The Problem with Using HackerRank as a Programmer Screening Tool

Re:The Problem with Using HackerRank as a Programmer Screeni... by user5994461 on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @11:31PM (#15967066)

I don't recall that HackerRank allowed to read and write to the filesystem. I've never seen any stock test doing that.

The default test settings generate code for parsing the stdin input and create the body of the program.

That company really went out of their way to make a terrible test. That's not representative of HackerRank.

I used to write tests for one company. The tool is great and totally flexible. A test should be taken as a representation of the company writing it, not as an example of the platform.

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Re:The Problem with Using HackerRank as a Programmer Screeni... by drdrey on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @01:47AM (#15967553)

OP here, the test was definitely in HackerRank's library, not something custom. I went through the exercise as we were evaluating HackerRank internally, not as a candidate (important context I should probably have mentioned in the post)

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Re:The Problem with Using HackerRank as a Programmer Screeni... by user5994461 on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @08:48AM (#15969407)

That changes everything. It's not a real test at all.

There is a broad range of exercises, a lot of which are for coding competition, way too long and too difficult for a short screening test.

I'd advise you to keep the majority of the exercises dead simple. An exercise to print numbers from 1 to 100 will tell you a lot about the candidate. An 1h dynamic programming exercise will stay unanswered most of the time, that doesn't tell you anything useful.

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