4 ms·

"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."

"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.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > If they measured useful skills they wouldn't require any study. I would be careful with this kind of statements. It can also show that most programming jobs don't actually require a sophisticated level of knowledge.
  - joncrocks 9y ago
    I think this is unfair. As a crude comparison, it would be like a mathematician being asked to recite his times tables. Something he could probably do, given a bit of time and practice, but so outside the normal day-to-day stuff they normally do that it doesn't tell you much other than they spent time preparing. Which is fine if that's what you're looking to measure. I think the point that the grandparent is trying to make is that if you take a group of developers with a good amount of experience and who everyone agrees are skilled in their field and administer a test with no warning/preparation, and none of them score very well, are they suddenly not very good developers or is the test not a very good predictor of whether someone is a skilled developer?
  - soundwave106 9y ago
    One programming job may require a completely different skillset than another. Going over the Hackerrank algorithms, how many times do you do things like fancy bit manipulation or game theory algorithms for building a simple CRUD web app? There are certainly programming jobs where bit manipulation is common (systems level / embedded code is one I can think of) but from my experience it's pretty rare to XOR bits in Javascript land. Same with things like data structures. Again: in the world of C / C++, certainly you'd use trees / linked lists / etc. I do think is good to know about these concepts regardless so that this type of thing is more than just vague black box magic, but in Javascript CRUD web app land all of that stuff is mostly "behind the curtain", so it isn't the most necessary skill to have. Hackerrank in fact seems really poorly suited to web development positions. No tests on CSS, HTML, design patterns (yer model-view-* patterns, dependency injection, responsive web design, etc etc.), data transmission structures (eg JSON and XML), browser structure (eg the DOM), dynamic communication (eg Ajax/XHR, Websockets), etc. Heck, Hackerrank may show that you can write some SQL, but ironically for something with "hacker" in it's name, it can't show that you know about how to mitigate the common "web hack" tricks (eg SQL injection, XSS vulnerabilities, URL fuzzing), something I would think would actually be way more relevant for any public CRUD web app.
yodsanklai 9y ago
> but it should not take much more than a few hours to get back to a decent skill level It really depends where you apply. Some companies have interview processes that require a very specific preparation and it can be very time-consuming. I applied once for a quant position. The interviewer didn't really care about my resume and we started directly with logic and probability puzzles (a few phone interviews). I was about 35 at the time, and this was the type of things I would have been more comfortable doing when I was a 20-years old math undergraduate. On one hand, I like that they put everyone on an equal ground. On the other hand, I think it's a bit of a shame that they dismiss many years of 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.

wolfgke 9y ago
> If they measured useful skills they wouldn't require any study. I would be careful with this kind of statements. It can also show that most programming jobs don't actually require a sophisticated level of knowledge.
- joncrocks 9y ago
  I think this is unfair. As a crude comparison, it would be like a mathematician being asked to recite his times tables. Something he could probably do, given a bit of time and practice, but so outside the normal day-to-day stuff they normally do that it doesn't tell you much other than they spent time preparing. Which is fine if that's what you're looking to measure. I think the point that the grandparent is trying to make is that if you take a group of developers with a good amount of experience and who everyone agrees are skilled in their field and administer a test with no warning/preparation, and none of them score very well, are they suddenly not very good developers or is the test not a very good predictor of whether someone is a skilled developer?
- soundwave106 9y ago
  One programming job may require a completely different skillset than another. Going over the Hackerrank algorithms, how many times do you do things like fancy bit manipulation or game theory algorithms for building a simple CRUD web app? There are certainly programming jobs where bit manipulation is common (systems level / embedded code is one I can think of) but from my experience it's pretty rare to XOR bits in Javascript land. Same with things like data structures. Again: in the world of C / C++, certainly you'd use trees / linked lists / etc. I do think is good to know about these concepts regardless so that this type of thing is more than just vague black box magic, but in Javascript CRUD web app land all of that stuff is mostly "behind the curtain", so it isn't the most necessary skill to have. Hackerrank in fact seems really poorly suited to web development positions. No tests on CSS, HTML, design patterns (yer model-view-* patterns, dependency injection, responsive web design, etc etc.), data transmission structures (eg JSON and XML), browser structure (eg the DOM), dynamic communication (eg Ajax/XHR, Websockets), etc. Heck, Hackerrank may show that you can write some SQL, but ironically for something with "hacker" in it's name, it can't show that you know about how to mitigate the common "web hack" tricks (eg SQL injection, XSS vulnerabilities, URL fuzzing), something I would think would actually be way more relevant for any public CRUD web app.

yodsanklai 9y ago

> but it should not take much more than a few hours to get back to a decent skill level It really depends where you apply. Some companies have interview processes that require a very specific preparation and it can be very time-consuming. I applied once for a quant position. The interviewer didn't really care about my resume and we started directly with logic and probability puzzles (a few phone interviews). I was about 35 at the time, and this was the type of things I would have been more comfortable doing when I was a 20-years old math undergraduate. On one hand, I like that they put everyone on an equal ground. On the other hand, I think it's a bit of a shame that they dismiss many years of experience.