[dahart]

I've interviewed and hired many devs. I find hackerrank style coding questions very useful in interviews and I agree with the superiority of your alternative suggestions.

Keep in mind that these quizzes are only one single part of a multi-part interview. Also keep in mind that acting offended by whatever style of interview you get may reduce your chances of getting the job you want.

You might be amazed how different answers can be on easy code puzzles, or how deep of a discussion you can have over a single line of code. The easy questions might be easy for you because you're good, but often there is a low bar for the first round interviews for a specific reason: to weed out the people who have less experience than they claim and/or couldn't be bothered to prepare for the interview.

Also, when several or many candidates are being interviewed, it takes a lot of time just to administer low-preparation interviews. Pair programming, as nice as it is, simply can't be done by the lead dev for all the candidates without keeping him from his job coding.

Remember, the main thing your interviewers are trying to do is compare candidates against each other, so they need standard a way to see who's better than someone else. Hackerrank type questions are definitely not ideal, but it does what it says: rank people against each other.

I would absolutely welcome ideas for being able to rank people in programming skill with some method that is closer to pair programming but takes less of my team's time. The suggestions in the article here are lovely, but they don't help someone who's interviewing because they take too long to evaluate, and they're different than anyone else so they're much harder to rank candidates.

[StavrosK]

> how deep of a discussion you can have over a single line of code

That's the problem with HackerRank: You can't! Every single time I've tried one, it was a dismissive "do this on your own time and we'll check your answers".

Not to mention that their question sets tend to be full of puzzles, which are the type of thing where I'll have an epiphany over lunch, rather than something I'll figure out how to optimize in the ten minutes I have to code the solution.

[dahart]

> That's the problem with HackerRank: You can't!

Agreed, this is why I give my own coding quizzes, so I can have a discussion about it. I'm more interested in the thinking than the answer.

But, I do have sections in my interview that test knowledge and not skill, so I can still see the usefulness of letting Hackerrank be a part of the process.

The one thing I don't claim is that HackerRank or coding quizzes are perfect. This is why coding quizzes are only one of maybe six phases of an interview.