6 ms·

HackerRankX Wants To Kill The Resume

25 points by draker 12y ago

jamesbritt 12y ago
Things like this seem more useful as a honeypot.
gopher1 12y ago
Great, so now I have to maintain an updated LinkedIn profile, contribute to various open source projects on GitHub, sustain an active StackOverflow profile, and complete coding challenges on HackerRankX. I hope the employer who hires me doesn't mind if I do all that on the clock!
- vdaniuk 12y ago
  While this may be uncomfortable for you, please understand that the absolute majority of people in the world is much worse off than you. And while contributing simultaneously to github, stackoverflow and others community projects could be cumbersome for you, positive externalities are immense. The whole ecosystem benefits from this. Even if this burden is too heavy, there are always options of 4-day working week, freelance work, project-based work, etc. etc. Programmers are lucky to enjoy most liberty from their profession. So come on, don't complain, you DON'T HAVE to do anything, unless you want to be the very best.
  - daktanis 12y ago
    Yes, at the end of the day, software developers have it pretty good in the current job market. Sometimes it gets a little ridiculous on the requirements/wants on job postings. Some companies just ask for the world; it can lead to impostor syndrome and it can be stressful.
    - vdaniuk 12y ago
      Yeah, it can be stressful. Software developers here are competing for the best positions on the market, so why the surprise about the requirements? The opportunities are plentiful for experienced programmer who doesn't play the credentials game and agrees to earn a little less.
  - mahyarm 12y ago
    This is not about projects and work that help other people, but doing this for future employers an a career, not out of altruism for others. For example you didn't bring up a linked in profile in your list of things.
  - nlowell 12y ago
    Arguably there are better things that programmers can do with their talent, not just for themselves but for the world, than updating social media websites and building a personal online image.
    - vdaniuk 12y ago
      I consider the activity of updating stackoverflow and github with new knowledge and code to be incredibly good for the world. The need to update Linkedin and other resume-like social media website is just an inevitable consequence to the (prisoner dilemma)-like evolution of the credentials game.
- daktanis 12y ago
  You forgot twitter and technology blog too!
- bitJericho 12y ago
  Don't forget you'll also need to know Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js, all .net languages, Javascript, HTML5, CSS3, Nginx, Linux, Nosql, MySQL, Photoshop, Art and Design, among other skills.
  - actionscripted 12y ago
    Oh and you should probably be able to manage people, prepare budgets and handle sales calls.
  - grad_ml 12y ago
    Not only that CLRS, Knuth, Mathematics, Statistics, Machine Learning, distributed system ecosystems....
    - angersock 12y ago
      Can you prove that your support vector machine works properly, fed with data from Arduino sensors, and can you scale that onto a cloud network while integrating with Active Directory so that users can view their results in a single-page app? Full-stack indeed. :(
  - incision 12y ago
    In my experience, the interview process for jack of all trades job descriptions plays out the same way every time. 1.) The candidate shows up with a effectively all the required skills. Predictably, logically, the candidate has a roughly average level of skill across the range on average. 2.) The interviewers decide the candidate won't do because he/she is 'only' average in some area that should have been one entry on a short list of required skills in the first place. Either hire for the skills you actually need and be specific about it or hire the smartest, hungriest people you can find and be honest about what they'll be expected to learn.
    - angersock 12y ago
      You forgot: 3.) Applicant is hired, and paid criminally below-market with above-market stress, because the types of people who explicitly hire "jack of all trades" are generally trying to save money.
- incision 12y ago
  I had the same thought. I don't just question the ever-growing list of must-have profiles and time required to maintain them, but their value in general. It feels like a sort of arms race to engineer and automate hiring. It's generally agreed that actually sitting down and talking with a person is strongest source of signal [1] in the hiring model, but rather than focusing on that the model is continually stuffed with a growing set of noisy variables (profiles). At what point does this filtering start identifying the best profile builders as opposed to the best or brightest employees? Does hiring become a full-on game of prep services and checklists of activities along the lines of college admissions? 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
