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Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

magmasystems 9y ago
Hello all, I am a bit late to this discussion, as Sarah Butcher (the author of the article) just informed me about this thread. This is Marc Adler, the person that was talked about in this article. It's great to see the discussion around Hackerank-type coding tests and the hiring process. There are probably some clarifications that need to accompany the article. First, when I was interviewed for the article, there was no mention of the word "ageism". As something in this thread surmised, it was probably inserted into the title for a bit of "shock value". The article was supposed to be about the correlation of Hackrank tests and the hiring of experienced people who have been coding successfully for a number of years on "real-world" problems. Many of you in this thread fall into that category. Second, I have about 30 years of experience in the industry. I started out in the mid-1980s as a Windows developer at Goldman Sachs, writing equities trading systems, went on to form my own software company (which I had for ten years and concentrated on programming tools), and then continued as a developer/architect for more Wall Street companies. Among some of my roles were Chief Architect of Citigroup's equities division, and Chief Architect of MetLife (a global insurance company). I am currently CA at another big company that is not on Wall Street. All of this time, I have been coding. Recently, I developed an Uber clone in Scala/Akka/Play. I am not completely against Hackerank-type tests for hiring junior devs or devs right out of college. But what I am against is the use of these coding tests to hire people who have 10, 20, or even 30 years of experience. When was the last time that you used dynamic programming algorithms in your job? When was the last time that you seriously thought about Big O? In my experience, a lot of apps use linked lists and hash tables. If you want a nice sorting algorithm, there is one that comes with one of Microsoft's C# assemblies. What is more critical is knowing how to find information and how to apply it in your day to day job. And that's the kind of developer I want to hire ... one who is resourceful and productive. -marc
Majestic121 9y ago
"For experienced programmers like Adler, the new tests aren’t insurmountable – all that’s required is an injection of time to learn the new Hackerrank tricks." Well, yeah. I do that too and I've been out of university for 5 years. You have to prepare for interviews, and to resharpen your skills when you're changing jobs, it's the same whether you're 28 or 48. I understand finding time is harder when you have a family and all, but it should not take much more than a few hours to get back to a decent skill level, and then you get to the interview stage where you can really stand out with your actual real world experience.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Isn't saying that a few hours is enough to get past it the nearly same thing as saying that it is just garbage?
  - yorwba 9y ago
    If it takes a few hours for someone with actual programming experience vs. a year for someone without any experience whatsoever, it's not exactly garbage. Just like FizzBuzz isn't garbage. It doesn't tell you much, but it filters out the total frauds.
  - Majestic121 9y ago
    I used to think that, but you'd honestly be surprised how many people it filters out successfully. It is just an advanced version of FizzBuzz : even if it's not enough to determine whether someone is good or not, it definitely burns people that are not able to code at all. It also provide talking points for the interview afterward about coding style and all. Of course, it's not sufficient, but it's just a stage among others if the interview is done correctly, and it's a useful one
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      So it's a step up over randomly pulling people right off the street?
- andrewvc 9y ago
  If you're a successful working programmer you shouldn't need to study to pass your next interview only to forget it all again after a couple more years on the job. That is why these tests are bogus. If they measured useful skills they wouldn't require any study. I've been working with a lot of graph algorithms lately. I've already forgotten several I learned a couple months ago. That is OK. The more interesting question for interviewees is where they would find the answer rather than whether they can implement algorithm X from memory. If a candidate says "I'd use A* and maybe compare it to similar algorithms to solve the problem" that's enough. There's no reason they need that permanently committed to memory. Almost no one writes A* twice a year.
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carlmr 9y ago
<<Most damningly, he says the questions posed by HackerRank and similar tests aren’t necessarily relevant to the work actually done in finance technology roles: “They’re the sort of problems you’re posed at university. – There’s a focus on data structures and algorithms, but this is less relevant when your success as a developer is in building complex enterprise systems.”>> Exactly on point. Also one gripe I have with hackerrank (I did some of the challenges to brush up on some language knowledge), is that a lot of the questions are poorly designed and from obvious amateurs. I still think that neither whiteboarding nor hackerrank selects for good developers. In the end you get people that studied hard to solve a certain class of problem that you'll never need in the real world. It's wasting candidates time, and it still shows nothing, except that your candidates know something unrelated to the job.
- jordanpg 9y ago
  Agree, but what is the alternative from the standpoint of the interviewer? These types of challenges are simple to state, self-contained, easy to timebox. For the interviewer for a say intermediate-level enterprise software backend position who needs to quickly sift through 50 applicants, what is the better option by way of code challenges?
  - pizzaman09 9y ago
    Credentialing. Seriously. Have a Bar Association for developers. When anyone can do a few weeks of Googling and claim to be a software developer, you're going to get mostly crap candidates. Offload that process to a formal body, like lawyers, doctors, and engineers do. You can hire unlicensed developers, but you do so at your own risk. Then once you're talking to someone licensed in an interview, you can focus on just getting to know them and talking about their past work. Edit: wow, I've clearly touched a nerve. Good thing your doctor is licensed to prescribe something for it instead of a rockstar named Chad who read about MongoDB once but can basically build Uber by this point.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      doctors Because the healthcare job market is such a success! Remember those accusations against tech companies for colluding to depress wages? Now imagine the same, but with State immunity! The anti-trust class-action lawsuit Jung v. AAMC alleged collusion to prevent American trainee doctors from negotiating for better working conditions. The working conditions of medical residents often involved 80- to 100-hour workweeks. The suit had some early success, but failed when the U.S. Congress enacted a statute exempting matching programs from federal anti-trust laws.
