Why I think HackerRank is not good for tech interview preparation

HackerRank might be good if you would like to take part in coding contest. But not if you are preparing to tech interview.

My first “assignment” during this preparation was to complete “Cracking the Coding interview” course on HackerRank. The tutorial was great. It was mostly about basic concepts but it was good to have an overview of various approaches and types of problems.

There is another section: “Algorithms”

Screenshot from HackerRank dashboard

I tried to solve a few problems and the experience was frustrating.

1. First of all problem descriptions are very verbose. Sometimes you spend more time reading the problem than solving it.
2. There is also no boilerplate code for parsing input. That’s especially frustrating when you not only have multiline input for your test case but also multiple numbers of these cases.
3. Test cases are super meaningless

I guess all of these is useful when you would like to take part in coding competition. But not for interview preparation.