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You should be able to implement something easy in 30 minutes even in an interview situation. And most Hackerrank are not about implementing linked lists or trees, but actually using data structures such as trees or hashes, so its perfectly fine to use the data structures (and algorithms) included the standard libraries of C++, Java or Python. Take something such as Marc's Cakewalk. It easily can be implemented using a few lines of code (e.g.: 10 lines of non-golfed python). It shows if you are able to spot the trivial greedy algorithm and are somehow able to sort a small amount of numbers, but the number is so small that even bubblesort would work well.

Hackerrank can't measure the best developers because the best developers don't waste time on hackerrank.

This is an insupportable statement.

the questions that hackerrank provides don't measure developer skill particularly well. A lot of them are more like tutorials.

And a lot of them are tricky dynamic programming problems with constraints designed to force you to find the correct algorithmic solution because any other will murder your CPU. I mean, perhaps you could sketch out a solution for this one? I was having a bit of a tough time finding the efficient solution, personally.

The simpler problems are of course far more tedious but I think it's probably not a bad way to pick up a functional programming language or two.

The more I read your post, the more silly I find it. You seem to be either unaware that there are difficult problems on this site, or you seem to doubt that other people can come up with hard programming challenges. Or, if you do not find any programming problems to be challenging, you must admit that it's possible to design challenges for lesser mortals. I may be singling myself out as the chaff rather than the wheat by saying so, but I disagree that HackerRank does not provide a reasonable measure of programming aptitude. However, even assuming that HackerRank is a terrible measure -- what better one did you have in mind?

That train left year ago. He's delusional if he thinks a race is even an option. The US is years behind and isn't even in the running. Hell we've just started to realize this is something we ought to /start/ training professionals for. We've still got people trying to outlaw security tools.

http://breakingdefense.com/201...
http://blog.hackerrank.com/whi...
http://www.techinsider.io/nort...
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/he...
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/...

We're years behind the competition, where professionals have been getting trained and put to work for many years. We're just getting to the point of having courses in hacking, never mind college degree based level training. How the hell are we going to enter a race when only a handful of three letter agencies even have professional hackers in their employ? This isn't the kind of thing your going to call up your local friendly pen-test company for. You can't win a race you refuse to enter.