jordanpg 9y ago
Are there any HackerRank-like apps out there that go beyond simple code challenges?
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > Are there any HackerRank-like apps out there that go beyond simple code challenges? What kinds of challenges to you have in mind?
- Majestic121 9y ago
  You can contribute to open source projects for another kind of challenge
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Contributing meaningfully to a big OSS project is a way bigger time investment. Not only you have to understand a lot about the project, you have to actually work on open issues in it. And contributions to tiny projects tend to get passed over anyway. Moreover, certain hiring agreements would consider it breach of contract or confidence. Making your own Github or such portfolio faces the same problems.
gberger 9y ago
These are all good points, but how does the author reach the conclusion that the coding tests are ageist? Ageism was only mentioned in the headline.
- olympus 9y ago
  When he says the tests favor people that just graduated from school. Those that have been in the workforce for a while (older people) are focused on "real world" problems and not the academic problems seen on HackerRank. Any system that favors young people over old people is ageist. I'm not saying I agree with the argument (old people have been complaining about young people for a very long time), but the logic is easy to follow.
  - Spoom 9y ago
    Bigger software companies also typically require "experienced" candidates (read: not new grads) to pass a systems design interview, which is very subjective and typically fairly difficult. This essentially makes the bar for new grads lower. The argument is that this is because they expect experienced developers to be able to enter at a higher level, but the cynical side of me thinks that it's because they really prefer new grads, and this tips the scales in their favor. Remember, Zuckerberg said, "young people are just smarter". I fear that attitude is pervasive, but hidden under the surface; they're not going to just come out and say it, as that would be illegal.
    - JohnTHaller 9y ago
      You can be a new grad and have experience. I made a point to do work in college that was appropriate for my work field when I graduated. Appropriate summer and part time jobs helped quite a bit as well. Having a bunch of appropriate jobs and projects under your belt (especially a few apps in app stores and code up on github) goes a very long way.
      - Spoom 9y ago
        Sure, I wasn't arguing that they're mutually exclusive. I was referring to the way that e.g. Google would refer to "experienced" or "industry" candidates.
yodsanklai 9y ago
What I like about these tests, is that everyone can have a shot. You can't forge a university degree you don't have, or a 5-years work experience, but you can take a couple of months and work hard to practice your algorithmic skills. As far as ageism is concerned, I prefer to have the opportunity to show my skills through technical tests rather than seeing my application ignored.
- pc86 9y ago
  > you can take a couple of months and work hard to practice your algorithmic skills Unless you have kids, or a demanding job, or personal obligations, or you don't want to make learning sorting algorithms for a job you'll never need sorting algorithms a full time job on top of your current full time job. It's just pre-selecting for a group you're in as opposed to a group you're not (the royal you :)).
fortythirteen 9y ago
In my experience, any whiteboard test of generic algorithms is more of a window into how the lead developer thinks about the people he manages, than an actual test of programming ability. It almost always denotes a fixed, "I know best" mindset. It's usually a interview killer for me. And it's just a poor way to assess skill. Learn about modulus once and you'll pass every other wizbang somebody else thinks they're the first to give you. You'll always learn more about a candidate's ability by just having a conversation about programming with them. Anyone worth their salt will not only be able to colloquially talk about their skillset, they'll enjoy it.
yorwba 9y ago
> When you’ve got a history of having built a high frequency trading system for Citadel, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, you’ll know a lot about latency and order flow – but you might not know how to find a maximal duplicated substring within a palindrome on a HackerRank-type test. I have only a vague idea of the requirements in financial technology, but aren't streams of financial data central to it? And repeating substrings correspond to pattern repetitions, so they might be important, especially the longest ones. I think if you can find the longest repeating pattern in a stream of data, you should also be able to find maximal duplicated substrings in palindromes. Maybe it's more about the way the problem is phrased rather than about the difficulty of coming up with a solution?
erikbern 9y ago
I interview 20-30 people per week and send most of them Hackerrank tests. I'm a big proponent of vetting that people can write code, but 99% of the questions on HR are waaaay too "algorithmic". Had to go through almost all of them to find a few tests that are not about graph algos or dynamic programming – finally found a question that was based on regular expressions and a few other ones that I think are a bit more representative of real world challenges. I really wish Hackerrank could add more problems or let employers add their own question. Are there any good alternatives to HR?
- joncrocks 9y ago
  We (the company I work for) use Codility for some of our roles. I think you can add your own tasks/questions.
  - Spoom 9y ago
    Big fan of Codility. They do have a lot of algorithmic questions as well, but they also have easy ones (which we use), and we tested them on our own staff prior to deploying (all then-current staff got perfect or nearly perfect). I would only use medium or above if the question tested something that the job absolutely needed in a candidate. They also allow candidates to add their own test cases easily, which, for the ones that do, tends to be a very strong signal in their favor (they also tend to do better).
    - dver 9y ago
      To get a true stress read, I think you would have had to tell your staff that they needed to pass this test to come back to work in the morning.
    - AstralStorm 9y ago
      Big NOT fan of algorithmic question that can be summed up in one sentence taking a full page of text description. In most of these coding test the algorithm is easy, but figuring out the catch in the description is harder than actual implementation (unless you're insanely limited and have to reimplement basics from scratch)
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lozzo 9y ago
I am in my 40s and have a relatively safe job and not looking for a change. A friend of mine told me to apply for a certain company and I did. They asked me to free an hour one evening and they put me through hackerrank. And I failed. I failed big time. My take away: Surely we all need to revise if we seriously want to apply for a job yet it did feel like the screening was asking me to see how good I am at resolving small problems quickly. Yet, my 25 years of experience told me that we don't need to solve problems quickly we need to solve them rightly. and that takes "mulling over"
