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

Many recruitment agencies won't even talk to you until you pass some FizzBuzz test on HackerRank or similar. Even Facebook strongly suggest you to take their own training based off similar platform and Google does something similar. So it seems that even entry level jobs these days require Googlesque excellence just to get your foot in the door. It's similar to law firms requiring you to take parts of bar exam during your interview or physicians to perform autopsy during interview. Even worse situation is with Machine Learning now, where you are expected to answer PhD exam-style questions for entry level data augmentation jobs. Unless you are from Top 10 school your credentials don't matter at all. It's IMO complete insanity and I am throwing such companies out of the door instantly unless they offer $500k+/year. Then we can talk that way.

Programmer and owner of a technical recruitment agency here. I forked and rewrote the whole thing: https://gist.github.com/iwangu/b0d8b8e140afdd4e30bb7e401babc...

I made it more generic so more people can use it and removed things that make no sense to me as a recruiter. Also, I deleted all the patronizing parts and made the English simpler. If you start quoting authors and even think I am going to read articles linked in footnotes, you're wrong. I think many HR people will just ignore you if you e-mail this. They won't want to talk to you because you signal that you will be hard to work with and you clearly don't value time of others. Your e-mail is way too long. Seven paragraphs with bullet-points, are you kidding? RIGHT NOW, I have 197 other e-mail conversations in my inbox that are easier to read than this essay.

I wrote a blogpost why programmers don't get jobs due to random factors (https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/why-software-engineers-dont...), but this is one of these things where just shoot yourself in the foot by being too demanding too early in the process. (You can be demanding ONLY AFTER they told you that they want to hire you, but not before)

You are not alone in your frustration, and I suspect most people here will sympathize with you as this topic comes up quite often in the software community. Just be aware that drawing this kind of line in the sand is going to greatly limit your options.

If you want to be evaluated in a more holistic manner (including side projects) you'll probably have better luck with very small companies. When the people in charge will actually be the ones working with you every day, and they are only filling a small number of positions, they will be more likely to find it worthwhile to get to know you as a whole person during the hiring process.

Unfortunately, once a company is beyond a certain size this just isn't possible because it doesn't scale. They have to fill hundreds or thousands of positions and also maintain a universal set of hiring standards. Things degrade into a game of numbers. This makes cookie-cutter tests almost inevitable.

While frustrating in their own right, for me what makes things worse is that you have to do one of these screens for every single company you apply to. And most companies have the same evaluation goals for the phone screen stage (e.g., do you actually understand data structures & algorithms).

What I'd really like to see is the emergence of something like a "common app" for software hiring. Outsource technical screening to a reputable third-party, and once you've proven yourself by obtaining a good enough "score" you can move immediately to on-sites (what constitutes a "good" score would vary by company). This doesn't solve the problem of the efficacy of technical screens, but it at least cuts down on all the redundant effort.

Two services I've tried so far that are doing something like this are Interviewing.io and A-List. Unfortunately it seems these services merely make it easier to get a phone screen, rather than replacing them. But it seems like a step in the right direction.

If "Googlesque excellence" is passing FizzBuzz then I am severely undercompensated.

I've never used HackerRank personally (although I'm looking into for the next round of hiring I'll be involved in), but it seems it might be kind of useful as one step towards deciding which of the 50-100 candidates that applied you should invite to the pair programming session. You simply cannot have your lead dev doing pair programming sessions with 50+ candidates for each job opening.