I despise HackerRank and that ilk. I am a (actual) senior engineer at a FAANG in Silicon Valley and can barely do those contrived problems but am approaching my

I despise HackerRank and that ilk. I am a (actual) senior engineer at a FAANG in Silicon Valley and can barely do those contrived problems but am approaching my second year at one of the biggest companies in the world working on “serious” build engineering stuff and never once have had to invert a binary tree and display my results using STDOUT. Honestly, command line Linux skills and a take home (<1 hour) “build an app in <relevant language> that does x” is far more relevant to my work than some timeboxed HackerRank contrived example. My favorite screening tools have typically been “here is an app with failing tests, fix the failures.” I have been screened out of all manner of dinky companies from these contrived tools. A reasonable oral technical interview to ensure the candidate can communicate within the domain is far more valuable than contrived tests of solving problems unrelated to the actual job. I can learn more about a candidate asking about use cases of SOA than I can by watching them calculate prime numbers.