Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

Re:Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist by jarsin on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @10:12AM (#15183808)

Testing foundation is great but that is not at all what the current interviewing system does. It hides foundation in trick questions that require you to have a moment of insight that fires off a light bulb that you can then use your foundation to solve.

For example why cant they just ask. Ok givin an array find all the pairs of the array. Great now whats the big O of that. Great...

Instead they ask some trick question that disguises the fact that you should solve this problem by finding all pairs etc.

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Re:Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist by shados on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @10:50AM (#15184114)

I totally agree. My point wasn't that the interviewing system was great. Just that the problem with it isn't what it's trying to test, but how.

I have issues with people who dismiss the problem space entirely. "I don't need to know CS fundamentals to do my job". To which I say: you do. You're just doing a subpar job because -everyone else- is and that's the standard even though it's suboptimal.

(Note I don't have a CS background myself, and thought this for a long time, until I ended up working in environments that were CS heavy and seeing how "hard problems" were trivialized, so we could spend time solving "real" problems instead)

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