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Show HN: I made a job board that doesn't allow HackerRank tests
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pseudonymousgun 6y agoFinally, much needed relief from nonsensical stuff. Thanks for building this.
- arsalanb 6y agoBest thing since sliced bread!
- asdev 6y agodomain is insecure
- j45 6y agoGood approach, I enjoy puzzles but they do not verify if a person can think, problem solve, or learn how to learn. Instead it's an indicator of being able to memorize, recognize patterns and regurgitate tactics. Ask why something should or shouldn't be strategically used can be a realer indicator if there is someone behind the steering wheel.
- pk78 6y agoSimilar collection of jobs: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
- monopoledance 6y agoNo TLS in 2021. Side note: Why is everyone into job boards in 2020/2021? Was there some event or article to push this as an untapped market? Seems like so many people recently came up with the ever same variation of job listing services.
- tmpz22 6y agoA lot of college grads go into the recruiting industry as a means to get entry level tech sales experience, a lot of people are also unemployed and thinking about unemployment solutions, finally job boards are a good means to collect data that is interesting: the resumes of everyone. Job boards are a major part of the zeitgeist of collapsing middle class America.
- monopoledance 6y agoHm. I am not satisfied with that explanation. Why now? And I am seeing this in Germany as well, which of course suffers a social divide, but much less extreme, or existentially threatening, than in the US. I assume the "job exchange" market is a natural monopoly, at least for its respective sections, and now there seems to be a race for it. But weirdly it's for the most part all the same: Listings. There doesn't seem to be a sustainable model, which avoids the problems of the past's iterations. Therefore I assume it's driven by business folks, not people with ideas.
- lmarcos 6y agoGenuinely interested: What are the problems of the past iterations you are talking about?
- monopoledance 6y agoI don't know, but apparently they weren't perfect or otherwise there wouldn't be such a rush for it, no? I guess it's still a tedious experience for all parties involved. I wonder why there isn't an OkCupid for jobs, but I think the problem is an asymmetrical interest in a "good match", unlike dating. As usual people fail to come up with good metrics and incentives and it's Goodhart's law all the way. Some problems just can't be solved by technology. But that never stopped anyone from trying over and over again... hyping their overfit tech to non-tech people. I think the actual problem is with management on the employer side, not the job boards. They need to bite the bullet and accept they need real human interactions to measure productivity and reward it case to case.
- chillacy 6y agoThe tricky thing here seems like customer acquisition of a two-sided marketplace: you need job searchers to get job posters, but you need job posts to get job searchers.
- rukshn 6y agoYEs the classic chicken and egg problem, the hardest problem to solve
- indymike 6y agoJob board industry veteran here. You are right it's hard to scale up a job board because of the two sided market. Once you get to a certain size, you are suddenly competing with Indeed, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn (and all the other job boards). Getting started is pretty easy right now because the employer side is very much into pay-per-click or pay-per-apply syndication and there is high demand for jobs on the job seeker side of the market. The key is to have a source of traffic that you can convert into click and applications. You'll see all kinds of niche job boards spring up right now fueled by traffic from communities like this, product hunt and even appropriated email lists that people take when they are laid off (yes, that's probably unethical, but lots of job boards get their start when a developer or recruiter starts one up in anger).
- Kwpolska 6y agoHow is this a job board? There is effectively no information about the position you would be applying to. The only offer is asking for “A typescript developer with experience using React, Apollo, Node, GraphQL”. This tells me nothing about the position. How much experience do I need? How much do you pay? What other benefits are available? Where is your office located / what’s your stance towards remote work (and what will it be post-covid)? What will my typical day look like? Do you use source control and CI/CD? Do I get a company laptop or do you expect me to bring me own? I need to know answers to questions like those before I even think about sending a job application.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago> There are better ways to test candidates. Genuine question here: what's the better way? I'm not a fan of whiteboard coding challenges, even though they got me my first "real" Bay Area tech job. On the other hand, take home challenges eat up a lot of time and credentialist filters like going to a name brand school (or even having the right major) filter me out. My go-to for when I'm in a hiring position again would be recommendations from my personal network, but that has its own flaws and doesn't scale very well. I think at the core of the problem is that most companies are extremely risk adverse in their hiring and would gladly miss a Jeff Dean type of super-performer in order to reduce their number of bad hires.
- chapium 6y agoHow do you interview for any other job?
- mattkrause 6y agoIt's often less...adversarial. I work somewhere in the middle of biology/neuroscience and ML. Interviews for essentially the same job (e.g., building brain-inspired robots) are hilariously different depending on how the org views itself. In a "science" organization, the interviews mostly involved talking about what I've done in the past and how I'd approach new issues (technical and behavioral). There were certainly a few probing questions about things that seemed designed to check up on claims, but my experience seemed mostly taken at face value. A coding test, for example, was skipped because an interviewer had already seen some of my code and thought it was fine. "Tech" interviewers seemed to want everything "proved" on-site during an all-day slog. I reversed strings and traversed graphs on a whiteboard. Someone quizzed me on facts and figures about the human eye (which they were reading out of the same book I learned them from). To me, this seems to test immediate recall and stamina/stress tolerance more than anything actually related to my R&D skills.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoI think adversarial is the right word for the current style of tech interviewing. It wasn't always this way. Back in the 80s when I first got into tech it was a lot more conversational and in the spirit of "we really need help, what can you do for us?". I think something more akin to a thesis defense would be better than what we're doing now. Prior to the interview have the candidate write up a description of a project they worked on and particularly liked along with a set of slides. Have the candidate send this presentation to the main interviewer who will distribute it to all of the interviewers. The interview then becomes a presentation where interviewers can ask questions about the presentation. I've seen this done in industry, but it was only when we interviewed folks who were PhDs coming from academia - I don't see why we couldn't do this for all kinds of candidates, not just those coming from academia.
