
Interviewstreet - Hackers rejoice - rvivek
http://uzairchutani.tumblr.com/
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almost
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"?

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rvivek
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 :)

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almost
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...

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uzair88
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 :(

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tomh-
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?

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DanielRibeiro
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>

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tks
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...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/reddit-
programmer/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29)

Congrats on the launch, good luck

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geuis
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.

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mtogo
> _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.

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rvivek
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?

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anc2020
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;
      }

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rvivek
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.

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anonymoushn
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.

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

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openmosix
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>

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diN0bot
the nice thing about contributions to open source is that it fits into a
larger picture: communication, tests, users.

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rvivek
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

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mathattack
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?

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rvivek
Yes, this acts as a pre-screener

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mathattack
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..."

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uzair88
Not only that, it seems like a lot more fun than going to an HR first-round
interview!

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galactus
ah, no love for lisp :(

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

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KateP
For me codility rulez!