- codyb 9y ago
  I'm only 27 and I suck at these tests. This year alone I've run the gamut working frontend, backend (Spring), services (clojure), elasticsearch, and a bit of devops. I tried one last night after a nine hour work day in JavaScript and it kicked my butt. First I was thinking solution X but eventually realized Y was simpler, so then I've wasted a bunch of time because the pressures on coding quickly instead of "mulling" over as you mentioned. It was similar with a Ruby one which I prepared for by running through the Ruby Koans. Lots of time spent looking up syntax, and the vast majority of the time I'm not starting entire repos from scratch, so a lot of simple but not oft repeated things can trick you up to. And, to be quite frank, when I'm at home, and I want to program, I want to work on my over engineered, terribly underdeveloped personal website where I get to do things I don't normally do, putz around with erlang and postgres, do the devops and all that other stuff. Ahh the afflictions of the affluent!
notyourday 9y ago
TL; DR summary: programmers... err.. software engineers discover that fundamentally most of the companies consider them to be be totally interchangeable, just like janitors are fundamentally interchangeable or models walking down the catwalk during the NY Fashion Week are interchangeable. Since they did not save money for the twenty years that they have been paid quite well, they dont like the prospect.
- expertentipp 9y ago
  Outside of certain bubbles (i.e. in most of the world) they have never been paid exceptionally - well, at most.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    Outside that bubble they were paid just as well compared to the going salaries of other people living outside that bubble.
thedonkeycometh 9y ago
HackerRank and all those online coding challenges cater to a specific type of skill. Which is wholly learned by doing lots of online coding challenges. As such, they're not really a good barometer of skill in anything but doing online coding challenges. I don't think anything I've done on a coding challenge has ever manifest into something useful at work. So to have it as a task in an interview process strikes me as a bit lazy. However, for general brain exercise, they're good.
xtracto 9y ago
We faced exactly this problem at the current company I work for. When the company was just starting, we had the great idea to use interview questions "like the ones they make in SV", thus used algorithmics-heavy problems when interviewing candidates. Fast forward 4 years, and I realized that the dev team we have is basically a group of just-graduated Engineers or people with at most 1 year of experience. My "eye opener" moment was when I realized that by asking for difficult algorithms (tree and graph traversal, subsequences, etc) the following was happening: The people that know the most about how to solve these types of problems are students, or people that had graduated recently. Not only that, but this groups is a very reduced sub-group from the recent graduates group, because these people dedicate their Uni free time to solve these problems and get in ACM, IOI competitions. Thus, they don't play with different technologies, they oftentimes don't feel confortable with shell, and finally, the type of systems they develop are optimized to be "used and thrown away".
- jarsin 9y ago
  In my network many people that I would classify as bad to some of the worst developers I have ever worked with ended up at Google. They are masters of this type of programming problem solving but could not build a straight forward, maintainable system to save their lives.
- pc86 9y ago
  How much algorithm work does your dev team deal with on a day-to-day basis?
bsenftner 9y ago
I'm in my early 50's. I've been getting paid well writing code since 15, and have been employed at (arguably) the top of the industry in my fields. Nobody at my level takes tests; none of us would pass them as they deal with utter bullshit. Work for a few decades, at the highest levels of the intersection of business and technology, and you'll find complex and/or sophisticated algorithms often get removed due to support difficulties. Sophistication occurs within the core of the product, which needs to embody cutting edge features and performance, so unless you are the product's core architect, sophisticated algorithms are taboo. The vast majority of software is user interface, import/export logic and other aspects that are not the core of a product. Those non-core features and facilities need to be nimble and simple because they are transitory, and operated by juniors. Frankly, the world where HackerStank is valid is a type of software company that is best avoided, as they treat you 100% like a cog, and not a human.
- expertentipp 9y ago
  If a person in the workplace is asked to implement quick search or some sophisticated algorithms on linked lists or binary trees there are only two possibilities: this is a low level and high importance project for NASA/Intel/Lockheed Martin, or one is being teased.
davesque 9y ago
This isn't surprising. I remember getting the strong impression when poking around on Hackerrank (between the UX, question quality, etc.) that it was designed by people who just graduated from school.
Xoros 9y ago
As I understand that having a first selection maybe a good idea to sort out if a person can program or not, it amazed me that that sort recruiters seems to not read the applicant resume. I do relate with the article. For experienced developers, it's probably not the best way to recruit. Ask something related to the job, not the degree.
jondubois 9y ago
HackerRank tests are very effective for companies in that they capture candidates who: - Have great problem solving ability. - Low emotional intelligence or self-esteem (don't realize that the kinds of companies that make you do these tests are exploitative and will treat you like livestock). - Don't have specific ambitions and don't place much value on their own time (prepared to spend tons of time studying/practicing for the tests).
- jarsin 9y ago
  The question is though how the hell do we find companies that don't do these test? It seems everyone and their mom are doing it now days, even immigration officials :)
  - jondubois 9y ago
    Most startups and some big companies like banks don't use these kinds of tests - Their process is mostly based around peer-review from other engineers in the company.
  - charlieegan3 9y ago
    There's this list: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
lt 9y ago
Hackerrank is a really good tool to separate the incapable from the capable, but not a very good one to separate the good from the best (or even the average from the good). It's impressive the number of supposedly senior candidates that can't follow simple instructions from the platform or write a couple of lines of code in their language of choice to sort the words in a string or something similar. I fully agree that multiple complex algorithm or puzzle questions are bad - require a longer time investiment that most candidates should be willing to devote to such process, are distanced to the reality of most programming tasks and favor those who enjoy and practice programming puzzles.

