Interviewstreet - Hackers rejoice | Hacker News Reader

Interviewstreet - Hackers rejoice

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34 pointsrvivek30 comments

Hackers rejoice? Really? Should hackers "rejoice" at being asked to do silly puzzles for the privilege attending one of your wonderful interviews? Surely it's more like "companies with useless hiring processes rejoice"?

Hey almost, we're almost getting to put up real-world problems soon! We had a soft launch earlier this week and are working on the feedback. That said, we've got quite a lot of hackers who solve the challenges for fun :)

Sorry for the negative comment. I think the headline just rubbed me up the wrong way :) I do think I would just be annoyed at being asked to use your site but I'm sure it's going to be useful for others.

I do sometimes (quite often actually) do programming exercises for fun, but if you want me to do them not for fun you'd better at the very least be wasting your time as well as mine...

Thanks @almost for the feedback. The thing is, the blog post isn't written by us (@interviewstreet), it was written by some person who bumped onto our site. Would be careful before posting such dramatic stuff.

That said, we're bringing in real-world problems pretty soon. Do check it out :)

Hi almost,

Original blog post author here. Generally speaking, interview processes have undergone a fraction of the innovation that industry has seen. Hence, After learning about Interviewstreet and checking out all the amazing companies they've partnered with, I got a bit excited but I definitely didn't mean to offend :(

I remember the last HN thread about Interview street they promised more 'real world' problems, instead they added more euler style algorithm quizes. I guess the companies have achieved good results basing hiring decisions on these algorithm quizes, maybe someone from interviewstreet can share some results?

Hi Tomh, we've received good results on this puzzles. But that said, we had a soft launch on the real world puzzles where we gave a few server instances and EC2 had to go down that day :| We're launching one soon - a real-world hack, given a server.

About all these quizzes for hiring, I really found Techcrunch's Why The New Guy Can’t Code[1] quite insightful (at least for startups) and filled with great links.

Hiring Developers: You're Doing It Wrong[2] also delves a lot more into this paradigm, showing some hands on experience and show the evolution of their hiring process. This post got a lot of tracking and great comments on HN as well[3].

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/07/why-the-new-guy-cant-code/

[2] http://devinterviews.pen.io/

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2385424

Clearly this type of service isn't going to be the only way developers get jobs, and yes it may be somewhat insulting to people further along their careers to make them do this, but for someone starting out who doesn't have a large portfolio of achievement, or (even more importantly) doesn't have the degrees or college backgrounds that have increasingly become the primary metric for determining who gets entry level software engineering jobs (despite the ample evidence that these metric have minimal to any correlation with programming ability or productivity) this seems like a potentially life changing type of service. Anything that takes steps towards rationalizing the hiring process in our industry should be rejoiced. And if there are other services trying to do similar work too all the better- it's a big problem.

That said it would be great if you all did work on trying to push the meter more towards real world type of challenges as opposed to what do tend to be fairly contrived 'interview' style questions. The benefit of the platform you are building is that you can get people do work on larger scope problems that do a better job approximate the real day work of engineers. See as an example in this direction reddit's challenge to aspiring front end developers to build a reddit clone a couple months back:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/reddit-programmer/?utm_sour...

Congrats on the launch, good luck

I like the concept, but these questions are nearly pointless. Great, you get someone in college that loves algorithm puzzles who scores really well. So then what?

Exactly what kinds of jobs are these companies presenting? Ops, frontend, backend, marketing, database, CTO, etc? None of that information is present here.

This would be very useful if a company could post a set of questions relating to specific job roles. Companies using the service could view the effectiveness of problems being used by other companies and either adopt them for their own interviews, or use them as a metric as to the effectiveness of their questions.

Perhaps I'm someone at my company who knows that I need to hire a frontend engineer, but I only have a cursory clue to the kinds of questions I should even be asking for that role. I could examine the most effective questions that other companies use and be able to pick and choose the ones that will best fit the frontend role I'm seeking to fill at my company.

This service needs a LOT of polish and re-think before it becomes remotely useful to anyone.

> Heck, I don’t even know how to code!

