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Tell HN: The Turing.com hiring platform is complete nonsense

51 pointsby someuser54541over 1 year ago
Been spending a bunch of time trying to get on their hiring platform. After a bunch of surveys on soft skills, assessments for selected tech stacks are required to receive job opportunities.<p>It seems like the assessment tests are written by a machine and&#x2F;or scraped entirely from questions in online repositories.<p>As an example, here&#x27;s a screenshot of one of their nonsense questions for an Android assessment: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prnt.sc&#x2F;waKVQjFoETwr<p>Almost all the questions are like that. I also figured out that a bunch of the questions seem to be copied word for word from online repositories like https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Ebazhanov&#x2F;linkedin-skill-assessments-quizzes&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;android&#x2F;android-quiz.md.<p>Tried to speak to a person about all the issues which make taking an assessment impossible, and just got more bots.<p>I&#x27;m sure many are looking for jobs, so figured this would save people a bunch of time.

6 comments

z_ackover 1 year ago
I can speak as witness about other interview, the interview of a close friend, skilled in machine learning related technology, in fact he applied for that kind of job. He received a video with instructions to do an online test registered with very poor, <i>really very poor</i> audio quality by a guy with a very very strong asian accent. I transcript the instructions to help him to understand how to do the connection to the test platform, etc and, men, I wasn&#x27;t able to understand every single detail, so I gave that video to a friend of mine from UK, he told me that my transcription was more accurate than the one he did. Moreover, the test, IMHO, was bullshit , my friend has a math degree and master in ML related topics and they sent him a junior Python programming exercise, SQL related nonsense and other ridiculous tests like a script selected random questions totally unrelated to the job they was interviewing for ( or they was pretending to do). More than a serious interview that was like a candid camera prank.
muzaniover 1 year ago
I was invited a few years back. Looked at the interview questions, decided not to do it (specs were basically a full app with MySQL or something, really specific stack).<p>Then I was given the following email: &quot;Congrats on scoring 100% in Turing&#x27;s basic JavaScript programming test on XXXX, 2019! You completed Step 1 towards being matched with top Silicon Valley companies that want to work full-time with remote engineers.&quot;<p>If I scored 100% on a test I never took, the whole thing just feels like a scam to me.
armchairhackerover 1 year ago
My anecdote with Turing: after a few sets of nonsense questions like the one you described, I was given a nonsense programming challenge. Pretty basic (email address validator), but the instructions said &quot;the function must throw an exception if the email address is invalid&quot; while the sample testcases actually checked that the function returned false (I also remember bad grammar but no other ambiguity).<p>Anyways, I changed the sample testcases so that they tested the function threw an exception for invalid inputs and didn&#x27;t for valid ones. Which I probably shouldn&#x27;t have done, because then Turing said I failed the challenge so they couldn&#x27;t offer me any jobs, and I&#x27;d have to retake after 6 months.<p>...But <i>then</i> a while later, I get an email that I can retake the test due to &quot;test environment issues&quot; (maybe they realized the test was ambiguous, maybe it was just broken, I have no idea). At this point I already found a job.<p>Then they started spamming my email and eventually WhatsApp, so I blocked them.
henloover 1 year ago
Also, they spam people&#x27;s inboxes. I&#x27;m a designer, can&#x27;t code beyond HTML&#x2F;CSS, and they (their bots?) keep sending me an email to join their platform. It&#x27;s annoying, and I don&#x27;t think I can do anything about it except reporting their email as a junk and blocking them.
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kroltanover 1 year ago
About 4 years ago I think, they were paying people to answer assessments for the sake of answering, so my guess they were collecting data to do machine validation of actual applicants.
sitzkriegover 1 year ago
appreciate the heads up