Hello all, I am a bit late to this discussion, as Sarah Butcher (the author of the article) just informed me about this thread. This is Marc Adler, the person that was talked about in this article. It's great to see the discussion around Hackerank-type coding tests and the hiring process. There are probably some clarifications that need to accompany the article. First, when I was interviewed for the article, there was no mention of the word "ageism". As something in this thread surmised, it was probably inserted into the title for a bit of "shock value". The article was supposed to be about the correlation of Hackrank tests and the hiring of experienced people who have been coding successfully for a number of years on "real-world" problems. Many of you in this thread fall into that category. Second, I have about 30 years of experience in the industry. I started out in the mid-1980s as a Windows developer at Goldman Sachs, writing equities trading systems, went on to form my own software company (which I had for ten years and concentrated on programming tools), and then continued as a developer/architect for more Wall Street companies. Among some of my roles were Chief Architect of Citigroup's equities division, and Chief Architect of MetLife (a global insurance company). I am currently CA at another big company that is not on Wall Street. All of this time, I have been coding. Recently, I developed an Uber clone in Scala/Akka/Play. I am not completely against Hackerank-type tests for hiring junior devs or devs right out of college. But what I am against is the use of these coding tests to hire people who have 10, 20, or even 30 years of experience. When was the last time that you used dynamic programming algorithms in your job? When was the last time that you seriously thought about Big O? In my experience, a lot of apps use linked lists and hash tables. If you want a nice sorting algorithm, there is one that comes with one of Microsoft's C# assemblies. What is more critical is knowing how to find information and how to apply it in your day to day job. And that's the kind of developer I want to hire ... one who is resourceful and productive. -marc

