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> 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

> 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.

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.