Mar 19, 2015 A colleague of mine recently told me that he was testing potential candidates using HackerRank and asked that I give his test a go. Why not I thought, I’ve hired a lot of developers, and I’ve. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us.

1. Sep 27, 2017  hackerrank-solutions / Algorithms / Greedy / minimum-absolute-difference-in-an-array.cpp Find file Copy path c650 solve some greedy probs fe46749 Sep 27, 2017.
2. HackerRank admins decision will be final; Please refrain from discussing strategy during the contest. Any case of code plagiarism will result in disqualification of both the users from the contest. We've a fairly good plagiarism detector that works at the opcode level. You can code directly on our interface. We support 20 major languages.

• C Programming Tutorial
• C Programming useful Resources

• Selected Reading

C programming is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis M. Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories to develop the UNIX operating system. C is the most widely used computer language. It keeps fluctuating at number one scale of popularity along with Java programming language, which is also equally popular and most widely used among modern software programmers.

C programming language is a MUST for students and working professionals to become a great Software Engineer specially when they are working in Software Development Domain. I will list down some of the key advantages of learning C Programming:

• Easy to learn

• Structured language

• It produces efficient programs

• It can handle low-level activities

• It can be compiled on a variety of computer platforms

• C was invented to write an operating system called UNIX.

• C is a successor of B language which was introduced around the early 1970s.

• The language was formalized in 1988 by the American National Standard Institute (ANSI).

• The UNIX OS was totally written in C.

• Today C is the most widely used and popular System Programming Language.

• Most of the state-of-the-art software have been implemented using C.

• Today's most popular Linux OS and RDBMS MySQL have been written in C.

Just to give you a little excitement about C programming, I'm going to give you a small conventional C Programming Hello World program, You can try it using Demo link.

C was initially used for system development work, particularly the programs that make-up the operating system. C was adopted as a system development language because it produces code that runs nearly as fast as the code written in assembly language. Some examples of the use of C are -

• Operating Systems

• Language Compilers

• Assemblers

• Text Editors

• Print Spoolers

• Network Drivers

• Modern Programs

• Databases

• Language Interpreters

• Utilities

This tutorial is designed for software programmers with a need to understand the C programming language starting from scratch. This C tutorial will give you enough understanding on C programming language from where you can take yourself to higher level of expertise.

Before proceeding with this tutorial, you should have a basic understanding of Computer Programming terminologies. A basic understanding of any of the programming languages will help you in understanding the C programming concepts and move fast on the learning track.

A colleague of mine recently told me that he was testing potential candidates using HackerRank and asked that I give his test a go. Why not I thought, I’ve hired a lot of developers, and I’ve been coding for a long, long time and have used C# since it was launched in 2001, this should be simple.

You can imagine that I was a little miffed when my colleague forwarded my results, to find I had scored a pathetic 53/105. “Oh, I wouldn’t even bother interviewing you with that score” my colleague happily announced.

After the initial “Oh, no, I’m rubbish!” had worn off and my bruised ego had recovered I took a look at the results to see just where I had gone so badly wrong.

The test comprised of 9 questions, 7 of which were multi-choice and 2 actual coding problems. The test needed to be completed in 75 minutes. HackerRank makes you agree that you will not give details of the questions away, so I will obfuscate a little in order to not “give the game away”.

The multi choice questions were truly awful. They consisted of a question, along the lines of “which of these are valid c#?” and then five snippets of code, that can’t be copied from the site. So you are effectively playing “spell-checker”. The errors in the code were along the lines of missing semi-colons or dropped method modifiers.

In my entire development life I can’t imagine a situation where it would have been an advantage having someone on my team that can spot a line of code that the IDE will balk at before I even press compile. Let me make this 100% clear: That kind of testing is pointless! I do not need developers who can successfully code in Notepad, I need creative thinkers. The is the same as criticising J K Rowling’s skill at story telling due to her prowess at spelling, i.e. pointless.

Fortunately these questions only carried 5 marks each, so the 2 I got wrong only cost me ten points.

This brings me to the second point: These 2 questions are the only ones I got wrong, so how the hell did I score so badly?

Well, it transpires that getting the question right is only part of the battle.

The last two questions were considerably better questions, they presented you with a problem and asked you to write some code to solve it.

Unbeknownst to me, one of these questions carried 20 marks, and the other 50! Sadly, I assumed that the intention was to write code that correctly addressed the problem, I was not aware that there were graduations of passing.

Cisco Sp Sw Dev C Hiring Test Hackerrank 2017

Basically, you enter your code and press the “run” button and it tells you if it has passed or failed. Both of mine passed and yet my scores in the final assessment were 20/20 for one: “Nice!”, and 8/50 for the other: “What?!!!”

And here’s how I failed: As with most development problems, the question had a number of possible solutions. Their scoring system was utilising 11 test cases to assess your solution, there was no indication of scores being attached to these tests. I, as I would recommend all coders do, coded the simplest solution to the problem, pressed “run” and it said “Correct Answer” and then showed the output of some tests it had ran. Strangely (to me anyway) some of their test cases had “timed out” and I assumed they had server issues, or their site wasn't correctly built. How wrong was I? What they had actually meant was “Your code is not quick enough to deal with the inputs to these tests in the allotted time.”. If I’d have known that I would have optimised it! However, I just thought “hmm, that’s annoying” and moved on to the next question.

I finished the test in 42 minutes. The limit was 75 minutes. I am pretty sure I could have optimised that code to complete all 11 of the test cases easily in 33 minutes.

I don’t per-se have an issue with these last two questions in theory, but they were poorly executed. It was not clear, to me anyway, what I was being asked to do. And so, I failed.

My take-away from all this is that HackerRank is a poor indicator of a developer's problem solving capabilities, and like so many of these things is only really good at assessing one thing, namely how good the candidate is at completing HackerRank tests.

Cisco Sp Sw Dev C Hiring Test Hackerrank 12

Cisco Sp Sw Dev C Hiring Test Hackerrank Download

I will not be using HackerRank to test any potential candidates, and I will not be recommending others do either. If you want good developers you need to assess other things: Are they creative? Do they write good, clean, SOLID code? Do they understand patterns? Can they work with other team members? Do they add to the team? Do they understand the trade-off between speed and maintainability? etc. none of this can be found out from HackerRank.

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As with all things, be careful what you measure for that is what you will get. If you are looking for human spell-checkers, HackerRank is for you.