I hope the employer who hires me doesn't mind if I do all that on the clock!
I don't just question the ever-growing list of must-have profiles and time required to maintain them, but their value in general.
It feels like a sort of arms race to engineer and automate hiring.
It's generally agreed that actually sitting down and talking with a person is strongest source of signal [1] in the hiring model, but rather than focusing on that the model is continually stuffed with a growing set of noisy variables (profiles).
At what point does this filtering start identifying the best profile builders as opposed to the best or brightest employees? Does hiring become a full-on game of prep services and checklists of activities along the lines of college admissions?
1: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
The first automation software for the full hiring process is a going to be a very well marketed solution, not necessarily an effective one.
Ideally, I would see less of a need for specialist recruiters as tech has made connecting with appropriate hires simple enough for someone from the team the hire will work with to conduct interviews.
There's already an element of SEO-style optimisation in resumes as it is. I have a few outside-the-box approaches on how to get around this and I'll be doing a Show HN once I have something together :)
1.) The candidate shows up with a effectively all the required skills. Predictably, logically, the candidate has a roughly average level of skill across the range on average.
2.) The interviewers decide the candidate won't do because he/she is 'only' average in some area that should have been one entry on a short list of required skills in the first place.
Either hire for the skills you actually need and be specific about it or hire the smartest, hungriest people you can find and be honest about what they'll be expected to learn.
Thankfully HackerRankX seems about as likely to catch on as Klout.
Anyway, I'd submit that's the real threat here... this sort of thing is easy to game, and you are talking about the group of people most capable of gaming even the smartest AI algorithm... The top end of the "leaderboards" is going to be a list of cheaters pretty quickly.
And while contributing simultaneously to github, stackoverflow and others community projects could be cumbersome for you, positive externalities are immense. The whole ecosystem benefits from this.
Even if this burden is too heavy, there are always options of 4-day working week, freelance work, project-based work, etc. etc. Programmers are lucky to enjoy most liberty from their profession.
So come on, don't complain, you DON'T HAVE to do anything, unless you want to be the very best.
Sometimes it gets a little ridiculous on the requirements/wants on job postings. Some companies just ask for the world; it can lead to impostor syndrome and it can be stressful.
I'm not saying these tests are totally useless. Obviously it demonstrates a dev's ability to code within one or more languages, but they're hardly enough to make a hire off of. When it comes to building actual product, these tests always fall short.
The problem is that, as with most tests, these can be gamed. Every programmer under the sun now knows about FizzBuzz. So now there's an entire art dedicated to the craft of inventing new programming interview questions. Inevitably, the questions which were supposed to be the antithesis to trivia start to become their own trivia.
Really, though, it's just a hard problem. There is no easy way to really accurately assess a programmer you've never met or worked with. Your specific questions could easily turn down an incredibly talented programmer who just hasn't done much front-end work before but could pick it up in a few afternoons.
However, I think you are right in that most of them are useless because they don't focus on that sort of detail.
EDIT: Okay, I had a bad example. Sorry.
There are tasks/competencies that can only be tested via manual intervention. But things that can be automated are in our roadmap.
They're also easy to fake. If this became widely adopted, you could hire someone on Fiverr to boost your score.
The point to note is that there is (usually) a job on the line, and a programming challenge is not the only part of the screening process -- it will usually be followed by a live coding session/interview. So the question is would someone risk gaming the process, when the chance of getting caught is high. We think not.
Scala, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell, Ocaml, Lisp, F#.
not the most popular languages.
Aside from Dylan, J or Scheme, I can't think of anything else to add.
You might be able to make an argument to add is ES6 with a pile of additions to Function.prototype, but FP in JS isn't as natural as other languages.
The other company asked for some code samples of work I had already done and then I walked them through it to show that I understood it and what design decisions and trade-offs I had made and why.
The company that asked for code samples ended up making me an offer and due to lack of time and the fact that another company was already interested in hiring me, I never even continued the conversation with the coding challenge company.
It seems that if a coding challenge is trivial then it doesn't really prove much. There's probably an answer for something close to it online and even if the candidate did solve it on their own it's still too trivial.
If a coding challenge is complex enough to actually test a candidates range of knowledge then it's often not worth it to complete the challenge for a possible job opportunity.
Seems more elegant to use what exists than to ask recruiters to come up with a custom challenge. If they can't make realistic asks at the moment it's unlikely they can create realistic tests on HackerRankX either.
I'm still waiting to see the first job that requires 5 years + experience in Swift. Shouldn't take more than a few months.
Also I don't see bigger companies adopting these anyway. They will have their own way of hiring and is usually more relaxed. All these hurdles just make an experienced candidate cringe more applying to a startup.
Despite the somewhat sensationalist headline, the article itself actually seems to be pretty realistic (aside from the "and in a year from now, HackerRank will be like that" comment).
To me, it seems like another tool people who are not good at networking can use to distinguish themselves.
Even nowadays, no more or less respectable university will let you graduate with a CS degree without learning at least the basic ropes of graph theory (more than rightfully so). If this is representative of their priorities, I am left wondering if their ranking will actually be of interest to any organisation looking for competent programmers (as opposed to bedroom-trained PHP/Python hackers).
