Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#1

Post by throwaway_415 » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 3:07 PM UTC

I'm currently going through interview stages for several companies for the first time in years and the en vogue trend seems to be a timed hackerrank test. Without fail this involves an algorithms-heavy rip off from leetcode/projecteurler/googlefoobar/topcoder culminating in some trickily smart O(N) DP solution. 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.

On the one hand I like that it normalises the application process against prejudice (I was lucky enough to go to a top engineering school) so it allows a fair entry level to all, however, it appears to be just an utterly irrelevant IQ hazing.

Anyone else going through this pain? What are we to make of the recruiting scene going forward? Are we now at a point where an engineer should at all times be intimately familiar with competitive programming and codegolf techniques?

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#2

Post by sotojuan » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 3:28 PM UTC

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.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#3

Post by natdempk » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 3:31 PM UTC

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.

I could see why that might be annoying, but it forces the coder to make choices about their data structure and makes it easier for hacker rank to support many languages.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#4

Post by go_go_ » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 3:32 PM UTC

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.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#5

Post by orsenthil » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 3:32 PM UTC

> Are we now at a point where an engineer should at all times be intimately familiar with competitive programming and codegolf techniques?

Yes, we are. Accepting that trend seems to be better than ignoring it.

There is one not-so-bad way to look at these programming challenges. In silicon valley, we live in a condition wherein the company could fail at any time. As a developer, most often, we have to learn something entirely new and ship the code for the business. Those challenges are quite enormous with lots of unknowns compared to these programming contest problems where it is just preparation. The general idea is, if a developer is diligent enough to prepare for these programming contest problems and delivers when required, he is probably going to be helpful as well when the business has a dire need.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#6

Post by nickbauman » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 3:32 PM UTC

Knowing the implementation of a specific algorithm is much less important than knowing what class of problem you're facing, where and how to look up the details of algorithms that could help you and how to work well with others to get the work done. If your employer uses hackerrank to choose candidates, you really don't want to work there. People who do those things well are often the worst kind of people to hire: they're really good at certain types of problems but suck at almost everything else. I end up cleaning up systems after these people all the time everywhere I encounter them in the workplace.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#7

Post by akerl_ » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 3:33 PM UTC

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"

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#8

Post by ktRolster » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 3:34 PM UTC

It's annoying, I agree, and sometimes on hackerrank the problems are miscalibrated, but the best way to handle it is to just do it. They aren't that hard, so spend a week or so getting your skill level up.

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#9

Post by pweissbrod » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 3:34 PM UTC

maybe what you should really hate is a company that adopts the en-vogue trend as the standards for recruitment. think about what that says about the team that passed their interview

Re: Rant HN: I hate hackerrank

#10

Post by evilc0 » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 3:34 PM UTC

I completely agree with you. Measuring our skill based on HackerRank is completely bullshit. I'm 100% sure, every programmer-beginner (even every math student) can solve the problems on HackerRank but can't even deploy a application on server nor know how to deal with real customers nor read a build-script nor... (image a lot more things here)