HackerRank raises the white flag

I've always thought algorithm puzzles (aka LeetCode) in job interviews were one of the most braindead hiring strategies out there.

My go-to example was always Floyd's algorithm: "Determine whether a singly linked list contains a cycle in O(n) time using O(1) memory."

Sure, fast and slow pointers are a classic technique. But how the fuck are you supposed to come up with that unless you've memorized Knuth? It's like that infamous Google interview question: "You've been shrunk to 2 cm and put in a blender. How do you get out?" - "Jump out, for fuck's sake! High school physics, ha ha!"

Well, AI seems to have finished this off. HackerRank's founder and CEO has surrendered and raised the white flag:

I'm Vivek, co-founder and CEO of HackerRank. We're sorry we made you grind LeetCode endlessly. You can now see those words on billboards all over San Francisco.

HackerRank didn't invent algorithmic interviews. But we helped normalize a form of technical hiring that has candidates spending months solving problems with little connection to the actual job.

Technical interviews have come a long way: from questions like "How many golf balls fit in a Boeing 747?" to reading code over the phone, writing programs on whiteboards, and finally LeetCode-style problems.

Each stage brought interviews a little closer to real work. But for the most part, we were still measuring how well a candidate had prepared for interviews, rather than how well they could build software.

AI is changing the work itself.

Developers increasingly plan tasks with AI agents, build software with them, and review the results. They need to distinguish good code from code that needs work or is no good at all.

Hiring needs to change too.

At HackerRank, we're changing three things:

Tasks: moving from algorithm puzzles to working with real code repositories

Assessment will evaluate the ability to work with AI and make decisions, rather than code correctness alone

The candidate experience: an agent-based development environment in place of an IDE

Amen. I wonder what Yandex will have to say about this?