Getting to your dream job: 10 points in how to beat the HackerRank Challenge.

More and more companies are using HackerRank challenge to process their engineering candidates. If you are not familiar with HackerRank, it provides competitive programming challenges where developers compete by trying to program according to provided specifications. The submission of the participants are graded according to the accuracy of its output.

Given it’s nature, there are many inherent issues if company relies too heavily on HackerRank for screening. HackerRank is like your standardized test — it tests you more on your “examination skills” than your substantive knowledge.

I came across a Linkedin article that had eloquently put (one of) the major drawback(s) of HackerRack:

My take-away from all this is that HackerRank is a poor indicator of a developer’s problem solving capabilities, and like so many of these things is only really good at assessing one thing, namely how good the candidate is at completing HackerRank tests. — Be ware of HackerRank, Richard Linnell

The same applies to Kaggle. I just talked to a candidate about how he did a well above average challenge without actually understanding data science at all.

There are many other articles covering the drawbacks on using HackerRank (including one on how using HackerRank (and other similar platform) can ruin your chance of hiring good senior developer).

That being said, it is understandable that why companies would adopt that for initial testing: it’s fast, least costly and can screen out people who wouldn’t even bother to do it.

[Shameless ad: If you are a hiring manager who agrees with what we said so far, we have something better for you! Our team is developing a series of technical challenges that aim to help you understand a candidate’s technical capability, not their examination skill. Please get in touch!]

Given that it would remain and probably continue to grow as a way for companies to screen for talents, our team has come up with a list of things that you can do to prepare yourself for HackerRank challenge:

1. Challenges are timed, make sure you are not disturbed and focused.
2. 20–30% of your success comes from system familiarity. Before you start the actual coding challenge, try others, e.g. algorithms warm up. Make sure you know how to execute and submit your code.
3. Understand allowed programming languages for the test. If your language of choice is not available, practice another one.
4. Usually there are multiple problems to solve in every challenge and its a mistake to start with the hardest one. A good approach is to solve problems in ascending difficulty/time order. Read them briefly first and decide implementation order.
5. Try to minimize switching time between problems after the implementation. You could spend extra time to make sure it’s a “final” implementation and not come back to it again.
6. Every problem has public and private test cases. You score is based on both. If code implementation passed all of the public test cases, it does not meat it would pass all of the private test cases. Think about edge situations, e.g. empty input, one element input, two elements, many elements, etc. HackeRank environment allows you to run the code on your custom tests.
7. Submit at least something for every problem. It’s easy to capture some points even if you do not know how to solve the problem. However, if you don’t know how to solve all the problems, try to figure out at least one.
8. Home preparation makes the difference: some templates might help as you could copy-paste them during the challenge. For example, BFS/DFS/Binary search.
9. Practice first as much as you can. You could try solving at least one problem from every algorithmic subdomain.
10. A good result is not a magic, it’s practice and sweat.

May the force be with you! 💪

Bonus:

1. How to get top machine learning badge on HackerRank (by our very own Kirill Pavlov!)
2. Cracking the HackerRank Test: 100% score made easy — the HFT guy .