Majestic121 9y ago

"For experienced programmers like Adler, the new tests aren’t insurmountable – all that’s required is an injection of time to learn the new Hackerrank tricks." Well, yeah. I do that too and I've been out of university for 5 years. You have to prepare for interviews, and to resharpen your skills when you're changing jobs, it's the same whether you're 28 or 48. I understand finding time is harder when you have a family and all, but it should not take much more than a few hours to get back to a decent skill level, and then you get to the interview stage where you can really stand out with your actual real world experience.

maxerickson 9y ago
Isn't saying that a few hours is enough to get past it the nearly same thing as saying that it is just garbage?
- yorwba 9y ago
  If it takes a few hours for someone with actual programming experience vs. a year for someone without any experience whatsoever, it's not exactly garbage. Just like FizzBuzz isn't garbage. It doesn't tell you much, but it filters out the total frauds.
- Majestic121 9y ago
  I used to think that, but you'd honestly be surprised how many people it filters out successfully. It is just an advanced version of FizzBuzz : even if it's not enough to determine whether someone is good or not, it definitely burns people that are not able to code at all. It also provide talking points for the interview afterward about coding style and all. Of course, it's not sufficient, but it's just a stage among others if the interview is done correctly, and it's a useful one
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    So it's a step up over randomly pulling people right off the street?
andrewvc 9y ago
If you're a successful working programmer you shouldn't need to study to pass your next interview only to forget it all again after a couple more years on the job. That is why these tests are bogus. If they measured useful skills they wouldn't require any study. I've been working with a lot of graph algorithms lately. I've already forgotten several I learned a couple months ago. That is OK. The more interesting question for interviewees is where they would find the answer rather than whether they can implement algorithm X from memory. If a candidate says "I'd use A* and maybe compare it to similar algorithms to solve the problem" that's enough. There's no reason they need that permanently committed to memory. Almost no one writes A* twice a year.

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carlmr 9y ago

<<Most damningly, he says the questions posed by HackerRank and similar tests aren’t necessarily relevant to the work actually done in finance technology roles: “They’re the sort of problems you’re posed at university. – There’s a focus on data structures and algorithms, but this is less relevant when your success as a developer is in building complex enterprise systems.”>> Exactly on point. Also one gripe I have with hackerrank (I did some of the challenges to brush up on some language knowledge), is that a lot of the questions are poorly designed and from obvious amateurs. I still think that neither whiteboarding nor hackerrank selects for good developers. In the end you get people that studied hard to solve a certain class of problem that you'll never need in the real world. It's wasting candidates time, and it still shows nothing, except that your candidates know something unrelated to the job.

