7 ms·

Over the past several months about 4 out of 10 companies that interviewed me actually required me to complete several HackerRank challenges because I did not ha

by gamedna 10y ago

Over the past several months about 4 out of 10 companies that interviewed me actually required me to complete several HackerRank challenges because I did not have a HackerRank score. The fact that I have worked for several industry leading companies, and had 20+ years of development experience was irrelevant without that score. As a sr. dev manager, I found this to be an odd requirement.

jacquesm 10y ago
Good reasons to look elsewhere. What a ridiculous thing.
- logicallee 10y ago
  No more ridiculous than women listing height requirements in their dating profiles, asking about height, and filtering out people with too low a number -- even though they don't actually care, it's not actually a requirement they have[1], it's just one they list and filter against at the online stage, despite not actually caring. By don't actually care, I mean that when they meet those men in different settings they don't care about height, when very short men decline to mention their height or match with women despite not meeting stated "requirements" it isn't an issue, and indeed some men lie outright about their heigth but women get over it and enter happy relationsihps with them once they actually meet. In many contexts stated requirements or the hoops applicants have to jump through don't match actual requirements. Fundraising would be another one. VC's don't invest in companies that actually meet whatever requirements the VC's list on their web sites regarding what kind of opportunities they're looking for. In short, people are lousy at stating their requirements and sabotage processes. For my woman example, the same woman will complain that no good men are available, while having an irrelevant filter in their dating profile: then, when they meet someone nice in real life, they're happy. It does not occur to them that the person they have met does not meet their stated requirements. Here is another case of someoen with an impossible laundry list of requirements: https://www.reddit.com/r/dating/comments/58uoo7/should_a_girl_go_on_a_date_even_if_the_guy_doesnt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dating/comments/58uoo7/should_a_gir... That post is titled "Should a girl go on a date, even if the guy doesn't meet the requirements for dating?" When that person actually meets someone in bible study (say), I doubt very much that the person will meet all of her requirements. Rather than "Should a girl go on a date, even if the guy doesn't meet the requirements for dating" we might be reading a Quora post about "Should HR still interview a candidate, even if the guy doesn't meet the HackerRank requirements?" Those requirements are irrelevant and just weed out qualified people. (And the answer is, yes, they still should.) [1] Example: Tom Cruise is officially 1.7m (which could be inflated, celebrities often pad by a little bit) which is 5'6.9". That is lower than many women's stated requirements, but those requirements are not actual requirements and I doubt he had any trouble dating women he literally didn't meet the requirements of at the time. The requirements aren't real, they're fake and invented, made-up. Not true. - EDIT: I absolutely stand by this comment, even though it is being edited to -1 and will likely end at -4. I completely stand behind every word. Lest you think I'm speaking with a bitter tone, I'm not. I'm average height or slightly above, no issues for me or disqualification due to it. I was using it as an example of a "number" that is a requirement, only it's not.
  - mrits 10y ago
    You are wrong on a few different levels.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      That's a bit short, it would probably be more productive if you said what was wrong.
  - Retra 10y ago
    I don't see what relation a person's dating requirements - completely arbitrary requirements for achieving their personal happiness without any requirement for regard to social norms, standards, or economic well-being - has any bearing one what practices are acceptable for hiring people. As such, one is subject to regulation and the other is not. And for the same reason, your analogy is entirely inappropriate for reasoning about how hiring parties should behave.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - jakobegger 10y ago
    I completely agree with you. Hiring is very much like dating. You try to evaluate people based on what they tell you now, but in reality there's no way to know what they'll be like 6 months from now...
twblalock 10y ago
Was it in lieu of a phone screen? A lot of companies do that now, and it's generally done for the same reasons as a phone screen. My company doesn't do this, but we do phone screens for every developer, no matter how much experience they have. There are just too many crappy "senior" developers out there.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  A phone screen/coding exercise is ok to filter bad ones out (but not to pick good ones from)
  - therein 10y ago
    Yeah, we use phone screens as a smoke test. It is disheartening seeing how many "Senior" Software Engineers with over a decade of experience fail to implement `bool isNumber(const char*)` that works for positive/negative integers and decimals. And these people somehow get past the filtering that our recruiters (large social network headquartered in the Bay Area) are supposed to perform. Honestly exactly for this reason, I've been feeling a lot less passionate about conducting interviews than I did when I started my current job.
    - NumberSix 10y ago
      Most senior software engineers with over a decade of experience never implement bool isNumber(const char *) for positive/negative integers and decimals. It is rare to need this and, if you do, either use a library or find it on Stack Overflow, in a book, or some other source. Implementing it is unnecessarily reinventing the wheel. One thing senior software engineers learn or should learn is not to reinvent the wheel. This is one of the problems with these types of questions, including the CS 101 type questions that often make up purported coding tests during hiring. In most cases, they do not test what practicing software engineers actually do.
      - hcho 10y ago
        The point of the question is to see if a candidate can glue a loop,an if statement and a bit of arithmetic together, on the spot. Failing to come up with an answer to such a question is generally symptomatic of lack of problem solving skills.
rampage101 10y ago
Wow that is shocking how much Hacker Rank is being used by companies... it seems experience should count much more than coding challenges.
pathy 10y ago
That sounds like an utter waste of time for everyone involved.
syngrog66 10y ago
thats nuts the hiring/recruiting culture often looks like a circus run by mad people
Waterluvian 10y ago
