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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.