jordanpg 9y ago
Agree, but what is the alternative from the standpoint of the interviewer? These types of challenges are simple to state, self-contained, easy to timebox. For the interviewer for a say intermediate-level enterprise software backend position who needs to quickly sift through 50 applicants, what is the better option by way of code challenges?
- pizzaman09 9y ago
  Credentialing. Seriously. Have a Bar Association for developers. When anyone can do a few weeks of Googling and claim to be a software developer, you're going to get mostly crap candidates. Offload that process to a formal body, like lawyers, doctors, and engineers do. You can hire unlicensed developers, but you do so at your own risk. Then once you're talking to someone licensed in an interview, you can focus on just getting to know them and talking about their past work. Edit: wow, I've clearly touched a nerve. Good thing your doctor is licensed to prescribe something for it instead of a rockstar named Chad who read about MongoDB once but can basically build Uber by this point.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    doctors Because the healthcare job market is such a success! Remember those accusations against tech companies for colluding to depress wages? Now imagine the same, but with State immunity! The anti-trust class-action lawsuit Jung v. AAMC alleged collusion to prevent American trainee doctors from negotiating for better working conditions. The working conditions of medical residents often involved 80- to 100-hour workweeks. The suit had some early success, but failed when the U.S. Congress enacted a statute exempting matching programs from federal anti-trust laws.

jordanpg 9y ago

Are there any HackerRank-like apps out there that go beyond simple code challenges?

wolfgke 9y ago
> Are there any HackerRank-like apps out there that go beyond simple code challenges? What kinds of challenges to you have in mind?
Majestic121 9y ago
You can contribute to open source projects for another kind of challenge
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Contributing meaningfully to a big OSS project is a way bigger time investment. Not only you have to understand a lot about the project, you have to actually work on open issues in it. And contributions to tiny projects tend to get passed over anyway. Moreover, certain hiring agreements would consider it breach of contract or confidence. Making your own Github or such portfolio faces the same problems.

gberger 9y ago

These are all good points, but how does the author reach the conclusion that the coding tests are ageist? Ageism was only mentioned in the headline.

olympus 9y ago
When he says the tests favor people that just graduated from school. Those that have been in the workforce for a while (older people) are focused on "real world" problems and not the academic problems seen on HackerRank. Any system that favors young people over old people is ageist. I'm not saying I agree with the argument (old people have been complaining about young people for a very long time), but the logic is easy to follow.
- Spoom 9y ago
  Bigger software companies also typically require "experienced" candidates (read: not new grads) to pass a systems design interview, which is very subjective and typically fairly difficult. This essentially makes the bar for new grads lower. The argument is that this is because they expect experienced developers to be able to enter at a higher level, but the cynical side of me thinks that it's because they really prefer new grads, and this tips the scales in their favor. Remember, Zuckerberg said, "young people are just smarter". I fear that attitude is pervasive, but hidden under the surface; they're not going to just come out and say it, as that would be illegal.
  - JohnTHaller 9y ago
    You can be a new grad and have experience. I made a point to do work in college that was appropriate for my work field when I graduated. Appropriate summer and part time jobs helped quite a bit as well. Having a bunch of appropriate jobs and projects under your belt (especially a few apps in app stores and code up on github) goes a very long way.
    - Spoom 9y ago
      Sure, I wasn't arguing that they're mutually exclusive. I was referring to the way that e.g. Google would refer to "experienced" or "industry" candidates.

yodsanklai 9y ago

What I like about these tests, is that everyone can have a shot. You can't forge a university degree you don't have, or a 5-years work experience, but you can take a couple of months and work hard to practice your algorithmic skills. As far as ageism is concerned, I prefer to have the opportunity to show my skills through technical tests rather than seeing my application ignored.

pc86 9y ago
> you can take a couple of months and work hard to practice your algorithmic skills Unless you have kids, or a demanding job, or personal obligations, or you don't want to make learning sorting algorithms for a job you'll never need sorting algorithms a full time job on top of your current full time job. It's just pre-selecting for a group you're in as opposed to a group you're not (the royal you :)).

