Hacker News Reader

Comment by parennoob | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea why people who otherwise are against practices like stack ranking think that companies like "Hacker"Rank which assign you a score based on a set of simplistic algorithm are a good idea. If you are a manager and your company uses HackerRank as a hiring filter, I request you to take a good, hard second look at it – specially if you lament that you are unable to find any developers.

These companies make bank from both sides (the person interviewing who is cramming on their material, and the employer), and leave out important things like how well you work with teams, how fast you adapt to new frameworks, or how maintainable your code base is.

I guess it is no surprise that another of their "featured" blog posts talks in extremely glowing terms about someone for coding for 24 hours without any sleep. (http://blog.hackerrank.com/recap-how-mimino-solved-78-projec...).

View on HN

You're right -- HackerRank does leave out those things. It's a filter, not a replacement for the entire interview process.

By having a filter, it allows a company to evaluate a lot more people and not rely entirely on the resume (which might not do a good job of representing your skills). Presumably, they are already doing these same style of coding+algorithm questions later on in the process, so this is just weeding out people who clearly wouldn't pass (and identifying people who would unexpectedly pass). Not a bad thing.

If a company is using it as total replacement for the hiring process then, yeah, that's broken. They won't be able to evaluate team work and a bunch of other things.

> so this is just weeding out people who clearly wouldn't pass

This is true only if your coding/algorithm interview process is the exact same as HackerRank. Alternately (like they do at the place I work at), if your coding interview is conducted in person and relies upon you correctly describing a thought process rather than coming up with the correct code snippet, it's an awful replacement.

It depends on where you put the bar and how challenging your questions are on each side.

Yes, the fact that in-person interviews involve some back-and-forth conversation makes the HackerRank ones slightly less predictive. But slightly less predictive doesn't mean "awful."

It's worth noting that on HackerRank, candidates can see how they're performing against the test cases. So when people don't perform well, it's not that they made some silly mistake or misinterpreted the problem. It's because they truly weren't able to get something more optimal or more correct.

Companies can set the bar wherever they want. There are times when a company sets a bar too high. You certainly can implement HackerRank in a good way. You can also implement it in a bad way.

Agreed. HackerRank works great as an 'initial' filter. The way to use it correctly is to ask people a couple fairly easy questions, because if they can't pass the easy stuff, then you shouldn't waste their time with a full onsite. A person who is at least moderately capable, shouldn't at all struggle with your initial filter.

Save the tough questions for the onsite interview, where an interviewer can subjectively make judgments about their performance.

Or, ask two questions, where (on at least one) it's fairly easy to get an inefficient solution, but requires more thought to get a more efficient one.

You don't necessarily demand perfection on this test though.

One mistake that companies make is that they think they want to set a lower bar, so they make the questions easy. But then, in order to distinguish candidates, they basically require perfection. Now, a simple mistake can "fail" a good candidate.

It's better if they make the questions harder, but just don't require perfection.

Oh god I know what you mean.

> It's worth noting that on HackerRank, candidates can see how they're performing against the test cases.

You can see how you do against test cases in aggregate. You are given a few examples, the rest are hidden from you. A completely arbitrary and vindictive restriction.

For filter fun, try Googling "photo filters". Filters are generally bad, unless you actually want a biased output.

The only two alternatives to not filtering candidates are to hire every candidate or not hire anyone. How could these possibly be better?

Yes, not filtering is good, interviewing is good, hiring qualified candidates is good, not insulting senior candidates is good, blind filtering is bad.

Interviewing _is_ a filter. Each step where you eliminate candidates is a filter; that's what that word means.

I think what you're really trying to say is that blind filtering is bad (okay, you said this part explicitly) and you think that HackerRank is a blind filter. Unfortunately, this is pretty obviously not true. HackerRank uses quite a bit of data. Arguments that HackerRank is using the wrong data, or using what data it has poorly, would make a lot more sense than what you've said so far.

"Make bank from both sides"

Can you point me to the part of the HackerRank website where they ask people (not businesses) to pay them money?

I am sorry -- since Gayle's book of the same name is a product worth ~$30, I assumed there was a paywall at some point behind https://www.hackerrank.com/domains/tutorials/cracking-the-co... -- I guess I was wrong? It doesn't clearly say on the page that it was, and I don't want to sign up for their product.

A slightly weaker version of that argument is that having a vast base of signed-up users and data about their challenges is still making bank out of the efforts of individual users, but clearly not as bad as requiring you to pay for this tutorial.

They make money by selling the snake oil that are these tests and interviews. They need interviewers to believe they are useful and diagnostic, and they need interviewees to put up with them and think it's acceptable to be put through it.

Had a look myself. There isn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com