Tell HN: The Turing.com hiring platform is complete nonsense

I can speak as witness about other interview, the interview of a close friend, skilled in machine learning related technology, in fact he applied for that kind of job. He received a video with instructions to do an online test registered with very poor, really very poor audio quality by a guy with a very very strong asian accent. I transcript the instructions to help him to understand how to do the connection to the test platform, etc and, men, I wasn't able to understand every single detail, so I gave that video to a friend of mine from UK, he told me that my transcription was more accurate than the one he did. Moreover, the test, IMHO, was bullshit , my friend has a math degree and master in ML related topics and they sent him a junior Python programming exercise, SQL related nonsense and other ridiculous tests like a script selected random questions totally unrelated to the job they was interviewing for ( or they was pretending to do). More than a serious interview that was like a candid camera prank.

I was invited a few years back. Looked at the interview questions, decided not to do it (specs were basically a full app with MySQL or something, really specific stack).

Then I was given the following email: "Congrats on scoring 100% in Turing's basic JavaScript programming test on XXXX, 2019! You completed Step 1 towards being matched with top Silicon Valley companies that want to work full-time with remote engineers."

If I scored 100% on a test I never took, the whole thing just feels like a scam to me.

My anecdote with Turing: after a few sets of nonsense questions like the one you described, I was given a nonsense programming challenge. Pretty basic (email address validator), but the instructions said "the function must throw an exception if the email address is invalid" while the sample testcases actually checked that the function returned false (I also remember bad grammar but no other ambiguity).

Anyways, I changed the sample testcases so that they tested the function threw an exception for invalid inputs and didn't for valid ones. Which I probably shouldn't have done, because then Turing said I failed the challenge so they couldn't offer me any jobs, and I'd have to retake after 6 months.

...But then a while later, I get an email that I can retake the test due to "test environment issues" (maybe they realized the test was ambiguous, maybe it was just broken, I have no idea). At this point I already found a job.

Then they started spamming my email and eventually WhatsApp, so I blocked them.

Also, they spam people's inboxes. I'm a designer, can't code beyond HTML/CSS, and they (their bots?) keep sending me an email to join their platform. It's annoying, and I don't think I can do anything about it except reporting their email as a junk and blocking them.

About 4 years ago I think, they were paying people to answer assessments for the sake of answering, so my guess they were collecting data to do machine validation of actual applicants.

appreciate the heads up