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.
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.
> You feel that any use of that tool is indicative of some unredeemable flaw in the company as a whole.
This is a good summary of my position, except that it's not unredeemable. They could just stop using short, standardized, timed tests as a candidate evaluation, and instead they could acknowledge that there is no effective substitute for actually speaking with candidates, probing them about their experiences, and developing more nuanced understanding. Doing so would be time consuming and expensive ... that's life. Papering over the reality of the situation by pretending like automated, timed, standardized tests can measure the thing you need to measure won't make reality go away.
If a company is verifiably an excellent place to work and has excellent technology culture, and this can be verified ahead of time, then they do have the negotiation power to respectfully require completing code trivia (although most of the firms that actually are excellent don't do it this way even though they could).
Firms that are question marks to a candidate prior to some kind of phone interview to assess the fit, experience, and the nature of the role have no business trying to cheaply avoid the required costs of candidate evaluation. By trying to be cheap about it, they send a bad signal (and also generally don't succeed in getting the candidate pool they want to get).
Short, standardized, timed tests have no place in professional software hiring. Literally none. A company that uses such tests definitely raises red flags. It may be a sign of unredeemable dysfunction in the company, it may be some misguided HR initiative, it may be a totally fine place to work. The candidate can't tell and it's seriously not in their interest to waste effort on whatever the test is going to be.
There are just too many bad jobs ... the better decision rule is to always reject and if you end up rejecting an otherwise good job that somehow ended up using short, timed, standardized testing, oh well. The loss function is not symnmetric. Ending up in a dysfunctional job just because you felt good about acing their code test is a far worse outcome than rejecting an otherwise good job and being overly selective about where to work.
Yup, I still genuinely disagree with most of your points. Just not seeing the connection between using an interviewing tool and being a dysfunctional company. But like I said, spinning tires, etc. All the best to you going forward!
I think the problem is that you continue referring to it as an interview tool just because it is a thing that can be used for interviewing.
Making candidates stand on one leg and recite the alphabet backwards would also be an "interviewing tool" but it's not legitimate, just as short, timed, standardized coding tests are also not legitimate. Playing semantic games about whether it's an "interview tool" is not worthwhile. The question has nothing to do with whether it's logically possible to be used as part of an interview. The point is that it cannot provide the kinds of evidence that people claim it provides, and so continued usage of it for interviews can only be explained by other reasons, which is when it begins to be evidence of dysfunction.
That's not 'the problem'. That's the disagreement. You claim it's not a legitimate tool. I say that it is. We obviously disagree and this is going absolutely nowhere.
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.