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HackerRank Tries To Calculate Which US States Have The Best Developers (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Palo Alto-based HackerRank, which offers online programmng challenges, "dug into our data of about 450,000 unique U.S. developers to uncover which states are home to the best software engineers, and which pockets of the country have the highest rate of developer growth." Examining the 24 months from 2015 through the end of 2016, they calculated the average score for each state in eight programming-related domains. (Algorithms, data structures, functional programming, math, Java, Ruby, C++, and Python.) But it seems like low-population states would have fewer people taking the tests, meaning a disproportionate number of motivated and knowledgeable test takers could drastically skew the results. Sure enough, Wyoming -- with a population of just 584,153 -- has the smallest population of any U.S. state, but the site's second-highest average score, and the top score in three subject domains -- Ruby, data structures, and algorithms. And the District of Columbia -- population 681,170 -- has the highest average score for functional programming.
California, New York and Virginia still had the highest number of developers using the site, while Alaska, Wyoming and South Dakota not surprisingly had the least number of developers. But maybe the real take-away is that programmers are now becoming more distributed. HackerRank's announcement notes that the site "found growing developer communities and skilled developers all across the country. Previously, the highest concentrations of developers did not stray far from the tech hubs in California. Hawaii, Colorado, Virginia, and Nevada demonstrated the fastest growth in terms of developer activity on the HackerRank platform..." In addition, "we've had a noticeable uptick in customers across industries, from healthcare to retail and finance, with strong demand for identifying technical skills quickly."
Their conclucion? "Today, as the demand for developers goes beyond technology and as there is more opportunity to work remotely, there's a more distributed workforce of skilled developers across the nation, from the Rust Belt to the East Coast... Software developers aren't just attached to VCs, startups or Silicon Valley anymore."
California, New York and Virginia still had the highest number of developers using the site, while Alaska, Wyoming and South Dakota not surprisingly had the least number of developers. But maybe the real take-away is that programmers are now becoming more distributed. HackerRank's announcement notes that the site "found growing developer communities and skilled developers all across the country. Previously, the highest concentrations of developers did not stray far from the tech hubs in California. Hawaii, Colorado, Virginia, and Nevada demonstrated the fastest growth in terms of developer activity on the HackerRank platform..." In addition, "we've had a noticeable uptick in customers across industries, from healthcare to retail and finance, with strong demand for identifying technical skills quickly."
Their conclucion? "Today, as the demand for developers goes beyond technology and as there is more opportunity to work remotely, there's a more distributed workforce of skilled developers across the nation, from the Rust Belt to the East Coast... Software developers aren't just attached to VCs, startups or Silicon Valley anymore."
CA. Done.
Sixty second zoological reconstruction of a creimer post on Slashdot
1) Truly the best out there - probably not necessary for most projects, and they might/will get bored.
2) Good enough.
3) Good enough and cheapest.
4) Good enough and available locally.
5) Good enough and no training required.
5) People in my posse or family tree.
maybe they should switch to politics. we could use some functionality there.
The best developers all attended the tremendous Trump Iniversity. If that's not on your resume, don't even *think* about applying to work at my company.
That's why were not attracted to them anymore.
The most talented developers are the ones surviving on their own outside of Silicon Valley.
Hackerrank can't measure the best developers because the best developers don't waste time on hackerrank.
Furthermore, even if we assume that some of the best developers do spend time on hackerrank, the questions that hackerrank provides don't measure developer skill particularly well. A lot of them are more like tutorials.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sorry - couldn't help myself ... A Rust Belt passing through several immutable states...
Once when I could still see sharp I saw a python drinking a cup of java...
oh - I found the door, bye!
There's 2 reasons for this BS.
First, large corps are going to want to find meritocratic-looking ways to discriminate against experienced employee's. Notice how the article is ranking people in Ruby and downplays C++. This is the same game as Microsoft and Cisco making their certificaton candidates answer advertising questions; you need to be stupid enough to learn any langauge we tell you which means you're young.
The second is accountants. Constantly forcing people into the un-meritocratic process of assessing them exists to give accountants, who agrate people to numbers all day long, numbers to make justifications with. Accountants are supposed to stand on the sideline and report accurately. The moment they get into running anything, they immediatly mess it up.
Aren't you a big gay baby? I saw your posts saying that....
Pity they don't also offer some spellng lessons too.
Hackerrank compilers don't work properly. You find out about this during some shit pre-interview test and then you run out of time.
The one with most Indians.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Garbage in, Garbage out.
HackerRank measures no skill useful for professional software development.
I've never met a great programmer who was a speed champion. The best programmers take their time and get the job right the first time. The fastest programmers write unmaintainable code and make everyone else's life miserable.
The truth: Competent developers in Wyoming wonder to themselves "Why the fuck do I live in Wyoming if my skills are in such high demand in Silicon Valley? I wonder if I could hack it somewhere exciting and pleasant to live. Maybe I should take some online tests to see how my skills stand up against people NOT in Wyoming."
Meanwhile, developers already living in California have better shit to do with their weekends than volunteer for market demographics research.
hackerrank is not an effective measure of ability to be a good development skills.
it either measures:
- how recent did you study pointless CS 101 programming questions.
- how old are you. (younger will perhaps be able to reverse a string faster)
If you are only looking for junior developers, perhaps it's ok.
Otherwise, it will tell any experience engineers that you do not know how to interview.
Thanks for giving us kind suggestions.You can buy @ fresh vegetables at low price.
I disagree. That someone is doing well in competitive programming (CP) type of questions does not tell you that that person is a good programmer. However, it also doesn't measure pointless stuff and proper knowledge of data structures and algorithms is a skill every good developer should have. CS101 can sometimes be pointless because many people cannot transfer this knowledge to any other problem. Just being able to tell that Quicksort is average O(nlog n) and worst-case O(n^2) is not useful if that doesn't mean anything to you. A bigger CPUs is not going to fix that O(n^3) algorithm that worked fine when the developer unit tested it with 10 elements, but somehow struggles when trying to run it on 100k elements in the production system.
Jan
>They're conclucion?
ftfy
Article say
Some of the lower overall performing states, like Oregon, Delaware and Alabama, made the top 10 list in Java, our platform’s most popular language,
but if you look on the chart Alabama isn't in the list for Java. Alaska is #3 so maybe either they mis-read it or wrote the wrong state in?
True, but rarely are you put on the spot to implement it in 30 minutes.
Interviews should be mainly sudo programming and standard questioning with a take home test. The timed tests are not applicable to the real world, a CS junior would beat out most senior devs at LinkedLists or TreeNodes.
Except that I bring down the average. A lot.
Do they include all those guys in India? Is it like tech support where you get someone on the line you can barely understand with their heavy Indian accent who tells you their name is "Steve" and that they live in Indiana?
If you want to quantify least bad when you have these small populations states, then compare on the left tail, not the center.
If you look at the 10th percentile for each state, then you can tell how bad "bad" really is.
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?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
What's "sudo programming"?
That's when you write some really hacky code but it's okay because somebody else signed off on it.
Nomsg
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.
Jan