Whenever I see absurd stuff like that, I wonder if the companies are really worth working for. What's your opinion? Do they feel worthwhile despite the silliness of the hiring process?
- 67726e 10y ago
  Do they typically require that during the interview process or before? I recently had a company ask for me to opelte a challenge that would have taken about 10-15 hours, before so much as a phone screen.
- FLUX-YOU 10y ago
  You go after these companies because they grant prestige and you want to accomplish a certain level in your career by being employed by nationally or globally top company. If you aren't competitive in the least and just don't see the appeal, then it shouldn't be forced because you will be miserable and not succeed.
cpplinuxdude 10y ago
Then flat out refuse. I just landed an amazing gig by writing a relevant blog post with code included. Else they could rely on some of your github code.
- mindfulgeek 10y ago
  Can you post a link?
  - cpplinuxdude 10y ago
    http://shyal.com/blog/building-a-service-virtualisation-server http://shyal.com/blog/building-a-service-virtualisation-serv...
Delmania 10y ago
> The fact that I have worked for several industry leading companies, and had 20+ years of development experience was irrelevant without that score. This pretty much sums up what I hate about technical interviews that require a white board. You could have a solid resume, good references that can speak to your technical skill, and a discussion about your previous projects could demonstrate technical aptitude. However, because you can't solve a problem that took people weeks to figure out in an artificial, stressful, and contrived situation, companies won't look at you.
imaginenore 10y ago
What score did they want?
skizm 10y ago
I'm totally okay with that. I was fresh out of school and was working at a small consulting company that required us to go work with some larger companies and lots of "senior" devs - 10+ years of experience all of them - I'd say 50-60% of them could not code fizz-buzz. There was one meeting with two devs, both of whom had worked as programmers for over 10 years at this company and we were looking at code one of them wrote. The code looped over a string's chars to check for a single char's existence, and there were 26 IF statements: one for each alpha character. I had to explain to these two about the "contains" method. 10 years of programming experience each. And I had to show them the "contains" method... Since then "X years of programming" doesn't mean a thing to me.
- NotSammyHagar 10y ago
  How are people that can't do fizzbuzz able to function in a programming job? The thing you describe should lead them to struggle with virtually anything. I used to do front line interviews, and it was rare even then for people like that to make it to me. I've mostly worked for large, successful tech companies. I don't see someone like that getting a job, and definitely not being able to hang around for a long time.
  - skizm 10y ago
    I assumed they got by without doing much work. I was there mostly to fill budget. This company had a policy that projects had to meet budget. Their window was 2% under budget or 5% over budget or they would get in trouble (or maybe the budget was less next time or whatever). As far as I could tell they would just try and get lost in process as much as possible and not do any work. I just went with the flow, I wasn't trying to make waves. Also, I was only working with those two in particular for two months. Did almost nothing. Took a week to get approval to add a column in a DB. I could have written all the code that eventually went into production in 5 minutes without red tape, and that included testing.
    - JDiculous 10y ago
      What kind of company was this? It's amazing that these horribly managed companies haven't gone bankrupt yet.
guessmyname 10y ago
> [...] required me to complete several HackerRank challenges because I did not have a HackerRank score. I have no problem with this since most of the time it is just 2-3 coding problems. What irritates me is when HR people and even some developers ask me about my contributions to projects hosted on websites like BitBucket or GitHub. I usually tell them that all my public contributions are on personal projects with no relevancy [1] because the interesting contributions are protected by NDAs [2] and I cannot disclose any significant details about any of the projects that I have developed for obvious reasons. Some people consider your GitHub account as your "Resume 2.0". [1] https://github.com/cixtor https://github.com/cixtor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-disclosure_agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-disclosure_agreement
andy800 10y ago
The hiring manager needs you to do that for typical corporate CYA reasons. If you turn out to be a great hire, it's all good. But if not, then the hiring manager can say, "he was top 10% (or 5%, or 1%) at HackerRank, blame it on them", as opposed to, "I incorrectly evaluated his competency/fit/experience/motivation/etc." It's for the manager to have someone to point a finger at, if necessary. Simple as that. Some HR depts may have instituted the policy, same thing just larger scope.
rcarmo 10y ago
HackerRank must have genius salespeople. I can see the whole pitch unfolding on the back of my mind: how it saves valuable interview time, ensures skillset validation, follows best industry practices and only improves as new candidates flow through the system, because BIG DATA. Toss in a slide crammed with logos for top technical companies who've signed up for a free trial and never touched it again, and you've got a killer pitch for hiring managers at smaller shops who honestly can't hire tech folk to save their own skin.
- thr0waway1239 10y ago
  > Toss in a slide crammed with logos for top technical companies who've signed up for a free trial and never touched it again However, those top technical companies are the same ones who report manipulated video views, manipulated user base numbers, actively renege on promises after major acquisitions, and generally show the way to these smaller companies. The overarching philosophy underlying growth hacking and conversion optimization today is: Lie and let lie. The end user is the poor sucker, so perhaps it sort of cancels out? It is amazing how many smart people work for companies which are super manipulative under the pretext of working on "hard problems". One would wish the hard problems were becoming tractable because of human ingenuity. Unfortunately, it turns out most of the time it is just a consequence of finding more data points from newer sources of data, and most of the ingenuity is simply going towards trickery which allows even more data collection.
0xmohit 10y ago
Is this (https://mistry.io/ https://mistry.io/) you?
user5994461 10y ago
As a sr. dev manager, you should be the first to understand the point of HackerRank because you're expected to give interviews yourself. When 33% of applicants can't write a program to solve 3 numbers, HackerRank becomes a mandatory step.

