We just published our 2025 Developer Skills Report. It combines survey responses from over 13,000 developers worldwide with platform data from millions of coding assessments on HackerRank.
For additional context, we are currently using problems which have test cases, and it feels as if it doesn't correctly reflect the day-to-day of a data scientist. In fact, many interviewers pass a candidate iff they pass the test cases.
I failed many job interviews because of HackerRank's and others' web-based IDE.
Do you mean I can run HackerRank without opening my browser? I didn't see this described in the invitation email I received or the interview URL I clicked.
Thank you for logging back in! I’d say the biggest differentiator among the ones you have mentioned is our connect to 3000+ companies who use our enterprise platform to screen & interview candidates. They would also like to interview interested candidates from the community.
On the pure play practice, we are working on introducing more real-world challenge set up + a real AI tutor
I think a general problem with most of these problems is that they’re biased towards how big US tech companies recruit.
However non-tech companies also want to assess coding skills but don’t care about algorithms & data structures.
A bunch of programmers today are not software engineers but analysts, data scientists, data engineers. So it might be worthwhile to examine how to access these applicants‘ skills.
For example for DS roles more Kaggle like real life problems might be suited better.
Wow, I'm surprised at the level of cynicism here. As a startup, the last thing on your mind is trying to optimize for a situation when a major bank collapses that too in a matter of days. There are many more urgent fires to put off. Sure, as a payroll company, you may wonder if this is indeed an edge case they need to take care of but the way the team, VCs harnessed in such a short period of time to delight customers is commendable. Think about all the things that needed to happen.
--> Move the primary banking provider from SVB to JPMC.
--> Get a set of engineers to have all-nighters to ensure the new payment system actually works. This is hundreds of millions of dollars worth of risk.
--> Raise $500m(?!!) in 48 hours to fund the payroll without any assurance from FDIC whether depositors are going to get the money back or not.
--> While doing all of this, respond to a massive influx of support tickets.
What this really shows is they are willing to go to a crazy extent (raise $500m in 48 hours!) to delight customers.
FWIW, I'm not affiliated with Rippling in any way but I do have a ton of respect for Parker for his ability to bounce back after the Zenefits debacle.
There’s no universal agreed upon definition for a startup but if at all you want to think of one, use growth rate. They have 1000 employees and $1b in the bank now. They had 1000 employees and $500m 48 hours back. They had 500 employees and $250m a year ago. They had 250 employees and $100m 2 years ago and so on..
I have to agree they’re not a startup. By the definition the parent comment provided, a lot of clearly-not-a-startup companies are startups.
How many new hires did Facebook add during the pandemic that are now being fired? Facebook is by no means a startup. It typically works the other way around: gawping headcount by thousands at a time requires the kind of organization that startups typically struggle with.
As a customer I am not sure I would even be delighted to not have to worry in the first place? Like great your business didn’t fail and cause me more issues - do I get a discount now for all the stress?
As James Acaster might say, I am too good for a free banana, and il reserve my delight for situations where I am actually delighted, not just delighted to not be up a creek ;)
Yes, you should be delighted. Normal work of operations is only guaranteed in normal circumstances. Any unusual castrophic situation is grey area, at best.
Not that long ago, Kronos, another time management and payroll company, faced a ransomware issue that caused a complete payroll outage for a month at some of their companies.
The fact that a bank failed in 24 hours and Rippling made changes to the system to route around that bank and raised capital to front customer payrolls on behalf of their employees is incredible. The default action would be to wait it out.
You really should be able to show appreciation in a situation like this. This is not “normal course of business” stuff.
I fully agree this is obviously (and should be!) out of the ordinary.
I’d be glad to do business with a company that cares. In my business, I walk away from prospective vendors that don’t demonstrative proactiveness or that just follow the pack.
I would absolutely expect them to be able to route around issues with a single bank in the same way I would expect Cloudflare to be able to route around issues facing a single data center. with that kind of business it doesn’t make sense to have a single point of failure with the money you manage. There should certainly be more than one bank in their portfolio, and the differences should be small enough to capitalize in an emergency.
