Well, that was unexpected. In the following, I’m trying to follow Jon Evans’ advice from “The Terrible Technical Interview”.
To: [email protected]
From: Ahmed Fasih
Subject: Re: Programming Test Invitation
Hi there! Thanks for offering to let me take a HackerRank test for ABC, I appreciate the vote of confidence.
I'd never heard of HackerRank, but after you wrote two other employers sent me their own HackerRank tests. Having worked on those tests first (I considered them practice, for the real thing with ABC :), I'd like to check if you have flexibility in finding an alternative way to evaluate my basic coding chops.
This is because, as functional programmer and author Paul Chiusano says, "Programming is all about managing complexity" [1], but HackerRank is quite bad at measuring my ability to manage complexity. It asks for small algorithmic coding puzzles to be done in unnatural conditions including (1) time limits, (2) forbidding research on Wikipedia or StackOverflow, (3) forbidding collaboration, and (4) forbidding the use of libraries (Python and JavaScript e.g. are so different when confined to their vanilla languages without Numpy/Pandas or lodash/npm packages).
I'm hoping ABC's recruitment policy is flexible enough to let me offer alternative, or at least parallel, routes to quantifying my skill in coding—skills in managing complexity, selecting libraries, and extending existing code, not just solving algorithmic puzzles. I have written a number of open-source projects that I'd love to spend two hours adding features and squashing bugs:
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Ebisu is a Python (and JavaScript) library I wrote to implement a Bayesian estimation problem (for scheduling quizzes in spaced-repetition software): I have a detailed writeup on what it does at https://fasiha.github.io/ebisu/ and the source code lives at https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu
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Mudder.js is a JavaScript library I wrote that implements simple arithmetic in arbitrarily-high-base numbering systems to lexicographically-subdivide string space, which is useful in NoSQL databases for use as keys: a detailed writeup is included in the repo at https://github.com/fasiha/mudderjs
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The Texture Shaded Globe lets you interactively visualize the world's elevation and terrain after it's been texture-shaded, which is a fractional-Laplacian frequency-domain operation that I wrote in Python to work on ~100 gigabytes of data: the app is at https://fasiha.github.io/texshade-cesium-viewer/ and a description of it, with links to specific views, is at https://fasiha.github.io/post/texshade/
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KanjiBreak is a webapp I wrote in JavaScript and Elm to collaborate with my friends and family who were also learning Chinese/Japanese characters. We are using it to make a character dependency graph: the app is at https://kanjibreak.glitch.me and includes a detailed "Help" section (it may take a few seconds to load the first time, since Glitch is a free resource that spins down inactive servers).
These are just four projects I picked as I scrolled through my list of recently-committed GitHub projects [2] that I think showcase not just skill in programming but also in math and design.
Would ABC be willing to work with me to define a better way to check my technical qualifications by choosing one of these projects (or any other project of mine!) to perhaps conduct a code review and/or add an enhancement that you would like to see? I think that would be a much more interesting and useful way to spend two hours, rather than implementing cute little algorithms inside an isolated environment like HackerRank.
I'm hoping that, if the HackerRank test turns out to be an absolute requirement for ABC, that we can do something like the above in addition to HackerRank.
Thanks for considering it! I'd love to work for ABC, and I hope I'm not being too forward or presumptuous by sending you this long email.
Best regards,
Ahmed
[1] See http://pchiusano.github.io/2017-01-20/why-not-haskell.html
[2] At https://github.com/fasiha?tab=repositories
As a programmer working with the greatest teammates, I believe only very few of them, if any at all, can answer moderate level of algorithm tests on Hackerrank website. But I would work with them anytime or hire them in a heartbeat if I were an employer.
They have been dealing with higher level problems on daily basis rather than writing code to find out how many palindromes with maximum 4-letter vowels are there from a given string. The problems for them usually involve figuring out how to finish a task that comes with unrealistic time frame, implementing a ground breaking feature that can fit in with the legacy code in backward-compatibility manner, to find a bug in time-attack fashion from the production code written by someone else who already left the company, to convince the product owner that his "beautiful UI" can be improved, to communicate with other teams located across the globe, juggling between Java, C#, JavaScript, and Kotlin codes from multiple projects/micro services and confused with the syntax and data types, trying to be patient with scrum processes, meetings, and corporate processes, being lost in thousands of JIRA tasks and confluence pages, etc...
The simplistic idea of a good programmer being able to come up with a good algorithm in few minutes without looking up any reference doesn't fit with the current enterprise software industry. Most of the enterprise application programmers have never had to write their own sorting algorithm after they have left the school. If they had to take these tests, they have to invest not just 1 or 2 hours to take the test, but there also is a amount of time needed to refresh their memory about what they learned many years ago. Besides, not all of them are singles, they have families, and their own commitments. Time is a extremely valuable commodity.
Having said that, these tests are useful if the employer is looking for someone with excellent algorithms skills and the job requires writing brilliant ones, or the employer is looking for perfect or near-perfect programmers who are good with both algorithm and real life problems.
In any case, It would be great to have hiring manager or an senior employee from the hiring team taken the test to see if it really fits the position they are hiring for, instead of letting HR make a decision whether to use those tests. For me personally, I would prefer to talk to someone about solving real world problems with enough technical questions- those not from textbook - sprinkled on.