fortythirteen 9y ago

In my experience, any whiteboard test of generic algorithms is more of a window into how the lead developer thinks about the people he manages, than an actual test of programming ability. It almost always denotes a fixed, "I know best" mindset. It's usually a interview killer for me. And it's just a poor way to assess skill. Learn about modulus once and you'll pass every other wizbang somebody else thinks they're the first to give you. You'll always learn more about a candidate's ability by just having a conversation about programming with them. Anyone worth their salt will not only be able to colloquially talk about their skillset, they'll enjoy it.

yorwba 9y ago

> When you’ve got a history of having built a high frequency trading system for Citadel, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, you’ll know a lot about latency and order flow – but you might not know how to find a maximal duplicated substring within a palindrome on a HackerRank-type test. I have only a vague idea of the requirements in financial technology, but aren't streams of financial data central to it? And repeating substrings correspond to pattern repetitions, so they might be important, especially the longest ones. I think if you can find the longest repeating pattern in a stream of data, you should also be able to find maximal duplicated substrings in palindromes. Maybe it's more about the way the problem is phrased rather than about the difficulty of coming up with a solution?

erikbern 9y ago

I interview 20-30 people per week and send most of them Hackerrank tests. I'm a big proponent of vetting that people can write code, but 99% of the questions on HR are waaaay too "algorithmic". Had to go through almost all of them to find a few tests that are not about graph algos or dynamic programming – finally found a question that was based on regular expressions and a few other ones that I think are a bit more representative of real world challenges. I really wish Hackerrank could add more problems or let employers add their own question. Are there any good alternatives to HR?

joncrocks 9y ago
We (the company I work for) use Codility for some of our roles. I think you can add your own tasks/questions.
- Spoom 9y ago
  Big fan of Codility. They do have a lot of algorithmic questions as well, but they also have easy ones (which we use), and we tested them on our own staff prior to deploying (all then-current staff got perfect or nearly perfect). I would only use medium or above if the question tested something that the job absolutely needed in a candidate. They also allow candidates to add their own test cases easily, which, for the ones that do, tends to be a very strong signal in their favor (they also tend to do better).
  - dver 9y ago
    To get a true stress read, I think you would have had to tell your staff that they needed to pass this test to come back to work in the morning.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Big NOT fan of algorithmic question that can be summed up in one sentence taking a full page of text description. In most of these coding test the algorithm is easy, but figuring out the catch in the description is harder than actual implementation (unless you're insanely limited and have to reimplement basics from scratch)

deleted 9y ago

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lozzo 9y ago

I am in my 40s and have a relatively safe job and not looking for a change. A friend of mine told me to apply for a certain company and I did. They asked me to free an hour one evening and they put me through hackerrank. And I failed. I failed big time. My take away: Surely we all need to revise if we seriously want to apply for a job yet it did feel like the screening was asking me to see how good I am at resolving small problems quickly. Yet, my 25 years of experience told me that we don't need to solve problems quickly we need to solve them rightly. and that takes "mulling over"

codyb 9y ago
I'm only 27 and I suck at these tests. This year alone I've run the gamut working frontend, backend (Spring), services (clojure), elasticsearch, and a bit of devops. I tried one last night after a nine hour work day in JavaScript and it kicked my butt. First I was thinking solution X but eventually realized Y was simpler, so then I've wasted a bunch of time because the pressures on coding quickly instead of "mulling" over as you mentioned. It was similar with a Ruby one which I prepared for by running through the Ruby Koans. Lots of time spent looking up syntax, and the vast majority of the time I'm not starting entire repos from scratch, so a lot of simple but not oft repeated things can trick you up to. And, to be quite frank, when I'm at home, and I want to program, I want to work on my over engineered, terribly underdeveloped personal website where I get to do things I don't normally do, putz around with erlang and postgres, do the devops and all that other stuff. Ahh the afflictions of the affluent!

notyourday 9y ago

TL; DR summary: programmers... err.. software engineers discover that fundamentally most of the companies consider them to be be totally interchangeable, just like janitors are fundamentally interchangeable or models walking down the catwalk during the NY Fashion Week are interchangeable. Since they did not save money for the twenty years that they have been paid quite well, they dont like the prospect.

expertentipp 9y ago
Outside of certain bubbles (i.e. in most of the world) they have never been paid exceptionally - well, at most.
- notyourday 9y ago
  Outside that bubble they were paid just as well compared to the going salaries of other people living outside that bubble.