- altdatathrow 6y agoWhy is there so much aversion to proving one's abilities? Programmers today feel they shouldn’t have to do whiteboards, hackerrank, or take-homes. How does a prospective employer evaluate someone’s problem-solving and programming chops?
- edem 6y agoI don't care about the tests, but I do care about my time. That's why I'm not taking anything home. They either take the time to look at my GitHub / StackOverflow / Whatever profile or make me do some test, but I'm not spending more time on these things than what's absolutely necessary.
- schwartzworld 6y agoPersonally, I don't mind take home assignments or even live coding challenges as long as they are testing skills I use for my job (front end web dev). I've spent a lot of time getting good at what I do, and I am actually happy to show those skills off to potential employers. But hackerrank/leetcode don't test for those skills. They test your ability to memorize solutions to trivia questions, typically things you'd never be asked to do in the workplace. There's enough to learn to be good at software without having to also memorize arbitrary trivia.
- bentlegen 6y agoHackerRank is a platform. You can design and implement your own exercises on HackerRank. We do this at our company; we design real-world problems and even test our own engineers to make sure “we” can pass our own evaluations. I understand that at many companies, they just use pre-canned questions and all the above criticisms apply. But I don’t think this is the fault of the platform; it’s a conscious choice of the company to do so.
- treis 6y ago>But hackerrank/leetcode don't test for those skills. They test your ability to memorize solutions to trivia questions, typically things you'd never be asked to do in the workplace. That's not really true. Most of them are variations on a relatively small set of techniques. Dynamic programming, back tracking, tree traversal, sliding window, greedy algorithms, and minimal connected tree will solve 90% of them. And those are all techniques that are occasionally useful. Sure, some of them will have some esoteric math or algorithm that makes the solution trivial if you know it. Or sometimes there will be some confusing wording. But so long as they're not like that it's a pretty fair test.
- blackrock 6y agoPeople should push back. Tell the interviewer that if you work on the L33T code problem, that you will bill them $250/hour, and 8 hours minimum. Since that is your standard consulting rate. This will make obviously make them balk. But likely the company isn’t worth working for. Provide work samples, and discuss them. If the interviewer cannot put in the time to investigate your work product, then they’re just being lazy, or they’re really just stupid. And they need to get off their high horse.
- bgdam 6y agoDamn, and this was going to be my first project of 2021. Kudos on launching, I still think I'm going to keep plugging away on my own version. It is 2021 though, and there really is no excuse for not using TLS.
- bit_logic 6y agoTo the senior engineers who are already happily employed and hate leetcode interviews: An effective way to fight against this is to start saying no to these interviews. Senior engineers have the power to change this if it becomes a trend to say no to these interviews. Anytime a recruiter contacts you on Linkedin, ask them does your interview process include leetcode style whiteboard interviews? If they say yes, then politely decline and make it clear that's the reason for the decline. All the leverage is on the happily employed senior engineer side. If they're not happy or unemployed, then it's different. But for the happily employed, it's the recruiter/company trying to convince them to leave. And it's very reasonable to reject these interviews. An employed senior engineer already has a demanding job that requires at least 40 hours a week. And since they're older, they're likely to have other responsibilities like family. There's simply no time to grind for months on pointless leetcode problems. If more senior engineers start immediately rejecting any recruiter messages with a simple "No, I don't do leetcode", the signal will be sent. Recruiters will start getting frustrated and tell hiring managers, hey many of the great engineers I contact keep saying no because of this leetcode thing, can you change that part of the interview? I can't find any good candidates because of this. That will force hiring managers to really evaluate if this leetcode interview is a good idea. Don't be fooled if they say it's not about getting the problem right or they just want to see how you think about a problem. That was somewhat true a long long time ago when these types of interviews started and leetcode didn't even exist. And it's what they still say to make it seem reasonable. But the reality today is that the interviewer only cares that you can write out the optimal solution within the interview time. That's it, that's all the interviewer will care about. If you don't have the right answer, it's an immediate zero. They might care about other factors (like are you friendly, code quality, etc.) after you successfully write the optimal answer on the board. But writing out the optimal answer is the baseline, they don't care to evaluate any other factor until that baseline is satisfied. There might be a few interviewers who still try to stick to the old way of these interviews, the original intent. But statistically the odds are against you. These interviewers are generally older and becoming fewer and fewer. The new generation of junior engineers are becoming senior and they only know the leetcode grind. In a typical interview loop, it will become more and more probable that there's more and more of these interviewers who expect the candidates to have done the leetcode grind and base their evaluation from that assumption.
- everling 6y agoI like the idea, but what's up with the name? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorde...
- thamer 6y agoThis is a very unfortunate name indeed. BPD is a serious personality disorder that causes a great deal of suffering, not only in those affected by it but especially their families and loved ones.
- sanmak 6y agoWhy it didn't have https? Still running in http. Do people really post or it's manually done by an author?