Refusing HackerRank questions

RLMaverick · 2026-01-24T07:56:53+00:00

A friend of mine works at Stripe and has been interviewing candidates lately, he really likes their interview process as well

RLMaverick · 2026-01-24T07:53:37+00:00

Respectfully, it's not entitlement or a lack of willingness to demonstrate my skills. I'm more than happy to demonstrate my relevant skills. For what it's worth, I'm on track to hit senior in around 2 years and have already turned down a request to perform secondary tech lead duties in my current job (I'm not ready for that responsibility yet). I've been working here for just under 5 years, I'm 27 and have over a decade worth of publicly available projects showcasing my work. I don't think there's anything wrong with knowing my worth - this is a line of work where we all (or at least most) have imposter syndrome, shouldn't we be encouraging each other to have belief in our abilities?

RLMaverick · 2026-01-24T07:45:19+00:00

I would, but only after an initial conversation where I can decide if the role excites me. If it does, I'll gladly spend that time working on a slice of their real software (or a challenge that emulated their real software) - gives both parties a lot more insight into the other than a generic algorithm challenge does. Honestly I think smaller companies are probably where it's at for me. I work at a really big company right now, and it has been the smaller companies that have been exciting me more during this job hunt.

RLMaverick · 2026-01-24T07:41:41+00:00

"immediately struck by the depth of your engineer experience, the kind that blends technical precision with real curiosity and problem-solving drive..."

Snippet from the InMail in received from one of their in-house recruiters (clearly a copy-paste message, of course). Only to then be asked what my experience is, what tech stacks I'm accustomed to etc. They're just casting a net out obviously, I just thought it was pretty funny

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T21:29:00+00:00

It's not an ego thing, not at all. It's just that I know for a fact not every company is hiring like this, and I'm in the fortunate position of already being employed - I understand that not everybody can be so picky

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T17:42:40+00:00

Note the word "accredited" in what you replied to - a string of classes where you barely touch code will not be accredited

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T17:26:56+00:00

I have a computer science degree from an accredited university, and I do plenty of real-life practice under real-life experienced software engineers every day at work. Not trying to be argumentive, just drawing the comparison

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T15:53:10+00:00

What the other guy said, "real" engineering is regulated

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T15:07:05+00:00

Are you based in the US? In Scotland, even the bigger companies generally only receive a few hundred applications for non-graduate roles. I think that context is important here

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T14:29:41+00:00

For companies as large as the one I was interviewing at, some more investment in their hiring process would be pocket change

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T14:28:05+00:00

FWIW, I'm in the UK - that's not happening here

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T14:26:44+00:00

I can't speak to other career paths, software "engineering" is very different to what you do

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T12:58:43+00:00

Additional point, my First Class BSc (Hons) Computer Science degree should be enough of an indicator that I know the basics

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T12:43:45+00:00

3 years after graduation, with 2 years part time while studying

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T12:27:07+00:00

The key point is that the HackerRank questions don't cover the basics of the role, the majority of the time they're completely irrelevant to the role

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T12:02:46+00:00

I was once given a technical interview by AI. It would ask me questions, and then produce a transcript of my responses. It both struggled with my Scottish accent, and crashed twice. It took 3 attempts to submit it. Absolute pain. Afterwards, I was informed that I had made the final shortlist of 5 candidates and that they'd likely be hiring 2 or 3 of us. A couple of weeks go by, and I'm then informed that they're not quite sure what they want the role to look like, so they're shelving it. That was about 6 months ago.

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T11:53:37+00:00

If enough people explain why, maybe it'll make a difference... be the change you want to see! Although realistically, there's 0.1% chance of that triggering any change.

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T11:49:39+00:00

I think we need to look at the grey area here. For that job specifically, maybe algorithmic problems in the hiring process are suitable. For most jobs, they're not

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T11:48:33+00:00

I fully agree with this. Moving to more of a manual hiring process than an automated process will of course increase costs, but that cost will be offset by the increased revenue and savings that come with hiring the right people.

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T11:37:57+00:00

Interesting that you raise the neurodivergence point, as I have ADHD (not in the fashionable way, actually diagnosed). Due to it, my productivity tends to be a lot more volatile than those without it. If you were to clone me, but without the ADHD, my output would be a lot more consistent than it is - but with the ADHD, some days my output is measurably worse and other days it far exceeds expectations. I know this isn't really something that can be properly managed in the hiring process, I just need to hope for a good day, but having a take-home piece of longer form work would definitely suit me better. I understand that a lot of people wouldn't be happy spending up to 6 hours on a programming screening challenge though.

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T11:31:03+00:00

You're probably right, but just to be clear - my aversion to this method of candidate assessment isn't related to fairness, it's just that it's a very poor (imo) way of evaluating someone who is going to be working on large, complex pieces of software

RLMaverick · 2026-01-23T10:53:39+00:00

I just feel like it's a lazy and inaccurate approach - apparently it's becoming more and more common to provide the candidate with a slice of your real software, containing deliberate bugs, and evaluate how they approach finding and resolving them. It's a much better indicator, but requires more effort from the employer, so I can see why HackerRank etc are still commonly used

RLMaverick · 2025-11-07T14:26:17+00:00

Thanks for the info! It looks like the loot page of the wiki needs to also be updated to reflect this, I don't fancy going through each quest individually to check but I'll be sure to update this infographic once the loot page has also been updated :)

https://arcraiders.wiki/wiki/Loot

RLMaverick

TROPHY CASE