Any time a company asks me to do a HackerRank test, I immediately reject them. It's just not possible to have a quality engineering team and to also believe the results of HackerRank tests correspond to on-the-job success.
HackerRank is an attempt to commoditize software labor (literally reducing evaluation of your labor fitness to standardized examples). It communicates immediately that creativity is valued less than standardization, and that your uniformity and compliance are more valuable than your experiences.
It's also a way to position developers as lower-status employees -- you essentially have to capitulate to the judgement of higher-status employees. Even if you ace the code test, it puts you in a defensive position to justify yourself, which inherently reduces your negotiation power. If you submit something that is even slightly unconventional (even if it's provably just as or more accurate than conventional submissions), then your negotiation power is extremely damaged.
For example, think of the difference between actors who must audition and actors who are "offer only" -- they won't respond to your inquiry about hiring them unless you're prepared, based on their previous work, to make an offer already. If you ask Robert De Niro to audition, you'll get laughed out of the room. HackerRank is often like asking Robert De Niro not only to audition, but to do some kind of two-bit community improv class warm up exercise for his audition, then grilling him because he didn't enunciate clearly. Ridiculous.
Employers often say they want to "see how you think" -- when they say this, it's a good idea to run the other way. No one can grok some whiteboard code or some timed code test on standardized examples and draw any meaningful conclusions about "how you think" or how it will relate to job success. Someone who believes they can "see how you think" from narrow, time-constrained examples is going to be a terrible colleague or, worse, a very dysfunctional boss.
I think the trend of cultivating "full-stack" developers (instead of benefiting from specialization and separation of concerns) is the number one problem facing the software industry right now (and folks are largely in denial about it).
This nonsense with commodity interviews via HackerRank is the number two problem, followed closely by the prevalence of open-plan offices and the prevalence of Agile-like workflow management processes.
HackerRank is an attempt to commoditize software labor (literally reducing evaluation of your labor fitness to standardized examples). It communicates immediately that creativity is valued less than standardization, and that your uniformity and compliance are more valuable than your experiences.
It's also a way to position developers as lower-status employees -- you essentially have to capitulate to the judgement of higher-status employees. Even if you ace the code test, it puts you in a defensive position to justify yourself, which inherently reduces your negotiation power. If you submit something that is even slightly unconventional (even if it's provably just as or more accurate than conventional submissions), then your negotiation power is extremely damaged.
For example, think of the difference between actors who must audition and actors who are "offer only" -- they won't respond to your inquiry about hiring them unless you're prepared, based on their previous work, to make an offer already. If you ask Robert De Niro to audition, you'll get laughed out of the room. HackerRank is often like asking Robert De Niro not only to audition, but to do some kind of two-bit community improv class warm up exercise for his audition, then grilling him because he didn't enunciate clearly. Ridiculous.
Employers often say they want to "see how you think" -- when they say this, it's a good idea to run the other way. No one can grok some whiteboard code or some timed code test on standardized examples and draw any meaningful conclusions about "how you think" or how it will relate to job success. Someone who believes they can "see how you think" from narrow, time-constrained examples is going to be a terrible colleague or, worse, a very dysfunctional boss.
I think the trend of cultivating "full-stack" developers (instead of benefiting from specialization and separation of concerns) is the number one problem facing the software industry right now (and folks are largely in denial about it).
This nonsense with commodity interviews via HackerRank is the number two problem, followed closely by the prevalence of open-plan offices and the prevalence of Agile-like workflow management processes.