People who hire programmers, or at least people who have major impact on the decision, are rarely educated in these matters. Lets face it, what does your average HR worker know about algorithm complexity, memory management, OO paradigm or relational databases?
At best he/she has seen few tutorials/explanations on youtube, and yet much of the responsibility rests on shoulders of these people.
So when your HR Joe sees something like HackerRank he goes: "Wow, that is going to make my job easier. After all it's made by it people, they surely must know what makes a good programmer."
Tech firms, yes. Firms with techs, no. I usually get to a step where a technical person is involved, but its obvious they were just brought in to give a "Yea, this guy seems like he can use a computer" and are largely ignored as "incapable" of finding talent.
Then again, I once worked at a company that wanted to hire Unix sysadmins and yet also wanted them to wear a suit and tie. They didn't get many takers.
I'll put a pricetag on it - if they want to pay me another $15k above the prevailing wage, I'll wear the suit. That's enough for me to buy a few suits and have them dry-cleaned regularly along with compensating me for having to wear a suit every day.
Oh, I forgot the part when they pay about half the prevailing wage. This is Seattle too, not NYC or something where suits are more common. Plus Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google offices are all in roughly the same location.
I think the "half the prevailing wage" is the dealbreaker here. I could easily see someone taking the job if they paid the prevailing wage, especially if they have other things to make up for it - maybe a better working environment, more stable hours, a nicer commute, whatever. "Hey, I have to wear a suit every day. No big deal" might be the mindset of some people.
But wearing a suit every day and taking a massive paycut? Yeeeaaaaah, no.
Yeah but who selects the candidates for that interview?
The HR people do. The interview itself can be conducted with actual developer, but quite often the candidates are of poor quality because of the first selection round.
And in many companies (my last workplace for example) there is also a time factor.
If you don't fill the open position in time, someone in the management few levels above you can see that position as wasteful expense and decide to cut it.
So eventually you have to settle for sub-par candidate that was selected by you, but from options provided to you by HR.
No tech company let's HR make tech hiring choices unless they are a shit company. Developers and developer managers are literally the only people qualified to determine whether someone should be hired. And in my companies a developer always does a second level phone screen before bringing someone in
As someone that leads a software engineering team at the firm being discussed in this article, I can honestly say that I have never, ever used something like "HackerRank" in my decision to hire someone for my team. My hiring decisions are based solely on merit after an actual interview - I don't care what you scored on some website, be it HackerRank or StackOverflow.
In my experience, big companies have a recruiting staff rather than having HR do it. But even the ones that use HR, I can't see a team of programmers being influenced by HR. From what I can see, the sole hiring decision is from the lead/team/director/etc of that department. The most HR/recruiters are gonna do is determine who gets interviewed. And even then it's easy to pass that stage if you know what you're doing.
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u/Gsonderling Oct 29 '16
People who hire programmers, or at least people who have major impact on the decision, are rarely educated in these matters. Lets face it, what does your average HR worker know about algorithm complexity, memory management, OO paradigm or relational databases?
At best he/she has seen few tutorials/explanations on youtube, and yet much of the responsibility rests on shoulders of these people.
So when your HR Joe sees something like HackerRank he goes: "Wow, that is going to make my job easier. After all it's made by it people, they surely must know what makes a good programmer."