I was just griping about this earlier today. I'm in the interview process with a company, who has talked to me before, after being referred internally to do so.

I was just griping about this earlier today. I'm in the interview process with a company, who has talked to me before, after being referred internally to do so. I've talked to them about technical problems I've solved in the past, discussed problem solving and approaches to optimization and architecture. Interview process has gone really well. They said the last thing is a code test, that they do through Hackerrank. I figured ok, I'll go through some on Hackerrank and get the hang of them, since I've never really done much on these types of things. I did bomb out of an interview process last year that was strikingly similar, with a final step of random algorithmic code test that was timed/monitored and I struggled on. I spent 2 hours working on Hackerrank stuff just to realize: 1. It's virtually all either 1+1 intro or comp sci stuff. There's nothing there remotely applicable to any work I've done in my career, which has included numerous positions of architecture/scalability/emergency fixing. 2. A lot of the problems are very poorly described. After an hour of failing to solve one, with no feedback on what strange inputs were failing (because the ones it would tell me all passed), I finally clicked the editorial part. And it began with "here's the obvious solution, but that won't work because it's O(n^3). Well no sh*t, I'm aware, but this is a stupid brute force exercise and there was no notice of "be efficient, must solve using linear algebra." In the past, a couple places have done a code test that is basically "sit down with Jim for an hour, he's working on XYZ problem, and see how you would approach it." Those have been the absolute best code tests, both for me to show talent and for companies to judge me. Anyways, time to go bomb out of another candidacy at the last stage.