  - vicbrooker 12y ago
    I think the critical role for tech in recruiting is to help work out who to meet, not to replace the conversation. It's definitely an arms race to turn the 1000 resumes into 10 people to be interviewed, but I don't even know where to begin taking it past that realistically. The first automation software for the full hiring process is a going to be a very well marketed solution, not necessarily an effective one. Ideally, I would see less of a need for specialist recruiters as tech has made connecting with appropriate hires simple enough for someone from the team the hire will work with to conduct interviews. There's already an element of SEO-style optimisation in resumes as it is. I have a few outside-the-box approaches on how to get around this and I'll be doing a Show HN once I have something together :)
- nsxwolf 12y ago
  I'm going to try and stand out by refusing to participate in this madness and hope potential employers find that refreshing. Thankfully HackerRankX seems about as likely to catch on as Klout.
- jerf 12y ago
  It's OK. Maintaining a HackerRankX is just a subset of your ability to Google. Anyway, I'd submit that's the real threat here... this sort of thing is easy to game, and you are talking about the group of people most capable of gaming even the smartest AI algorithm... The top end of the "leaderboards" is going to be a list of cheaters pretty quickly.
pacofvf 12y ago
the functional programming challenges have a very weird selection of available languages: Scala, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell, Ocaml, Lisp, F#. not the most popular languages.
- dnissley 12y ago
  What are they missing?
  - pacofvf 12y ago
    https://docs.python.org/2/howto/functional.html https://docs.python.org/2/howto/functional.html
- pekk 12y ago
  functional programming languages are not the most popular languages.
  - angersock 12y ago
    Eh, Javascript seems to be doing alright for itself.
    - frowaway001 12y ago
      Since when is JavaScript functional?
      - _broody 12y ago
        It's not functional in the same vein as Haskell, but it is in the same vein as a lisp. Essentially, JS is an application of the lambda calculus.
        frowaway001 12y ago
        The family of Lisps isn't functional by definition. There are Lisps which are as non-functional as one could imagine. Anyway, where the hell are you seeing the lambda calculus in JavaScript (ignoring that "it's based on lambda calculus" is probably as useful as "computers usually work with 0s and 1s")?
vicbrooker 12y ago
I think I prefer Gild's approach (I've only superficially skimmed their site, no actual experience of their product). They're analysing existing data points to predict the right applicants - StackOverflow, Github etc. Seems more elegant to use what exists than to ask recruiters to come up with a custom challenge. If they can't make realistic asks at the moment it's unlikely they can create realistic tests on HackerRankX either. I'm still waiting to see the first job that requires 5 years + experience in Swift. Shouldn't take more than a few months.
ultimatedelman 12y ago
I feel like coding challenges like these are contrived and really prove nothing. Cool, you can create a "palindrome index." Can you effectively lazy load assets in an app on demand? Can you architect your CSS in a way that only the relevant styles show up on a page? Do you know why a standard for loop is faster in most cases than a for in loop? Tests like what this site is trying to do don't really prove anything other than you're good at solving puzzles with code whereas as an employer I'm more interested in the quality of your applicable code and architecting thought processes. I'm not saying these tests are totally useless. Obviously it demonstrates a dev's ability to code within one or more languages, but they're hardly enough to make a hire off of. When it comes to building actual product, these tests always fall short.
- opendais 12y ago
  If your core business is built around a specific CS problem [e.g. Uber would be the traveling salesman, Google is searching with NLP], picking candidates that demonstrate they can solve that sort of problem effectively [not perfectly, just 'good enough'] is pretty relevant. [e.g. Code Combat's Greed tournament would be a good recruiting platform for finding developers for Uber that worked on the backend since the traveling salesman problem seems really relevant to them] However, I think you are right in that most of them are useless because they don't focus on that sort of detail. EDIT: Okay, I had a bad example. Sorry.
  - Punoxysm 12y ago
    I guarantee the amount of time spent on traveling salesman problems at Uber is a miniscule fraction of all development time.
    - opendais 12y ago
