HackerRankReviews of hackerrank.com

Took test at Hackerrank as part of my interview process. I find the website poorly designed and instructions are wage. No proper support

At a German company, I was given a test assignment through a HackerRank link. Even in the assignment description, there were already absurd requirements — you must make sure that your solution doesn't match any existing ones. However, they didn’t explain it how were supposed to ensure that. Considering the nature of the tasks (standard, repetitive algorithmic problems that typically have template solutions), I still, as an honest person, spent two hours solving them, iteratively improving and refining my code. In the end, I received a message saying that plagiarism was detected. I contacted HackerRank support — no response. I also wrote to the company — also ignored.

What a bad website. Some problems edge cases are so poorly explained and you never know what is actually expected in the hidden cases. Like try to interpolate missing values from a time series, but you fail because your values are not in the std that is expected ? So you need to trial and errors until you find a good proxy randomly ? how is that a relevant exercise? The problem statements are overly complicated.

Unprofessional and bad approach of the issue.

Very bad customer care. They offer services that they don't support, no show up to the meetings. It's a waste of customers time - and we are paying big invoices for that kind of treatment.

The system is not interactive enough. It does not allow you to test code efficiently and is not very user friendly.

One of their test questions has a bug. I answered it correctly 4 different ways but it would not pass and therefore I could not continue. I submitted a suppor ticket 4 different times and got ZERO response from support. I needed to take the test as a prospective employer requireed it. Very disapointing and frustrating.

The exercises would be valuable practice were it not for the atrocious descriptions. Whoever writes the problems has a terrible grasp of English and very often word salad and confused terminology can lead you astray. It seems like the goal is to submit agreed-upon community answers, which is probably what any company hiring through Hackerrank expects as well. I prefer Codingame (though it is much harder) and LeetCode (though many questions are behind paywalls).