thedonkeycometh 9y ago

HackerRank and all those online coding challenges cater to a specific type of skill. Which is wholly learned by doing lots of online coding challenges. As such, they're not really a good barometer of skill in anything but doing online coding challenges. I don't think anything I've done on a coding challenge has ever manifest into something useful at work. So to have it as a task in an interview process strikes me as a bit lazy. However, for general brain exercise, they're good.

xtracto 9y ago

We faced exactly this problem at the current company I work for. When the company was just starting, we had the great idea to use interview questions "like the ones they make in SV", thus used algorithmics-heavy problems when interviewing candidates. Fast forward 4 years, and I realized that the dev team we have is basically a group of just-graduated Engineers or people with at most 1 year of experience. My "eye opener" moment was when I realized that by asking for difficult algorithms (tree and graph traversal, subsequences, etc) the following was happening: The people that know the most about how to solve these types of problems are students, or people that had graduated recently. Not only that, but this groups is a very reduced sub-group from the recent graduates group, because these people dedicate their Uni free time to solve these problems and get in ACM, IOI competitions. Thus, they don't play with different technologies, they oftentimes don't feel confortable with shell, and finally, the type of systems they develop are optimized to be "used and thrown away".

jarsin 9y ago
In my network many people that I would classify as bad to some of the worst developers I have ever worked with ended up at Google. They are masters of this type of programming problem solving but could not build a straight forward, maintainable system to save their lives.
pc86 9y ago
How much algorithm work does your dev team deal with on a day-to-day basis?

bsenftner 9y ago

I'm in my early 50's. I've been getting paid well writing code since 15, and have been employed at (arguably) the top of the industry in my fields. Nobody at my level takes tests; none of us would pass them as they deal with utter bullshit. Work for a few decades, at the highest levels of the intersection of business and technology, and you'll find complex and/or sophisticated algorithms often get removed due to support difficulties. Sophistication occurs within the core of the product, which needs to embody cutting edge features and performance, so unless you are the product's core architect, sophisticated algorithms are taboo. The vast majority of software is user interface, import/export logic and other aspects that are not the core of a product. Those non-core features and facilities need to be nimble and simple because they are transitory, and operated by juniors. Frankly, the world where HackerStank is valid is a type of software company that is best avoided, as they treat you 100% like a cog, and not a human.

expertentipp 9y ago
If a person in the workplace is asked to implement quick search or some sophisticated algorithms on linked lists or binary trees there are only two possibilities: this is a low level and high importance project for NASA/Intel/Lockheed Martin, or one is being teased.

davesque 9y ago

This isn't surprising. I remember getting the strong impression when poking around on Hackerrank (between the UX, question quality, etc.) that it was designed by people who just graduated from school.

Xoros 9y ago

As I understand that having a first selection maybe a good idea to sort out if a person can program or not, it amazed me that that sort recruiters seems to not read the applicant resume. I do relate with the article. For experienced developers, it's probably not the best way to recruit. Ask something related to the job, not the degree.

jondubois 9y ago

HackerRank tests are very effective for companies in that they capture candidates who: - Have great problem solving ability. - Low emotional intelligence or self-esteem (don't realize that the kinds of companies that make you do these tests are exploitative and will treat you like livestock). - Don't have specific ambitions and don't place much value on their own time (prepared to spend tons of time studying/practicing for the tests).

jarsin 9y ago
The question is though how the hell do we find companies that don't do these test? It seems everyone and their mom are doing it now days, even immigration officials :)
- jondubois 9y ago
  Most startups and some big companies like banks don't use these kinds of tests - Their process is mostly based around peer-review from other engineers in the company.
- charlieegan3 9y ago
  There's this list: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

lt 9y ago

Hackerrank is a really good tool to separate the incapable from the capable, but not a very good one to separate the good from the best (or even the average from the good). It's impressive the number of supposedly senior candidates that can't follow simple instructions from the platform or write a couple of lines of code in their language of choice to sort the words in a string or something similar. I fully agree that multiple complex algorithm or puzzle questions are bad - require a longer time investiment that most candidates should be willing to devote to such process, are distanced to the reality of most programming tasks and favor those who enjoy and practice programming puzzles.