[hw]

I loathe algorithm questions, and I almost always never ask them when I'm interviewing a candidate. Too often have I seen candidates who ace 6 rounds of algorithm interviews, only to struggle when it comes to building actual products and require a ton of handholding.

On the other hand, I've seen candidates who fail interviews that are algorithm heavy, but have done exceptionally well when it comes to the practical world - doing actual work and building apps and contributing to the team instead of writing the next (insert your fav tricky algorithm question here) solver.

It's unfortunate that while many companies that are hiring are just run-of-the-mill SaaS and apps companies that don't require you as an engineer to use algorithms or DP on a daily basis (or even ever), you still see algorithm heavy interviews at these companies.

On Hackerrank, I don't necessarily hate it as a tool, but just the questions that get asked through it. I don't like that it automates an interview process to a certain extent, as a candidate's potential and skills and experience and fit in the team can't exactly be measured via an automated process but requires actual human to human interaction. If a company rejects you on the basis of failing a Hackerrank question and hasn't even talked to you, you're better off working for a different company.

[0xmohit]

I've also seen a similar tool that claims to do a partial evaluation of candidate's code. Guess what does it do! Assume that the expected answer was

   42

and your code emitted

   4

it'd give you 50% marks for the test case.

--

As an aside, such tools would give you a 0 even if you coded the perfect algorithm but goofed up the final printf.

Robotic evaluations might work, but not in the current form.

[jedmeyers]

I've had a similar problem with one of more recent HackerRank challenges. Part of the input were value pairs, the example contained only two pairs and the ordering of the pairs was not clearly specified, ie it could have been:

x1 x2 x3

y1 y2 y3

or:

x1 y1

x2 y2

x3 y3

The worst part way that their example still produced the same result if you read the values in the wrong order! I spent 40 minutes debugging my solution not understanding why my test cases work perfectly but HR does not accept the solution.