by gamedna 10y ago

jacquesm 10y ago

Good reasons to look elsewhere. What a ridiculous thing.

logicallee 10y ago
No more ridiculous than women listing height requirements in their dating profiles, asking about height, and filtering out people with too low a number -- even though they don't actually care, it's not actually a requirement they have[1], it's just one they list and filter against at the online stage, despite not actually caring. By don't actually care, I mean that when they meet those men in different settings they don't care about height, when very short men decline to mention their height or match with women despite not meeting stated "requirements" it isn't an issue, and indeed some men lie outright about their heigth but women get over it and enter happy relationsihps with them once they actually meet. In many contexts stated requirements or the hoops applicants have to jump through don't match actual requirements. Fundraising would be another one. VC's don't invest in companies that actually meet whatever requirements the VC's list on their web sites regarding what kind of opportunities they're looking for. In short, people are lousy at stating their requirements and sabotage processes. For my woman example, the same woman will complain that no good men are available, while having an irrelevant filter in their dating profile: then, when they meet someone nice in real life, they're happy. It does not occur to them that the person they have met does not meet their stated requirements. Here is another case of someoen with an impossible laundry list of requirements: https://www.reddit.com/r/dating/comments/58uoo7/should_a_girl_go_on_a_date_even_if_the_guy_doesnt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dating/comments/58uoo7/should_a_gir... That post is titled "Should a girl go on a date, even if the guy doesn't meet the requirements for dating?" When that person actually meets someone in bible study (say), I doubt very much that the person will meet all of her requirements. Rather than "Should a girl go on a date, even if the guy doesn't meet the requirements for dating" we might be reading a Quora post about "Should HR still interview a candidate, even if the guy doesn't meet the HackerRank requirements?" Those requirements are irrelevant and just weed out qualified people. (And the answer is, yes, they still should.) [1] Example: Tom Cruise is officially 1.7m (which could be inflated, celebrities often pad by a little bit) which is 5'6.9". That is lower than many women's stated requirements, but those requirements are not actual requirements and I doubt he had any trouble dating women he literally didn't meet the requirements of at the time. The requirements aren't real, they're fake and invented, made-up. Not true. - EDIT: I absolutely stand by this comment, even though it is being edited to -1 and will likely end at -4. I completely stand behind every word. Lest you think I'm speaking with a bitter tone, I'm not. I'm average height or slightly above, no issues for me or disqualification due to it. I was using it as an example of a "number" that is a requirement, only it's not.
- mrits 10y ago
  You are wrong on a few different levels.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    That's a bit short, it would probably be more productive if you said what was wrong.
- Retra 10y ago
  I don't see what relation a person's dating requirements - completely arbitrary requirements for achieving their personal happiness without any requirement for regard to social norms, standards, or economic well-being - has any bearing one what practices are acceptable for hiring people. As such, one is subject to regulation and the other is not. And for the same reason, your analogy is entirely inappropriate for reasoning about how hiring parties should behave.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- jakobegger 10y ago
  I completely agree with you. Hiring is very much like dating. You try to evaluate people based on what they tell you now, but in reality there's no way to know what they'll be like 6 months from now...

