I had a brief call with a technology recruiter, which was basically an overview of my CV. I was then given a HackerRank test.

The test questions were not set up very well. Unlike the example HackerRank questions, they were vague and unclear, requiring fiddling around with parsing the input.

On HackerRank, there were seven questions:

• Three programming questions.
• Four questions relating to Linux.

Not enough time was given, with approximately 12 minutes per question.

It seems to me that candidates who passed this test were able to cheat. Twelve minutes per question is not enough time.

When I questioned the recruiter about the lack of time, he was patronizing and dismissive.

HackerRank: Given a list of intervals, e.g., [1,4], [2,5], [6,7], merge overlapping intervals, resulting in [1,5],[6,7].

HackerRank: Sort hotels by average score. Each line of input contains the hotel ID and a review score.

Example: 1000 4 1000 7 2000 10 2000 8

HackerRank: Given a string of lowercase unique characters (e.g., "ab", "lmne"), sort the string alphabetically and then find all possible combinations, ignoring ordering. For example, "ab" results in "a", "b", "ab".

SSH into a server. Restore a backup of a website. The location of the backup was provided, but no further details were given.

SSH into a server. Enable Google DNS as a secondary DNS server.

SSH into a server. A colleague's script is not working. Fix it. (No further details were provided...)

SSH into a server. A process is running and printing a message somewhere. Find out what the message is.