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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. A couple of weeks ago I had a recruiter from Atlassian send me an email saying they were interested an could I complete these 6 problems on Hacker Rank and each challenge has a time limit.

Its not enough to outwit a Burmese Python but you need to do it while a clock is ticking.

We all know the best performance and indicator of skill always comes from coding with an egg timer or stop watch.

Oh and did I mention the Hacker Rank challenge was being asked before even speaking to a human being about the job?

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These companies carrying water for Hacker Rank and their ilk ought to be totally ignored.

Programming is only a competition sport when it is voluntary, no need to turn access to a job into some kind of Christians versus the lions spectator sport.

If someone were to approach me with that kind of offer I think the response would not be much longer than one line (and I'd try hard to keep it polite).

>"These companies carrying water for Hacker Rank and their ilk ought to be totally ignored."

Yeah, I just deleted the email.

In the case of Atlassian and some others I have seen recently, the job of the recruiter now seems to be sending out links to hacker rank challenges after a successful key word search on a candidates C.V. I imagine recruiters love this because it means they now have to understand even less than the little they understood before.

> Oh and did I mention the Hacker Rank challenge was being asked before even speaking to a human being about the job?

I prefer that a lot more than scheduling a 1 hour phone interview during my workday, to do the same stupid questions over the phone, with someone who can describe neither the job nor the company.

Sure, that scenario is equally broken and happened to me with a big S.V company recently. If the company can't even schedule an interview with someone on the actual team then I'm probably not interested in the company and can and have cut the phone interview short upon learning that.

It's not enough to be on the team, the person has to be able to talk, not a mute engineer.

I completely agree.

It's even better when you or a recruiter has sent them your resume and it's obvious that they've ignored it and are looking at your outdated LinkedIn profile.

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