Ask HN: What can HackerRank do better?

[rvivek]

I'm the founder/CEO of HackerRank and started this ~12 years ago with the mission of enabling hiring to happen with skills vs pedigree. There's still a long way to go in making this a reality and have had my fair share of highs and lows.

Curious to hear from you on your opinion (either as a hiring manager or a candidate looking for a job) on what we can do better.

[nextn]

Run with the candidate's local text-editor and local terminal instead of a web-based IDE.

[rvivek]

We already have this but perhaps we should make it more prominent

[nextn]

I failed many job interviews because of HackerRank's and others' web-based IDE.

Do you mean I can run HackerRank without opening my browser? I didn't see this described in the invitation email I received or the interview URL I clicked.

[daemonologist]

I'm not big into this style of study (would usually rather do projects), but when I do want to grind HackerRank has been the site I use.

I think the biggest point that could be improved is question quality, particularly for curated questions sets/prep kits where my expectations are higher. It's not uncommon to run into an edge case that's tested for but not specified in the problem, or some deficiency with the question itself (I've seen "fix the bug" questions with "from scratch" code provided, or vice versa).

Another thing which could be really valuable are challenges in big codebases - add feature X to some open source project or whatever. Curated/teaching versions of this kind of exercise are hard to come by and would serve as a middle ground between the usual toy problems and in-practice software engineering.

[rvivek]

Super good feedback. It’s on top of our list to move to more real-world set up like how you are mentioning

[cssanchez]

Disclaimer: I've never believed in your product or any similar tool neither as a dev, analyst or manager (10 YOE). I think they're useful for CS competitions, clubs and so forth, but overall I see it the same way people good at Excel or Chess win competitions but that doesn't make them good analysts/devs/employees.

IMO there is a huge gap in the market for facilitating in-person interviews that no tool has really exploited yet.

[rvivek]

What would a solution like that look?

[vismwasm]

I can't give specific feedback, but the company I work at evaluated HackerRank for our hiring process (analytics, data science, data engineering). We ended up using Coderpad though and mostly us it to evaluate Python skills (I guess some SQL as well). We'are using it during our interview process for small live coding session - I've seen similar in at least one other company.

Unfortunately I don't know why we didn't choose HackerRank in the end. LeetCode was also an option but it didn't really fit what we wanted to test for.

[rvivek]

Thanks for the transparency. We will continue to get better at making it easy to get started

[wismwasm]

I think a general problem with most of these problems is that they’re biased towards how big US tech companies recruit.

However non-tech companies also want to assess coding skills but don’t care about algorithms & data structures.

A bunch of programmers today are not software engineers but analysts, data scientists, data engineers. So it might be worthwhile to examine how to access these applicants‘ skills.

For example for DS roles more Kaggle like real life problems might be suited better.

[hollownobody]

Not sure if this is not currently possible, but what about adding an LLM integration?

I work in DS for a large corp and we're currently working on replacing our hackerrank coding interview with something that lets us evaluate the daily life of a dev a bit more realistically. This includes letting them use LLMs and watching them do exploratory data analysis, instead of just coding.

[rvivek]

Before you replace, can I show you how the LLM integration works on HackerRank?

[hollownobody]

Yes please!

For additional context, we are currently using problems which have test cases, and it feels as if it doesn't correctly reflect the day-to-day of a data scientist. In fact, many interviewers pass a candidate iff they pass the test cases.

I'd love more open-ended problems.

[rvivek]

That's awesome. I'm sorry, I couldn't find your email / contact info from your profile. Any chance you can email me: vivek [at] hackerrank?

[hollownobody]

Done! Email subject is "HN DS Interviews".

[roetlich]

Hi, many years ago I used HackerRank to practice, before I got my first job as a programmer. I always thought it had nicer UI than leetcode. For practicing a new language I now mostly use exercism.io, because it allows me to run everything locally and solve problems however I want.

I have a question for you: What's unique about HackerRank? Why choose HackerRank over any of the alternatives? Is it really just leetcode with better UI?

Thanks to this post I logged in for the first time in a long time, and solved a medium difficulty challenge. Here are my impressions:

It felt pretty easy. The UI looks pretty nice. Nice dark theme. It felt a bit difficult to find problems I was interested in. I can compare with different solutions on both leetcode and exercism, but I couldn't find that in HackerRank. I guess that's what the discussion tab is for?

Good luck! :)

[rvivek]

Thank you for logging back in! I’d say the biggest differentiator among the ones you have mentioned is our connect to 3000+ companies who use our enterprise platform to screen & interview candidates. They would also like to interview interested candidates from the community.

On the pure play practice, we are working on introducing more real-world challenge set up + a real AI tutor