[yeukhon]

Most people don't get to choose who to interview. Your manager or your recruiter does not have enough data to eliminate the 60% unfit. But the first 40% are already eliminated because those candidates did not pass even the first phone interview with a recruiter (think Google hiring process).

[p4wnc6]

My point is that candidates face that exact same problem when trying to weed out bad employers. That's why good developers reject the employers who try to use commodity tests like HackerRank. We do it for the same reason that the employer wants to use the commodity tests to weed out bad candidates. But somehow the employers don't understand they are just signalling how bad they are (apart from a very rare few companies).

[frcknfrckn]

Don't be so quick to speak for all developers. Most good developers I've encountered are willing to put some effort in to find the right job.

[p4wnc6]

HackerRank-like lazy, commodity evaluation is not remotely close to "put[ting] some effort in to find the right job." It's very critical that we don't allow people to make the false comparison between actual interview effort and daft HackerRank time-wasting.

In fact, doing the emotionally difficult task of rejecting an employer who tries the HackerRank commodity nonsense represents putting in more legitimate effort to find the right job and to judiciously choose to complete code evaluations for companies that aren't being lazy and wasting your time.

[frcknfrckn]

Ha ha! Wow, that does sound difficult. You're a real trooper.

[p4wnc6]

There's no need to be insincere or intentionally hurtful. Trust me, when you need a job and you've got a lot of life and family pressures building up, but you can clearly see how dysfunctional an employer is and how bad your life will be if you agree to work for them, it can be extremely hard to make the choice to do the right thing and reject them. It's even worse when you get to the stage of an actual job offer and an employer starts revealing how dysfunctional they are when they won't negotiate on basic features that are necessary for minimally acceptable worker health and quality of life.

It seems you really desire to deride me simply because you disagree with me. I don't take it personally, but I will say that the attitude you've displayed throughout these comments defending HackerRank-like evaluations is exactly the kind of attitude that would be indicative of a badly dysfunctional employer, and it's often exactly the kind of dysfunction that HackerRank requests are indicative of. Especially the parts where you try to turn it around and assert that a candidate standing up for minimally acceptable, reasonable treatment is equivalent (for you) to having a "bad attitude." It's quite alarming that you feel entitled to declare candidates as having "bad attitudes" for doing something that simply makes common sense from the point of view of avoiding employers who will waste their time. Contrary to suggesting that the candidate has a bad attitude, it highly suggests that the employer has a bad attitude, bordering on feeling like they are entitled to candidate labor, instead of privileged to have that labor, and somewhat whiny about it too. Definitely a bad signal when coming from someone involved in the hiring process.

[frcknfrckn]

Was the sarcasm a bit much? Yeah, probably. But really, everyone makes hard decisions when it comes to jobs. I just find it somewhat amusing that someone would reject a company entirely because they disagree with one single facet of a multi-step interview process.

While we're at it, I don't particularly appreciate many of the insinuations people have made about my team and my employers based simply on the fact that I see a role for automated coding tests in the interview process. But like you said, I don't take it personally either.

Coding tests are just one tool in an interviewing toolbox. Like any tool, they can be - and are - abused. You feel that any use of that tool is indicative of some unredeemable flaw in the company as a whole. I feel that the tool has a genuine role in the initial candidate screening process. We obviously disagree, and are spinning our tires trying to convince each other, so there's really no point in continuing the discussion.