61–70 of 271 posts
My regular policy is to ghost any employer who throws a HackerRank test at me. This is usually a strong indicator that the work environment is incompatible with my values.
Never ghost anyone. It's so rude.
Recruiters acting in a professional capacity or companies, both of whom would ghost you without a second thought? I gotta say I don’t really see the problem.
You 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 I came across this in the wild, I'd reevaluate the parts of the interview I control to see if maybe I could make it less robotic and I'd probably still bring them in to make sure I'm not missing a good dev, but I would be fighting my bias at least a little. There is a small handful of people I've worked with before that would appreciate this approach and their toxic attitudes would prevent me from wanting to work with them again.
The interview process can suck, but this is not how I'd recommend standing out from the herd.
You 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.
In the same spirit you could definitely see it as unreasonable for a candidate to suggest you adapt your screening process because they know better (even if it's said in a polite, validated way).
You 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.
For a homogenous culture of a large corporation, where each dev is a cog in the system, yes, i would agree that this person will not fit. If i had a start-up, i would definitely give this person a good old try, because i can tell that he/she is capable enough to churn out rather advanced projects with complexity higher than just CRUD. Programmers of this type is what i'd call 10x, and one should never dismiss a 10x!
I'm not doubting this persons ability - I'm only responding my opinion of this person based solely on this email.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
As someone responsible for hiring developers, these quizzes seem like an absolute waste of time. As an applicant it's almost insulting. I've been a part of two great alternatives: a pair programming session with the lead dev and adding some features/refactoring a sample project. I'd be curious if anyone here is responsible for hiring devs and finds hackerrank type tests useful.
They serve as a relatively simple early-stage screen for applications from people we've never met. Ours costs each candidate 1-2 hours. But we do not require cover letters, which in the good old days might have taken about half that time, and been thrown in the bin.
Some may think no CS graduate would fail a test that let you choose any popular language to implement some basic string parsing. But in practice about half the candidates fail this stage of the hiring process, which saves us quite a lot of time. Yes, it costs each candidate an hour or so, but that's a feature, similar to the oft-proposed idea that sending email could cost one cent to reduce spam.
You 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 be clear, I wouldn't rule out someone for this, but I can sympathize with where I believe the above poster is coming from.
"Better"
Open source contributions carry a set of particular demographic biases to a hiring process. They skew things towards comparatively well-resourced white men.
There's certainly an argument to say that open source contribution is an indicator of ability, but there are other ways to assess ability which don't introduce such a heavy skew.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
...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.
"Difficult to work with" is perhaps too harsh a statement. But the candidate is asking for a completely custom treatment at the earliest possible stage of the interview process. The candidate is also assuming that the interviewers aren't aware of the caveats mentioned about standard coding screens/HackerRank exercises. The candidate's proposal also doesn't mirror real-world conditions, because I doubt the job consist…
10/10 !
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, silly people are living in the misconception that companies are any way interested in their personality. While it's really just about to obey, and follow command. People have to understand that they have to fit the soulless masses and have to be tested accordingly...
I was only responding specifically to a candidate responding with this email if I had asked them to do a hackerrank. While I can understand your leap to soulless masses - that was not my intention.