderbunder »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #28

> 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 actua…

> 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.

Oftentimes, the people actually designing the hiring process have an imperfect understanding of what work software engineers actually do. They ask the software engineers for input, but optimizing the hiring process to be orthogonal a software engineer's core work responsibilities, so they aren't necessarily going to give ideal advice.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#58

Post by 0xmohit »

hw wrote: post #41

I loathe algorithm questions, and I almost always never ask them when I'm interviewing a candidate. Too often have I seen candidates who ace 6 rounds of algorithm interviews, only to struggle when it comes to building actual products and require a ton of handholding. On the other hand, I've seen candidates who fail interviews that are algorithm heavy, but have done exceptionally well when it comes to the practical wo…

I've also seen a similar tool that claims to do a partial evaluation of candidate's code. Guess what does it do! Assume that the expected answer was

   42
and your code emitted

   4
it'd give you 50% marks for the test case.

--

As an aside, such tools would give you a 0 even if you coded the perfect algorithm but goofed up the final printf.

Robotic evaluations might work, but not in the current form.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#59

Post by banachtarski1 »

h43k3r wrote: post #53
banachtarski1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this mentality is actually wrong. I've definitely met good engineers who were rejected for jobs they were qualified for because of these questions, but I've never met someone who was extremely good at these questions who turned out to be a dud after hiring. I don't disagree with the hate towards the current interview process at larger companies, preferring take homes myself, but I think it's harmful to say th…

I have met many people in my life who are/were way better than me in chalking out algorithmic solutions but didn't even had a single bit of knowledge how computers and real softwares work. Many of these people are not good team players, don't understand the importance of delivering things, or simply aren't interested in the work they are doing. On other side, I have also met many people who are extremely good at comp…

I agree - I don't think competitive programming should be used as an interview tactic. That being said, if you look at the rating distribution of TopCoder/Codeforces problems, most interview problems (even at Google) tend to be around the 1500 Elo level. Around the 1900 Elo level and above, I think it's an extremely strong signal for a very talented thinker.

I'd much rather prefer a discussion about a previous project (open source or at work) with pointed questions about the code/design choices, a take home, etc.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#60

Post by MaulingMonkey »

tspike wrote: post #20
nicksergeant wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, now you have no idea if a developer is any good, because all they have to do is memorize a bunch of garbage interview algo techniques / questions.

What is your preferred interviewing method?

Part of the interview for my last job involved interviewing me about debugging, which I thought was neat. "What's wrong with this code?" All the samples were relatively simple - less than 30 lines each?

- Double delete, caused by not following the rule of 3 in C++, which would likely crash - Multithreading code missing volatile or memory barriers (which segued into a discussion of it's disassembly) - Nonvirtual delete through base pointer

Extremely realistic - it's all stuff I've seen and fixed in the wild (this was for a non-entry gamedev job involving plenty of C++)

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