      Oh, I'm sure. But it would be relevant which was my point. Someone at Uber at some point had to solve that sort of problem. Many of the questions I've been asked in interviews are more or less, "Someone had to do X at some point as part of our product, how would you do it?" The goal is to figure out if you are competent at solving business problems logically that are relevant to the business in some way.
stuaxo 12y ago
No.
yalogin 12y ago
Even with all these metrics I still have to write code even for the phone screen and then have a 6-8 round coding interview where I have to algorithms that I will not use in my job. I don't see that going away. Also I don't see bigger companies adopting these anyway. They will have their own way of hiring and is usually more relaxed. All these hurdles just make an experienced candidate cringe more applying to a startup.
emgeee 12y ago
For what it's worth, I kinda like the idea. I don't think coding interviews are going to go away anytime soon and I'd much rather use HackRank's fancy interface from the comfort of my home than stand awkwardly at a white board while one or two people stare judgingly at the back of my head. Despite the somewhat sensationalist headline, the article itself actually seems to be pretty realistic (aside from the "and in a year from now, HackerRank will be like that" comment). To me, it seems like another tool people who are not good at networking can use to distinguish themselves.
alphadogg 12y ago
It always surprises me that, in a community full of Agile people, there is so much effort put into the hiring process that smells of BDUF.
iamthepieman 12y ago
How is hackerrankx.com different than hackerrank.com? They use the same logo but require different logins.
- anilgulecha 12y ago
  One is a general programming/hacker site, the other is the same product built as a recruiting tool for recruiters/companies.
  - iamthepieman 12y ago
    It seems odd that they don't combine the two. You could have a paid version for companies that lets them create their own coding challenges and view candidates who have completed challenges in problem domains and languages they are interested in.
    - anilgulecha 12y ago
      We're figuring out exactly how this could work -- but given the disparate audience of the two applications, they are separated for now. Like Github normal, and Github Enterprise.
4bpp 12y ago
> "[...] an obscure theory, like graph theory [...]", [founder] says Even nowadays, no more or less respectable university will let you graduate with a CS degree without learning at least the basic ropes of graph theory (more than rightfully so). If this is representative of their priorities, I am left wondering if their ranking will actually be of interest to any organisation looking for competent programmers (as opposed to bedroom-trained PHP/Python hackers).
iamthepieman 12y ago
I was recently interviewing for a new job. One company asked me to solve a coding challenge. I had one free evening to do it and managed to get it mostly done but didn't feel comfortable submitting it as there was still a few issues and I didn't have time to clean it up like I wanted to. The other company asked for some code samples of work I had already done and then I walked them through it to show that I understood it and what design decisions and trade-offs I had made and why. The company that asked for code samples ended up making me an offer and due to lack of time and the fact that another company was already interested in hiring me, I never even continued the conversation with the coding challenge company. It seems that if a coding challenge is trivial then it doesn't really prove much. There's probably an answer for something close to it online and even if the candidate did solve it on their own it's still too trivial. If a coding challenge is complex enough to actually test a candidates range of knowledge then it's often not worth it to complete the challenge for a possible job opportunity.
masterjack 12y ago
I was into HackerRank for a while (in a previous life I did a lot of TopCoder/CodeJam/ICPC/USACO/etc) but it just wasn't the same. Programming competitions have a long history and high standards, and there were just too many repeated failures on both the side of execution and problem selection. An objective function that immediately allows a trivial solution for record points. Lack of compiling with optimizations. Changing what libraries are allowed partway through (more accurately, some server instances allowed the library, but they all went away by the end). Too basic algorithms. That said, I did have a lot of fun, especially having free reign to use ML and NLP and math libraries. But even that just made me realize that ML competitions tend by nature to be less about the "Aha" moment then they are about getting all your ducks in a row and doing the appropriate due diligence, and I might as well spend that time consulting for hedge funds.
ChrisFingaz 12y ago
Or companies could just ask for code samples. A resume is just a summary of experience, not sure how programming challenges would show the person can maintain a working relationship in a company.

