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hacker rank needed for quant dev roles?

Joined
10/5/18
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6
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Heard from a recruiter that I needed a good score on a hacker rank test in order to be considered for interviews. I'm trying to switch industries (from a computer programmer in Tech w/ 9+ yrs experience and a MS in math)

But if you've never heard about the hacker rank, it's notoriously buggy, unreliable, some may even argue useless. Before sinking time prepping for that test, I'd like some confirmation from other's in the industry.
 
I'm looking to lateral as well.

Regarding preparing on these sites there was a job that used them for screening. I poured a lot of time into prep and it paid off. I'm sure the same would hold for these jobs. If a company uses hacker rank as their screening process you should definitely practice on hacker rank. This is because the test isn't "do you know CS" it's really "Can you do hacker rank problems". So, if you want the gig, learn to do hacker rank problems.

Also the problems can be kind of fun and mentally stimulating anyways :)
 
The problem is that hackerrank can be painful. I've been spending the past week or so on problems and here are some of my complaints:

- hard-to-undertand questions. Like it'll take you 1 hr just to understand what it's asking vs a few minutes of actual coding. It's probably because some question writers are not a native English speakers *and* don't understand math/CS notation

- questions with bad test cases. You've implemented the question. You triple checked. You quadruple check. Yet the tests fail. You randomly change a parameter and the tests magically pass. It's probably because questions are not vetted.

- questions that really test something else. I went through some of the "array" questions. But to pass, you had to make sure the code ran in linear time. That's fine, but then it's not really an "array" question, is it? It was particularly painful when the problem was in the *boilerplate* code. the boilerplate code!

Overall, the idea of hackerrank as you say is "mentally stimulating"...the actual experience is more like mentally frustrating :)

So if i didn't have to go thru this dog-and-pony show, I would prefer not to
 
A related remark: all of the Quantnet/Baruch C++ quizzes and exercises have been coded up before unleashing them. You don't want to be wasting students' time on stuff that doesn't work.

Writing unambiguous text is not easy. A native speaker is (almost) essential.

Blogs :: Datasim

Blogs :: Datasim
 
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Oh nice @Daniel Duffy , way better practicing on something known to work. I've focusing on sharpening my Java skills though. Another recruiter told me that there were Java jobs out there. Might be worth revisiting that assumption though.

On recent job listings it's been mainly language agnostic---(C#, Java, or some OOP required, maybe some Python or R)
 
C# is also popular. As well as 'mixed' C++/C# programming model.
 
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