Script

Hi all, curious minds! I’m on hold on my HackerRank project. And I’m about to give you the story about it and my future plans I hope I will have time to achieve.

It is really hard for me to do a test. I’ve already talked about it. The reason why is; most of my previous colleagues, when they applied for a job, had the luck to get it on the first or the second try. For me, it took over 40 attempts. I was at the university, and I tried to find an internship. I did not have expectations about the companies or the projects, or the salary. I just wanted to learn from experts.

Back in the time, there were not so many opportunities near my university, so I applied for everyone that I could. One week I was preparing for a JAVA job, on the other for a C#, or PHP. Or for frontend or backend position. My dream job was participating in a game-development project, like many of us in the development community.

Setting up all these development environments, learning the basic of the given techs just to make a basic test done, and receiving no feedback at all or just the standard “We are looking for a more experienced developer.” response is very demoralizing. So I have a huge experience with different testing methods, and most of them are not very good. This why I have preconceptions about tests and why it is soo hard to get started with them.

I started a project about mine last time. And I have uploaded a video about it the Youtube. On the next day, I received a call from my recruiter.

• Hi Zoltan! How are you? Have you managed to solve your test?
• Ehh, I’m still working on it. But you know I really need to make it more challenging.
• I see. Well, I’m calling you because someone on the team found your YouTube channel and saw your recording about your HackerRank project.

My thoughts were like: Oh boy, here comes again. I screed it up, and I could not just complete a “simple test”.

• They liked it. They say you mentioned things inside of your video that goes beyond the test and they want to arrange a meeting with you.

Wait, what? This is kind of a miracle for me. I did not promote or share my video anywhere on socials. And I think I was a bit rude and had some preconceptions about the topic. So, I need to confess. I did not want to hurt anybody’s feelings I did not want to do a review about HackerRank. I didn’t want to share anything about the companies that prepared the actual tests. With that, I would have violated licensing and policies.

The meeting went fine. And how we are preparing how and when we could work together. Need to admit I was curious about what’s in the test, and now without consequences, I had a peek at it. I will not tell you the actual questions just a bit about the format. It only contained 12 questions. Most of them were multi-choice questions, and two of them were coding, one with phyton and one with bash.

So maybe I was overreacting it. I’m not planning to abandon my project, but now I need to pivot its goal. The original goal was to make myself solve a test. And probably, my new goal will be with it to showcase what I would like to on a candidate when I’m sitting on the other side of the hiring process.

I hope this will be a beneficial journey for both of us. And we will learn a lot in the upcoming content. If you want to follow my work, I have a personal site hosted on GitHub, the link in the description. You may want to follow. I try to make regular updates, but sometimes, I only have a little time, and maybe the script about a new topic will appear in the git commit history much earlier than in a video format.

See you next time.

Thoughts

I planned to make this video or just a blog post about it for weeks now. Today I hope I will have the time to make it true. The script is made. Now I should format it as a Hugo blog post and publish it on GitHub.