25 points by draker 12y ago

Things like this seem more useful as a honeypot.

Great, so now I have to maintain an updated LinkedIn profile, contribute to various open source projects on GitHub, sustain an active StackOverflow profile, and complete coding challenges on HackerRankX. I hope the employer who hires me doesn't mind if I do all that on the clock!

vdaniuk 12y ago
While this may be uncomfortable for you, please understand that the absolute majority of people in the world is much worse off than you. And while contributing simultaneously to github, stackoverflow and others community projects could be cumbersome for you, positive externalities are immense. The whole ecosystem benefits from this. Even if this burden is too heavy, there are always options of 4-day working week, freelance work, project-based work, etc. etc. Programmers are lucky to enjoy most liberty from their profession. So come on, don't complain, you DON'T HAVE to do anything, unless you want to be the very best.
- daktanis 12y ago
  Yes, at the end of the day, software developers have it pretty good in the current job market. Sometimes it gets a little ridiculous on the requirements/wants on job postings. Some companies just ask for the world; it can lead to impostor syndrome and it can be stressful.
  - vdaniuk 12y ago
    Yeah, it can be stressful. Software developers here are competing for the best positions on the market, so why the surprise about the requirements? The opportunities are plentiful for experienced programmer who doesn't play the credentials game and agrees to earn a little less.
- mahyarm 12y ago
  This is not about projects and work that help other people, but doing this for future employers an a career, not out of altruism for others. For example you didn't bring up a linked in profile in your list of things.
- nlowell 12y ago
  Arguably there are better things that programmers can do with their talent, not just for themselves but for the world, than updating social media websites and building a personal online image.
  - vdaniuk 12y ago
    I consider the activity of updating stackoverflow and github with new knowledge and code to be incredibly good for the world. The need to update Linkedin and other resume-like social media website is just an inevitable consequence to the (prisoner dilemma)-like evolution of the credentials game.
daktanis 12y ago
You forgot twitter and technology blog too!
bitJericho 12y ago
Don't forget you'll also need to know Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js, all .net languages, Javascript, HTML5, CSS3, Nginx, Linux, Nosql, MySQL, Photoshop, Art and Design, among other skills.
- actionscripted 12y ago
  Oh and you should probably be able to manage people, prepare budgets and handle sales calls.
- grad_ml 12y ago
  Not only that CLRS, Knuth, Mathematics, Statistics, Machine Learning, distributed system ecosystems....
  - angersock 12y ago
    Can you prove that your support vector machine works properly, fed with data from Arduino sensors, and can you scale that onto a cloud network while integrating with Active Directory so that users can view their results in a single-page app? Full-stack indeed. :(
- incision 12y ago
  In my experience, the interview process for jack of all trades job descriptions plays out the same way every time. 1.) The candidate shows up with a effectively all the required skills. Predictably, logically, the candidate has a roughly average level of skill across the range on average. 2.) The interviewers decide the candidate won't do because he/she is 'only' average in some area that should have been one entry on a short list of required skills in the first place. Either hire for the skills you actually need and be specific about it or hire the smartest, hungriest people you can find and be honest about what they'll be expected to learn.
  - angersock 12y ago
    You forgot: 3.) Applicant is hired, and paid criminally below-market with above-market stress, because the types of people who explicitly hire "jack of all trades" are generally trying to save money.
incision 12y ago
I had the same thought. I don't just question the ever-growing list of must-have profiles and time required to maintain them, but their value in general. It feels like a sort of arms race to engineer and automate hiring. It's generally agreed that actually sitting down and talking with a person is strongest source of signal [1] in the hiring model, but rather than focusing on that the model is continually stuffed with a growing set of noisy variables (profiles). At what point does this filtering start identifying the best profile builders as opposed to the best or brightest employees? Does hiring become a full-on game of prep services and checklists of activities along the lines of college admissions? 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
- vicbrooker 12y ago
  I think the critical role for tech in recruiting is to help work out who to meet, not to replace the conversation. It's definitely an arms race to turn the 1000 resumes into 10 people to be interviewed, but I don't even know where to begin taking it past that realistically. The first automation software for the full hiring process is a going to be a very well marketed solution, not necessarily an effective one. Ideally, I would see less of a need for specialist recruiters as tech has made connecting with appropriate hires simple enough for someone from the team the hire will work with to conduct interviews. There's already an element of SEO-style optimisation in resumes as it is. I have a few outside-the-box approaches on how to get around this and I'll be doing a Show HN once I have something together :)
nsxwolf 12y ago
I'm going to try and stand out by refusing to participate in this madness and hope potential employers find that refreshing. Thankfully HackerRankX seems about as likely to catch on as Klout.
jerf 12y ago
It's OK. Maintaining a HackerRankX is just a subset of your ability to Google. Anyway, I'd submit that's the real threat here... this sort of thing is easy to game, and you are talking about the group of people most capable of gaming even the smartest AI algorithm... The top end of the "leaderboards" is going to be a list of cheaters pretty quickly.

