Show HN: HackerRank's app guarantees an interview call after a coding challenge | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HackerRank's app guarantees an interview call after a coding challenge

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54 pointsrvivek33 comments

Are there actual licensed engineering professionals (ie electrical, mechanical) who resort to some made up ranks to separate themselves from the herd and use puzzles to judge the skillset of a potential employee? How does this work in industries other than software? Just genuinely curious here.

Putting the most positive spin on this situation as I can, I think the difference between software and other engineering disciplines is in software we are often hiring people to do things that have never been done before. Other disciplines can say, "we need you to design this, have you ever designed this before?" and the engineers can generally say, "yes, and this is how it went." For software the best way we can guess if people will be able to do the thing that they have never done before is to assess their general cleverness and problem solving skills, with puzzles.

Or something like that.

Is that true, or is it just that we're unaware of how much innovation exists in other fields?

What about other professionals? Doctors, accountants, architects.. do these people have to do silly puzzles as well?

"Design a footbridge across the Thames capable of sustaining a reasonable amount of traffic, using nothing but Tinker Toys and rubber bands. We don't care about the answer -- we just want to see how you think!"

Brilliant.

Is "Show HN" an appropriate category for a link to a TechCruch coverage? (Unless you are the creator of TechCrunch... and expect us learn about it from this post.)

The rules morph to accommodate the type of project. It's hard to show a mobile app directly, so an article describing the work with a link to the app is ok. In this case, since there's a web version, the Show HN post should probably have linked to that, with a mention of the article in the comments. But it's a bit late to change now so we'll leave it as is.

Is it wrong that I have zero interest in a new job, but want to sign up for a ready supply of interesting puzzles?

Why not just use normal HackerRank then...?

I love the general principle of this and applies to other professions.

I work in finance and accounting and it's rare for someone's technical skills to be evaluated in an interview.

The problem with that is that the profession becomes overrun with people who have zero ability to actually get things done in an efficient manner.

Not everyone need to be a coder, but most professionals do need to know how to leverage machines to automate their workflow and generate deeper insights.

If I were hiring people in my field (finance/accounting) I would love to use something like this to make sure a candidate can accomplish some basic analytic tasks and workflow automation tasks.

Looks like Uber and VMware are already using this product. Can anyone from those teams tell us about their experience?

My team (at VMware) has used HackerRank to hire. It worked out pretty well. The biggest advantage was being able to vet many candidates quickly. It's definitely improved our hiring process (it used to take us much longer to find a suitable candidate). I think my team was one of the first at our company to use it (and we haven't done much hiring since), so my knowledge about the specifics is a little out-of-date.

It would be really nice if something like this existed for internships - some of the companies listed (like Uber) seem to be extraordinarily hard to get a response from if you don't go to a target school.

We have 5 companies already ready to take interns. If you are interested, you can just email me: vivek@

I'm down, will do.

While I cannot vouch for whether or not this will land you an interview, HackerRank was very useful in preparing for interviews.

Also, the team is great - I signed up a long time ago and had some performance feedback for Vivek. They promptly implemented the change within a day. I haven't used it recently, but at the very least you'll get something out of it if you need practice.

Canadian companies too?

*guarantees an interview call after a coding challenge

Ok, we edited the title ("Show HN: HackerRank's app that guarantees an interview call") to make that explicit.

Yes, that's correct. Guarantees after clearing the qualification score for a coding challenge.

The point is that the omission makes your submission title somewhat misleading.

An app that guarantees an interview ipso facto would be interesting. An app that guarantees an interview after passing a coding challenge is standard fare for most tech job-hiring startups nowadays. (It also doesn't make much sense to offer a coding challenge on a smartphone either)

Got it. Will fix the title. However, the "guarantee" part if you pass a coding challenge isn't a standard. For eg: if you would like to apply to Facebook, how would you go about doing it now?

Standard for job-hiring startups like Hired and TripleByte, for example, not for the normal interview process. (Although I double checked and TripleByte does not do a programming challenge; they go straight to the interview)

It involves a lot of manual work on both hired & triplebyte . For instance in triplebyte, you get interviewed by the triplebyte team AND then proceed for an interview. We are bypassing those steps and getting them connected directly to companies.

Sorry, Hacker Rank can't make me guarantee anything.

Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

Deleted comment

You work for HackerRank.

EDIT: HN user name was ritikatrikha, same as Twitter with employment info.

Love the way you catch her :). Just being curious, who will be interviewing those that pass the code challenges?

The developers in the company.

She's cute. I think I found my next waifu.

What the other user did was bad, but this is egregious. If you comment like that on HN again we will ban your account.

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