Hackerrank is nonsense, question is how desperate the person is for the job.
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.
#52You want a personalized interview, styled exactly for you ? I would be a 'no' if i were interviewing me. You obviously can program but this makes you appear to be someone who would be difficult to work with.
Depending on who you are, having a personalized interview may make perfect sense. I'd say hiring a senior developer or a team lead should always take it.
Agreed, but without knowing the context I responded on this emails face value.
I would also worry hiring a team lead/senior dev who appears to be combative from the initial screening
Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.
#53The point of an interview process isn't to find out stuff about you in isolation; it's to be able to compare you to other candidates. That's only possible if all the candidates go through the same process. Also, processes get calibrated over time. The most bewildering thing to do as an interviewer is to try a new process, because it's difficult to tell how a candidate did without having collected some other data points.
Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.
#54I've done ballsy shit like this to get attention from employers. Once I was too slow with the programming questions in the screen-share, so I put up a website with a detailed solution to the last question.
I almost got the job, they randomly canceled the on-site at the last minute. Needless to say, I think my effort at least got me to that final step.
Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.
#55I can see giving a test like this for an entry level job, but for more senior positions it doesn't really make much sense to me. I'd rather show off a bunch of projects I have under my belt or code I've written in the past.
For example, I haven't had to write my own algorithm to parse a b-tree or implement binary search since I left school. I could explain how these algos work, but to actually implement it perfectly in python or java under timed conditions with no outside docs, I would most certainly fail and the company would miss out on a pretty good generalist.
Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.
#56It seems to me that this is a well-written, polite, non-confrontational counter-proposal.
My opinion is that the company may have two responses that are both valid and legitimate: i) "Sure, go on, nice idea!" or ii) "No, sorry, please follow our established hiring practices".
Now, if the company takes that as arrogance and that email only is reason to eliminate the candidate, the email still actually worked as a great way for the candidate to eliminate the company. If a company punishes a polite, thoughtful disagreement from a candidate, it must be a horrible place to work for.
Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.
#57I think this is a perfectly valid response if you are senior/experienced/specialist and asked to do these impersonal quizzes. "We need to filter out the idiots" is not a valid reason to waste an experienced candidate's time either.
Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.
#58From both sides as a hiring manager and candidate, I’ve found that a take-home coding challenge that’s tailored to the company is a far better indicator of fit.
With a tailored take-home, the company has a chance to evaluate candidates based on more realistic, holistic challenges than “solve this academic comp sci problem that you won’t actually encounter on the job”. And candidates can get a better sense of the type of work and challenges they’d actually be tackling on the job.
The take-home isn’t tailored to each candidate. The opposite, actually: it needs to be the same for all so that candidates’ solutons can be compared.
Here’s the tl;dr example of a challenge we give web engineering candidates:
“Here’s our API and API docs: . Create an interactive data visualization using D3 and any other tools you’d like. Your submission should include instructions on how to run it.”
By keeping the challenge relatively unconstrained, we allow candidates to show some creativity and prompt them to make the same feature/quality/speed tradeoffs that they’d have to make in the role. We look for autonomous individuals, so this turns out to be a good filter. We encourage them to spend less than 4 hours on it, but our time limit is a pretty generous 1 week since they likely already have a full time job and other interviews.
Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.
#59You want a personalized interview, styled exactly for you ? I would be a 'no' if i were interviewing me. You obviously can program but this makes you appear to be someone who would be difficult to work with.
...If "Tells me when I'm doing something in a way that could potentially be improved, in a polite, validated way" falls under your definition of "Difficult to work with", then perhaps he wouldn't want to work with you anyway. However if you want to hire people to just complete tickets as fast as possible, maybe that's a valid reason to reject the candidate.
To your first point, yes exactly. The interview is as much mine as it is the candidates.
Not necessarily hiring to complete tickets as fast as possible, but some who can take a task and complete with minimal issues. I don't want to be stuck in meetings or arguing in PRs etc.
Re: An employer asked me to do a HackerRank test. Here's my alternative proposal.
#60Immediate no hire. Just do the test, excel, then work on improving the hiring process. HackerRank is imperfect, but it's practical. Like code.