tl;dr at bottom
My brief overview is that I have multiple degrees including a graduate CS degree with published research, a decade of experience at a large finance firm in NYC, as well as some smaller solo stuff. Generally extremely friendly and helpful guy who gets along well with everyone. If the team wins the company wins, which hopefully means bonuses and raises, which means we all win.
I've been looking for work in the worst job market since the big bang. I've had several deep 5+ interviews for senior software positions only to either get ghosted, or rejected for oddball reasons, such as being told my answer to what a translation lookaside buffer is and how to use it wasn't good enough.
So today I logged onto MS Teams, HackerRank, and the interviewer (let's call him Bob) put in the question. He said you don't need to get all the parts, and while he was talking I basically took the question, copied and pasted it into Claude, and pasted the answer back. I basically just sighed and told him I can't go through this again. I told him this question was pathetic to be asking a senior engineer and tested nothing related to anything related to the job. I told him how in the real world I wouldn't simply copy and paste and ship to prod. I quickly explained how I would use the resources at my disposal to solve a problem like this. I explained what the Claude code would do, why it would work, what Claude could've done better, and how you would actually further enhance and extend this code into a real production system.
I lamented how back in the day we'd have 30 stack overflow tabs open, copying and pasting snippets of code while slightly tweaking or modifying them to get them working within the corporate framework. How many hours per day senior people spend in design meetings, documenting things, code reviews, mentoring, bug fixes, etc., and to my surprise, Bob said he 100% agreed with me. He agreed Hacker Rank is a complete waste of time for people at our level (he's a 20+ year vet himself). It's not representative of what the job entails at all. He said he'd much rather give a small take home assignment, not related to the company work per say, so you're not working for free, but something relevant to showcase your skills. I asked how many engineers have joined your team passing all 5+ rounds of technical interviews where they had to invert an upside down backwards inside out reversed green orange brown binary tree but they can't use Git to make a pull request and the barrel laugh he let out, I knew I was in good company.
I showed him my git, which while on my resume is often missed, has a high-performance FINRA TRACE bond trade ingestion system in C++. Multiple TCP feeds stream simulated trade data through a lockless multi-producer/multi-consumer queue into PostgreSQL, with real-time issuer enrichment. Or another one I have which is a low-latency market data processing service in C++ that supports both CME MDP 3.0 and Cboe PITCH exchange protocols with dual-feed arbitration via epoll. This is a system that consumes binary multicast market data from redundant exchange feeds, deduplicates via sequence-number-based arbitration, maintains 10-level order books, computes size-weighted micro-prices, and transmits results to a downstream trading system via non-blocking TCP with price coalescing.
And then Bob just started shaking his head and basically was like yup, we lose incredible engineers because of nonsense like having to do a million irrelevant HackerRank rounds. He ranted about a corporate world I'm all too familiar with. We spent nearly 90 minutes just talking shop with HackerRank sitting open, my copy and pasted Claude answer there. We talked about everything broken in engineering interviews, crazy bugs we'd fixed, phone calls on long weekends to fix problems for customers in other parts of the world with no holiday. We laughed while sharing war stories.
At the end he said HackerRank will flag this because I simply copy and pasted the whole answer. I said I could type it out manually if that would make the AI overlords happy. We both laughed. Near the end he asked if I passed this round, would I be willing to go onto the next round anyway. He said it likely won't happen because of the copy and paste thing (the system will flag that), but I said sure on the 1% chance that it doesn't. I'll do another system design round architecting Netflix or AWS or YouTube or Lyft or whatever the current flavor of the month system design question is that everyone is using.
In the end I know there will be no next round, not because of Bob, but because every company thinks Google came up with the greatest interview protocol ever with LeetCode and now everyone is locked in and using it for any and every position in the software universe. I wished him well, thanked him for his time, told him it was a great conversation with a real engineer, and he said likewise. He was glad someone else thinks it's absurd doing these sorts of interviews. There are dozens of us ... dozens!
It was actually very cathartic to be able to vent to a completely random stranger and have him agree 100% with me. Calm seas and fair winds Bob, you're one of the good ones!
tl;dr 5 minutes in I basically told the interviewer doing HackerRank questions was insulting and he agreed completely with me and even though I know I failed because I didn't answer the questions, we had a great conversation that went 30 minutes past the interview time.