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Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

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Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#71

Post by raverbashing »

jacques_chester wrote: post #65
matthewowen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Engineers like yourself, who don't want to pair, self-select out before applying. Which is fine! There's plenty of variety in this industry to find preferred practices, peers and environment.

You are right.

I like pairing. Once a week.

Being obligated to pair and doing it every day is No Way Jose for me

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#72

Post by fixxer »

These things are really just filters. Due to the legal aspects of hiring/recruiting, especially at large companies, these exercises are par for the course. Once you're in a large company, firing can be very difficult, so I'm all for filters.

Personally, after having taken many of these tests myself, if you're having even minor problems, that is a huge red flag for me. They're really just binary filters on basic skill level.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#73

Post by skybrian »

rajeshmr wrote: post #18

I face this problem. I am into server side scripting and automation and this hardly involves algos and stuff. The problem doesn't seem to lie with hackerrank but with one-size-fits-all HR approach. I would also pin the blame on lack of understanding on the part of HR personnel (they seem to be the drivers behind recruitment drives) of how the tech landscape is.They need to educate themselves on what sorta interview p…

That seems... limiting. Are you sure you want to specialize that much, and rule out doing any programming that does require understanding something about algorithms?

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#74

Post by spitfire »

I'll post to this thread because this is very relevant for the hiring companies. Hunter and Schmidt did a meta-study of 85 years of research on hiring criteria. [1] There are three attributes you need to select for to identify performing employees in intellectual fields.

  - General mental ability (Are they generally smart)
    Use WAIS or if there are artifacts of GMA(Complex work they've done themselves) available use them as proxies. 
    Using IQ is effectively illegal[2] in the US, so you'll have to find a test that acts as a good proxy.

  - Work sample test. NOT HAZING! As close as possible to the actual work they'd be doing. Try to make it apples-to-apples comparison across candidates. Also, try and make accomidations for candidates not knowing your company shibboleth.

  - Integrity. The first two won't matter if you hire dishonest people or politicians.

     There are existing tests available for this, you can purchase for
This alone will get you > 65% hit rate [1], and can be done inside of three hours. There's no need for day long (or multi-day) gladiator style gauntlets.

[1] http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

[2] The effective illegality comes from IQ tests disadvantaging certain minority groups.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#75

Post by falcolas »

retreatguru wrote: post #67
erichurkman wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a friendly interview process, to us, is a competitive advantage. As is not requiring multiple onsite interviews, too many phone calls, and even making the onsite interview not take all day (we try to wrap up by 1pm unless a candidate is shadowing an engineer for a day, which we typically do for more senior hires). Having a concise interview process often lets us get offers out the door while candidates are sti…

I wanted to use and like hackerrank as a hiring tool but found the questions had nothing to do with what devs do every day - mainly solving business problems in elegant ways. I even contacted them and told them so but did not get much response. I treat interviews more like going out for coffee and often do just that. I like to understand what people are passionate about both in tech and personally.

> I even contacted them and told them so but did not get much response.

Probably because it's much easier to rank a algorithmic solution. The question of "does your code compute the correct answer in the allocated compute time" provides a nice clear answer. Solving business problems in elegant ways, on the other hand, takes a human to judge, and the results are not always clear.

The difference in the difficulty grading the two is exactly why the former is so popular as an interview technique (requires low effort to get a binary answer), and the latter is better at actually judging an applicant (reflects the human behind the test).

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#76

Post by jakobegger »

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"

If you work with a modern framework, chances are high you'll never actually read from STDIN. For example, I have no idea how I'd read from standard input in ObjC or Swift.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#77

Post by ori_b »

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #60
tspike wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 delet…

Note that unless you are coding in Java, volatile is not a memory barrier, and both the CPU and compiler may reorder things around them.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#78

Post by skybrian »

go_go_ wrote: post #4

This is one of the reasons I'm eyeing management for long term career growth. I've learned that the problems given to sr. and jr. engineers are roughly the same, and that the interview process is biased towards jr.

I think you're underestimating how hard interviewing can be for new grads. There are some that are good and others who lack the background or the confidence.

It also seems a bit weird to give senior engineers easier questions. Do you really think people get worse with experience?

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#80

Post by clairity »

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…

i really like your "how well do we collaborate" assessment method and the underlying advice of treating people meaningfully. teamwork is so important to satisfaction, achievement, and even a feeling of responsibility.

that isn't necessarily at odds with assessing technical ability via tests, of course. in a perfect world, we'd be able to tease out both great technical ability and great interpersonal skills. it sounds to me like our original ranter disagreed with the scope and focus of the test--timed cleverness and ingenuity in an esoteric problem space. that kind of ingenuity is often helpful but not often required for many technical jobs.

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