pacofvf 12y ago

the functional programming challenges have a very weird selection of available languages: Scala, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell, Ocaml, Lisp, F#. not the most popular languages.

dnissley 12y ago
What are they missing?
- pacofvf 12y ago
  https://docs.python.org/2/howto/functional.html https://docs.python.org/2/howto/functional.html
pekk 12y ago
functional programming languages are not the most popular languages.
- angersock 12y ago
  Eh, Javascript seems to be doing alright for itself.
  - frowaway001 12y ago
    Since when is JavaScript functional?
    - _broody 12y ago
      It's not functional in the same vein as Haskell, but it is in the same vein as a lisp. Essentially, JS is an application of the lambda calculus.
      - frowaway001 12y ago
        The family of Lisps isn't functional by definition. There are Lisps which are as non-functional as one could imagine. Anyway, where the hell are you seeing the lambda calculus in JavaScript (ignoring that "it's based on lambda calculus" is probably as useful as "computers usually work with 0s and 1s")?

vicbrooker 12y ago

I think I prefer Gild's approach (I've only superficially skimmed their site, no actual experience of their product). They're analysing existing data points to predict the right applicants - StackOverflow, Github etc. Seems more elegant to use what exists than to ask recruiters to come up with a custom challenge. If they can't make realistic asks at the moment it's unlikely they can create realistic tests on HackerRankX either. I'm still waiting to see the first job that requires 5 years + experience in Swift. Shouldn't take more than a few months.

ultimatedelman 12y ago

I feel like coding challenges like these are contrived and really prove nothing. Cool, you can create a "palindrome index." Can you effectively lazy load assets in an app on demand? Can you architect your CSS in a way that only the relevant styles show up on a page? Do you know why a standard for loop is faster in most cases than a for in loop? Tests like what this site is trying to do don't really prove anything other than you're good at solving puzzles with code whereas as an employer I'm more interested in the quality of your applicable code and architecting thought processes. I'm not saying these tests are totally useless. Obviously it demonstrates a dev's ability to code within one or more languages, but they're hardly enough to make a hire off of. When it comes to building actual product, these tests always fall short.

opendais 12y ago
If your core business is built around a specific CS problem [e.g. Uber would be the traveling salesman, Google is searching with NLP], picking candidates that demonstrate they can solve that sort of problem effectively [not perfectly, just 'good enough'] is pretty relevant. [e.g. Code Combat's Greed tournament would be a good recruiting platform for finding developers for Uber that worked on the backend since the traveling salesman problem seems really relevant to them] However, I think you are right in that most of them are useless because they don't focus on that sort of detail. EDIT: Okay, I had a bad example. Sorry.
- Punoxysm 12y ago
  I guarantee the amount of time spent on traveling salesman problems at Uber is a miniscule fraction of all development time.
  - opendais 12y ago
    Oh, I'm sure. But it would be relevant which was my point. Someone at Uber at some point had to solve that sort of problem. Many of the questions I've been asked in interviews are more or less, "Someone had to do X at some point as part of our product, how would you do it?" The goal is to figure out if you are competent at solving business problems logically that are relevant to the business in some way.