twblalock 10y ago

Was it in lieu of a phone screen? A lot of companies do that now, and it's generally done for the same reasons as a phone screen. My company doesn't do this, but we do phone screens for every developer, no matter how much experience they have. There are just too many crappy "senior" developers out there.

raverbashing 10y ago
A phone screen/coding exercise is ok to filter bad ones out (but not to pick good ones from)
- therein 10y ago
  Yeah, we use phone screens as a smoke test. It is disheartening seeing how many "Senior" Software Engineers with over a decade of experience fail to implement `bool isNumber(const char*)` that works for positive/negative integers and decimals. And these people somehow get past the filtering that our recruiters (large social network headquartered in the Bay Area) are supposed to perform. Honestly exactly for this reason, I've been feeling a lot less passionate about conducting interviews than I did when I started my current job.
  - NumberSix 10y ago
    Most senior software engineers with over a decade of experience never implement bool isNumber(const char *) for positive/negative integers and decimals. It is rare to need this and, if you do, either use a library or find it on Stack Overflow, in a book, or some other source. Implementing it is unnecessarily reinventing the wheel. One thing senior software engineers learn or should learn is not to reinvent the wheel. This is one of the problems with these types of questions, including the CS 101 type questions that often make up purported coding tests during hiring. In most cases, they do not test what practicing software engineers actually do.
    - hcho 10y ago
      The point of the question is to see if a candidate can glue a loop,an if statement and a bit of arithmetic together, on the spot. Failing to come up with an answer to such a question is generally symptomatic of lack of problem solving skills.

rampage101 10y ago

Wow that is shocking how much Hacker Rank is being used by companies... it seems experience should count much more than coding challenges.

pathy 10y ago

That sounds like an utter waste of time for everyone involved.

syngrog66 10y ago

thats nuts the hiring/recruiting culture often looks like a circus run by mad people

Waterluvian 10y ago

Whenever I see absurd stuff like that, I wonder if the companies are really worth working for. What's your opinion? Do they feel worthwhile despite the silliness of the hiring process?

67726e 10y ago
Do they typically require that during the interview process or before? I recently had a company ask for me to opelte a challenge that would have taken about 10-15 hours, before so much as a phone screen.
FLUX-YOU 10y ago
You go after these companies because they grant prestige and you want to accomplish a certain level in your career by being employed by nationally or globally top company. If you aren't competitive in the least and just don't see the appeal, then it shouldn't be forced because you will be miserable and not succeed.

cpplinuxdude 10y ago

Then flat out refuse. I just landed an amazing gig by writing a relevant blog post with code included. Else they could rely on some of your github code.

mindfulgeek 10y ago
Can you post a link?
- cpplinuxdude 10y ago
  http://shyal.com/blog/building-a-service-virtualisation-server http://shyal.com/blog/building-a-service-virtualisation-serv...