And it shows. A lot, dare i say most, people who actually do code find solving puzzle after ridiculous puzzle for the mere hope of getting an interview very demeaning.

There are a ton of sites that do this, like Codility. Interviewstreet is a poor implementation of an already bad concept.

Oops - it's on similar lines. But, could you let me know what you didn't like about us, so that we could work on it?

Google login killed it for me. I didn't even try to look at more of your challenges.

The snippets of challenges on your homepage are almost entirely math problems. Math is an incredibly important part of software dev, but there's more than just math to software and your problems don't reflect that.

You overuse the word hacker. It's become a buzzword and you're perpetuating that problem.

And finally, your site is built on a flawed concept. Even if you fixed all of these problems, you didn't fix the core problem-- your business does the opposite of it's job because truly great """hackers""" won't jump through these hoops just for the hope of getting an interview.

This is just my opinion, of course. I sincerely wish you the best of luck with your business, but it definitely isn't for me.

Hi Mtogo, got it! We're in the process of launching real-world problems just like the reddit jobs page [http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/fjgit/reddit_is_doubli...] which is not only more than math problems, but more than algorithm challenges itself.

We're adding twitter auth / Fb connect as well. Is there a particular reason, why you don't like Google auth?

hi, feedback here:

when I got to 100 lines and then clicked "Compile", I needed to select text to scroll down, your lightbox needs something like overflow:auto to bring up scrollbars.

likewise, google account means a bounce for me even though I've got one, try to delay showing that

was a bit disappointed with the end result - just shows two green boxes, when I really wanted to see the metrics page from your promo video (http://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit/) (that demo is also too well hidden imo).

A little more in the program description would help, specifically IRL I'll know a rough target time and how this thing is likely to be used (eg. repeatedly, with mostly small numbers, etc.)

Also, the UI is annoying, split into 3 vertical panes: Problem | Code editor | Compile Output

Also randomise the test cases...

  int getNumberOfPrimes(int N) {
      return N == 100 ? 25 : 78498;
  }

Ah. okay, got it. That was just to give an idea of how compile & test, etc. looked, didn't think it would have an impact on the site, my bad. Would put up a proper sample test. Thanks so much for your feedback.

Hi mtogo,

The way I see it, the purpose of Interviewstreet is to provide a platform for skilled hackers to score tremendous opportunities without having to go through pre-screen interviews. A lot of these pre-screen interviews and traditional selection processes are based on check-lists, school grades, etc.

The intention here doesn't appear to be the solving of ridiculous puzzles all day in the hopes of finding a job. In fact, I think the aim is to remove jumping unnecessary hoops and give the hacker a chance to display his technical prowess up front - after all, that's their strongest suit!

This is my understanding of the site, maybe Vivek can shed some light here.

I'd like to be able to use Lua, D, and some Lisp to solve these problems. It seems like supporting these languages is a bit of work with your current model, but if you move to a model like that of Google Code Jam or Facebook Hacker Cup, you instantly support every programming language. These contests procedurally generate input each time the problem is attempted and let the programmer solve it on his own computer within a period of a few minutes.

Isn't it similar to codility.com or codeeval.com?

Well...also: http://www.coderloop.com, http://www.gild.com/, http://uva.onlinejudge.org/, http://www.spoj.pl/, http://www.codechef.com/ :)

Coderloop has also RealTime problems http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13GaYDoRwOg

the nice thing about contributions to open source is that it fits into a larger picture: communication, tests, users.

we're building a profile which would have only hacker stuff associated with it [stackoverflow, github, topcoder, etc.] serving as a neat link to a hacker if he/she wants to apply

Seems like an interesting website. Will there be issues of the questions and answers getting out? Or will that be obvious in a second round interview?

Yes, this acts as a pre-screener

In that sense it's probably a better pre-screener than a headhunter who says, "I see they're requesting a C guru, and my Word search found the letter C on your resume..."

Not only that, it seems like a lot more fun than going to an HR first-round interview!

ah, no love for lisp :(

We just added clojure support today. That counts as a lisp, right?

For me codility rulez!

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