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Comment by gaylemcd | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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