Delmania 10y ago

> The fact that I have worked for several industry leading companies, and had 20+ years of development experience was irrelevant without that score. This pretty much sums up what I hate about technical interviews that require a white board. You could have a solid resume, good references that can speak to your technical skill, and a discussion about your previous projects could demonstrate technical aptitude. However, because you can't solve a problem that took people weeks to figure out in an artificial, stressful, and contrived situation, companies won't look at you.

imaginenore 10y ago

What score did they want?

skizm 10y ago

I'm totally okay with that. I was fresh out of school and was working at a small consulting company that required us to go work with some larger companies and lots of "senior" devs - 10+ years of experience all of them - I'd say 50-60% of them could not code fizz-buzz. There was one meeting with two devs, both of whom had worked as programmers for over 10 years at this company and we were looking at code one of them wrote. The code looped over a string's chars to check for a single char's existence, and there were 26 IF statements: one for each alpha character. I had to explain to these two about the "contains" method. 10 years of programming experience each. And I had to show them the "contains" method... Since then "X years of programming" doesn't mean a thing to me.

NotSammyHagar 10y ago
How are people that can't do fizzbuzz able to function in a programming job? The thing you describe should lead them to struggle with virtually anything. I used to do front line interviews, and it was rare even then for people like that to make it to me. I've mostly worked for large, successful tech companies. I don't see someone like that getting a job, and definitely not being able to hang around for a long time.
- skizm 10y ago
  I assumed they got by without doing much work. I was there mostly to fill budget. This company had a policy that projects had to meet budget. Their window was 2% under budget or 5% over budget or they would get in trouble (or maybe the budget was less next time or whatever). As far as I could tell they would just try and get lost in process as much as possible and not do any work. I just went with the flow, I wasn't trying to make waves. Also, I was only working with those two in particular for two months. Did almost nothing. Took a week to get approval to add a column in a DB. I could have written all the code that eventually went into production in 5 minutes without red tape, and that included testing.
  - JDiculous 10y ago
    What kind of company was this? It's amazing that these horribly managed companies haven't gone bankrupt yet.

guessmyname 10y ago

> [...] required me to complete several HackerRank challenges because I did not have a HackerRank score. I have no problem with this since most of the time it is just 2-3 coding problems. What irritates me is when HR people and even some developers ask me about my contributions to projects hosted on websites like BitBucket or GitHub. I usually tell them that all my public contributions are on personal projects with no relevancy [1] because the interesting contributions are protected by NDAs [2] and I cannot disclose any significant details about any of the projects that I have developed for obvious reasons. Some people consider your GitHub account as your "Resume 2.0". [1] https://github.com/cixtor https://github.com/cixtor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-disclosure_agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-disclosure_agreement

andy800 10y ago

The hiring manager needs you to do that for typical corporate CYA reasons. If you turn out to be a great hire, it's all good. But if not, then the hiring manager can say, "he was top 10% (or 5%, or 1%) at HackerRank, blame it on them", as opposed to, "I incorrectly evaluated his competency/fit/experience/motivation/etc." It's for the manager to have someone to point a finger at, if necessary. Simple as that. Some HR depts may have instituted the policy, same thing just larger scope.

rcarmo 10y ago

HackerRank must have genius salespeople. I can see the whole pitch unfolding on the back of my mind: how it saves valuable interview time, ensures skillset validation, follows best industry practices and only improves as new candidates flow through the system, because BIG DATA. Toss in a slide crammed with logos for top technical companies who've signed up for a free trial and never touched it again, and you've got a killer pitch for hiring managers at smaller shops who honestly can't hire tech folk to save their own skin.

thr0waway1239 10y ago
> Toss in a slide crammed with logos for top technical companies who've signed up for a free trial and never touched it again However, those top technical companies are the same ones who report manipulated video views, manipulated user base numbers, actively renege on promises after major acquisitions, and generally show the way to these smaller companies. The overarching philosophy underlying growth hacking and conversion optimization today is: Lie and let lie. The end user is the poor sucker, so perhaps it sort of cancels out? It is amazing how many smart people work for companies which are super manipulative under the pretext of working on "hard problems". One would wish the hard problems were becoming tractable because of human ingenuity. Unfortunately, it turns out most of the time it is just a consequence of finding more data points from newer sources of data, and most of the ingenuity is simply going towards trickery which allows even more data collection.

0xmohit 10y ago

Is this (https://mistry.io/ https://mistry.io/) you?

user5994461 10y ago

As a sr. dev manager, you should be the first to understand the point of HackerRank because you're expected to give interviews yourself. When 33% of applicants can't write a program to solve 3 numbers, HackerRank becomes a mandatory step.