If you’re not mitigating risks brought by your most important vendors, then you’re not mitigating your own risks. Any organization that’s serious about payroll will ask it’s payroll vendor about planning for various out-of-band failures.
I appreciate your take here, but frankly I think it ignores the absolutely enormous world of vendors and partners out there, and the challenges that startups face when navigating it.
Quite simply, there absolutely is neither enough time nor mental space to deeply evaluate and understand these types of risks for all of your vendors. Further, this is one of those risks that is abundantly clear in hindsight but a person without deep financial experience or one who hasn't gone through this exact problem would really have no reason to understand or ask about it.
In fact, a person without intimate knowledge in payroll software might have no reason to even understand that there is an intermediate bank account in which funds are parked en-route to employees. It's just extremely unrealistic to expect someone to be thinking about this when picking a payroll vendor. Just like it would be unrealistic for me to expect an employer to perform a deep analysis of an insurance company's historical MLR and books to ensure they're sufficiently liquid and solvent to fund an employee's medical emergency.
Like it or not, social proof is a fairly critical construct in the world, and without it we'd be stuck spending more time analyzing our decisions than we do living with them.
Hello again, Vivek, founder/CEO here. In the interest of moving swiftly, here are the actions we are going to take:
(1) We have withdrawn the DMCA notice for sympy; Sent a note to senior leadership in Github to act on this quickly.
(2) We have stopped the whole DMCA process for now and working on internal guidelines of what constitutes a real violation so that these kind of incidents don't happen. We are going to do this in-house
(3) We are going to donate $25k to the sympy project.
As a company we take a lot of pride in helping developers and it sucks to see this. I'm extremely sorry for what happened here.
I have received fake DMCA requests from WorthIT Solutions, Pakistan that you guys seems to have hired. It is sent for a simple blog entry discussing about programming algorithm!
I guess it is pretty much perjury penalty risk free to make such DMCA declaration from outside of US:
>Declaration:
I have taken fair use into consideration.
I have a good faith belief that the use of the copyrighted materials as described above is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
It would probably be prudent to withdraw your other DMCA notices until you figure this out. You're being given the benefit of the doubt, and the other counternotice on Github doesn't exactly portray you in the best light either.
It would probably be prudent to withdraw all existing notices, never submit one again, and send donations to every single project you have ever sent a DMCA notice to, and do everything in your power to get all content re-instated, everywhere.
You aren't even really a content company, this is such a bad look. Your value is in your network of people, not in the content.
Without a discussion of how/why you thought this would be a good idea and how this has been happening on an ongoing basis, we can't really accept your apology.
Regarding (3), are you going to make similar contributions to all of the other projects that you have issued unjustifiable takedown notices? As I see it, the only reason you are making this contribution is because you got called out in public and you are getting free PR.
Proportionate contributions to other projects and individuals would go a long way to showing that you are not just playing lip service to your admission of wrongdoing. You have hurt a lot of people, and you need to make amends for your shenanigans. At the very least, you need to comp any legal fees incurred by your actions.
Personally I like Hacker Rank and consider it a good way to learn about new algorithms but at the same time I do not like the style of interviews that require it and it makes me wish I could leave the industry because it's a waste of time for people with a lot of practical experience and who have a good portfolio of apps/sites they've created.
That said, I would recommend not doing DMCA at all unless it's really serious. Sounds like your company has a lot of problems with this. Think StackOverflow, there are plenty of sites that copy it but I'm not aware of them going after anyone. If anything all the copying of a site makes it more of an authoritative source because a lot of people reference it.
it's fairly simple, at some point you have to evaluate somone technical skills to make sure they are suitble for the job, and well designed tests do that.
There is an abundance of bad tests out there, but blanket statements that you won't use a tool that is used for assessing candiates is just as rediculas as saying you won't give apply to jobs that ask for your cv to apply.