stuaxo 12y ago

No.

yalogin 12y ago

Even with all these metrics I still have to write code even for the phone screen and then have a 6-8 round coding interview where I have to algorithms that I will not use in my job. I don't see that going away. Also I don't see bigger companies adopting these anyway. They will have their own way of hiring and is usually more relaxed. All these hurdles just make an experienced candidate cringe more applying to a startup.

emgeee 12y ago

For what it's worth, I kinda like the idea. I don't think coding interviews are going to go away anytime soon and I'd much rather use HackRank's fancy interface from the comfort of my home than stand awkwardly at a white board while one or two people stare judgingly at the back of my head. Despite the somewhat sensationalist headline, the article itself actually seems to be pretty realistic (aside from the "and in a year from now, HackerRank will be like that" comment). To me, it seems like another tool people who are not good at networking can use to distinguish themselves.

alphadogg 12y ago

It always surprises me that, in a community full of Agile people, there is so much effort put into the hiring process that smells of BDUF.

iamthepieman 12y ago

How is hackerrankx.com different than hackerrank.com? They use the same logo but require different logins.

anilgulecha 12y ago
One is a general programming/hacker site, the other is the same product built as a recruiting tool for recruiters/companies.
- iamthepieman 12y ago
  It seems odd that they don't combine the two. You could have a paid version for companies that lets them create their own coding challenges and view candidates who have completed challenges in problem domains and languages they are interested in.
  - anilgulecha 12y ago
    We're figuring out exactly how this could work -- but given the disparate audience of the two applications, they are separated for now. Like Github normal, and Github Enterprise.

4bpp 12y ago

> "[...] an obscure theory, like graph theory [...]", [founder] says Even nowadays, no more or less respectable university will let you graduate with a CS degree without learning at least the basic ropes of graph theory (more than rightfully so). If this is representative of their priorities, I am left wondering if their ranking will actually be of interest to any organisation looking for competent programmers (as opposed to bedroom-trained PHP/Python hackers).

iamthepieman 12y ago

I was recently interviewing for a new job. One company asked me to solve a coding challenge. I had one free evening to do it and managed to get it mostly done but didn't feel comfortable submitting it as there was still a few issues and I didn't have time to clean it up like I wanted to. The other company asked for some code samples of work I had already done and then I walked them through it to show that I understood it and what design decisions and trade-offs I had made and why. The company that asked for code samples ended up making me an offer and due to lack of time and the fact that another company was already interested in hiring me, I never even continued the conversation with the coding challenge company. It seems that if a coding challenge is trivial then it doesn't really prove much. There's probably an answer for something close to it online and even if the candidate did solve it on their own it's still too trivial. If a coding challenge is complex enough to actually test a candidates range of knowledge then it's often not worth it to complete the challenge for a possible job opportunity.

masterjack 12y ago

I was into HackerRank for a while (in a previous life I did a lot of TopCoder/CodeJam/ICPC/USACO/etc) but it just wasn't the same. Programming competitions have a long history and high standards, and there were just too many repeated failures on both the side of execution and problem selection. An objective function that immediately allows a trivial solution for record points. Lack of compiling with optimizations. Changing what libraries are allowed partway through (more accurately, some server instances allowed the library, but they all went away by the end). Too basic algorithms. That said, I did have a lot of fun, especially having free reign to use ML and NLP and math libraries. But even that just made me realize that ML competitions tend by nature to be less about the "Aha" moment then they are about getting all your ducks in a row and doing the appropriate due diligence, and I might as well spend that time consulting for hedge funds.

ChrisFingaz 12y ago

Or companies could just ask for code samples. A resume is just a summary of experience, not sure how programming challenges would show the person can maintain a working relationship in a company.