Dear gods I hate the HackerRank interface.

[tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Dear gods I hate the HackerRank interface. I like the theory, but the practice is maddening. I guess as long as it's only used for basic "is this candidate lying" sort of tests... whatever.

[tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

* No interactive debugger. I get why - it's difficult to implement. But it's still bad.

* It has asserts, which is good, but if one fires, it then doesn't show you your stdout, so you don't get to see the debug log of what DID work.

* Autobrackets drive me nuts. Can't turn them off. You can turn off autocomplete (which is actually useful!) but not autobrackets.

[tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

* I couldn't find any way to exit autocorrect except hitting Escape, which takes you out of fullscreen, which some interviews require, so does that flag it as "hey stop cheating" I don't know.

* Because of the fullscreen requirement, doesn't seem to be any way to check basic things like the names of string conversion functions unless you can guess/remember the names and infer from autocorrect suggestions? Very unnatural environment.

It's just all half-baked.

[tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I guess it's a level playing field? Everybody's equally angry with it? But still...