Who else hates hackerrank coding challenges?

I mostly hate that shit because it doesn't create value and the problems are largely irrelevant.

My prof is making us do like 3 of these a week as labs, I can't keep up, I just can't problem solve arbitrary problems made up in someone else's mind

How do I particularly get the notice on this rant only?

@Fast-Nop I'm finding them fun honestly and they really challenge your knowledge of algorithms and data structures (and maths) sometimes

@beegC0de I started to do this stuff for interviews, the way I cope is by trying to invent the most hilariously convoluted or abstract methods to solve even the simplest problems, usually using Haskell.

Eg. Use Reader-Writer-State monad transformer stack (what a mouthful, whew!) for simple reverse polish notation converter

Express your solution in continuation passing style

Use laziness to set up massive structures of thunks and then get the answer by evaluating one thing and having it domino throughout the structure

Clever (or usually pointlessly complicated) solutions with only function composition allowed (i.e. you have to fit as much as possible of your answer into one huge line)

and so on. Makes it a looot more interesting and you learn a lot more too.

@RememberMe I try to do all mine in Rust using iterators and their functional and lazy combinators. Unfortunately we get 3 of these a week and I'm taking calc 2 for the first time 🙃 don't have time to even finish all of them

Me too..

Company needs to understand that data structure and algorithm are like 1 percent of CS. And the questions are so fucking irrelevant that you nevdr end up using even a single one of them in real life. For example i am managing an infra of more than 1 million user with 35k Daily active users. And i have developed both frontend and Backend infra. In this long span of time i have never used a single algorithm other than sort and merge and some very basic algorithm. I am not saying they are completely useless but that's the first and basic criteria of selection in some company makes me worried.

Once i hired an intern who was not good with algo but had a very good and brilliant understanding of large system and large base code. And that guy helped us build our in house video editor in Android integrating with current source code by compiling ffmepg using Android NDK and then integrating the same in our source code. I don't think a guy with good algo skills could have done that in a short span of 2 week. That's what make me sick the first and most basic criteria of selection to big companies are competitive programming which is so irrelevant to the work which they will be doing.

@RememberMe the thing is, there's nothing of value created. Feels like empty work to me. I want real problems where the solution actually achieves something, like delivering a product to a real, paying customer.

I also have a considerable side project that has been going on for a few years, and that I can use as portfolio. Tells more than some mini code snippets anyway.

@Fast-Nop oh I agree it's not a replacement for all that.
But works really well as an additive.

Kind of like solving Rubik's cubes or being interested in pro StarCraft - not direct life or work skills but they do add a lot and are quite interesting to boot.

Besides I respect the problem solving mentality it generates, gives you a large bag of algorithmic tools and tricks to whip out when needed (it has helped me in the past, so I guess I'm biased here).