Well no, if a company is happy to pay six figures but lacks the desire to spend an hour or two pair programming or even just creating a tech test, their priorities are all wrong and I don’t want to work for them. Hiring is about people and not robots, so using automated tests like Hacker Rank that almost always have zero bearing on how a problem would be solved in a real environment is a testament to a lazy hiring process and an extremely poor reflection on the company. Don’t try to automate something that should intrinsically involve human interaction.
Comparing it to a CV is a false equivalence because it takes me O(1) effort to make and CV and O(n) to do some stupid timed algorithm test for every company that is interested in the value of my labour.
I understand why you're getting downvoted but I have to say that I agree with the gist of what you're saying. We use HackerRank mostly just to package a problem set and put a timer in place for upload, nothing more clever than that, so if someone pattern matched "HackerRank test" to "disrespectful" I would think of that as a severe red flag and move on to another candidate.
There are many "in good faith" steps that both parties must do in the interview process, wherein if either party drops the ball it really makes sense for both parties to cut their losses and move on; which I believe is what you are getting at.
> it's fairly simple, at some point you have to evaluate somone technical skills to make sure they are suitble for the job, and well designed tests do that.
There is employment contract for a trial period, because you only know how good coder is when they face real problems/code. Writing sort algorithms on white board might look cool, but in real world you will search internet for best algorithms for your case, look up generic one, so you will not make a trivial error writing it from memory, or just use equivalent of std::sort.
StackOverflow contributions are (thankfully!) licensed under the very permissive CC-BY-SA license. I suspect the sites ripping them off are not infringing copyright.
>"As a company we take a lot of pride in helping developers and it sucks to see this."
I don't understand this because as others on this thread have pointed out you have done this before.
Further isn't much of your own content just plagiarized from other people's previous FAANG interviews?
I've never used HackerRank as I view it as something of scourge on the industry but I will probably go to extra effort and recommend to other that they not use it either.
Reading elsewhere in the thread it looks like they have been relying on firms in Pakistan and elsewhere to scour the internet for strings that appear in Hacker Rank and submit DMCA takedowns when they find these strings elsewhere. This becomes awkward when it is in fact Hacker Rank that copied the strings from the source they are DMCAing.
They should probably never send a DMCA again. It's political suicide in this industry anyway.
We really need a strikes policy for DMCA submitters built into the legislation. Like submit three dubious claims, and you lose your copyright. I've been saying it for literally 15 years.
That is how business is run in the US, but not exclusively. They don't want to have dirty hands and hired some company with specific profile to do this job for them. They took a time to find company like this. This is not an unexpected accident. And when things become hot, they blow some money to shut other mouths.
Shady practice for the bad people who got caught several times. Taking responsibility for them will be ceasing whole business. Just stop doing bad things.
>Reading elsewhere in the thread it looks like they have been relying on firms in Pakistan and elsewhere to scour the internet for strings that appear in Hacker Rank and submit DMCA takedowns when they find these strings elsewhere.
Who ever thought this was a good idea? Those firms and the "monkeys" they hire have an incentive to send takedowns everywhere to make it look like they are "doing something".
But since there are no consequences for sending them to the wrong places, I guess they don't care much.
Nice I suppose these were the pointers given to you by your PR team? What prompted (2) after all this time, considering there are previous instances of HackerRank acting hostile?
Curious how things got to the point where it took public outrage on HN to move the needle on this issue. Legal department going crazy with stuff without you realizing it maybe?
Repentance was the last thing I expected to find in here, and it did go a long way towards lowering my blood pressure.
Please don’t ever use DMCA in this way again. Even if it were somehow borderline justifiable, your users will be motivated to lambaste your company into oblivion, and to wish non-existence upon your company. Probably not the best posture for anybody concerned.
> Hello again, Vivek, founder/CEO here. In the interest of moving swiftly, here are the actions we are going to take:
So you are taking action only after news spilled all over the internet? So I can assume that if no one(in internet terms) known about it (as described in links pointing to other DMCA cases), you would do nothing to remedy your illegal (from moral stand point of view, no real one) actions.
It's only illegal if you get caught and find someone willing to prosecute you. Also if penalty for breaking law is a fine, then this law only applies to poor people.
