I’m Vivek, co-founder/ceo of HackerRank. We’re sorry we made you grind leetcode. That line is on billboards around SF now.
HackerRank didn’t invent algorithmic interviews, but we helped normalize a version of technical hiring that turned into months of grinding questions with little connection to the actual job.
Technical interviews have come a long way: from “How many golf balls fit in a 747?” to reading code over the phone, writing it on a whiteboard, and eventually solving LeetCode-style problems.
Each step got us a little closer to the work. But we were still mostly evaluating how well someone had prepared for an interview, not how well they could build software.
AI has changed that work.
Developers increasingly plan with agents, build with them, and review their output. They need to know when the code is good, when it needs another pass, and when it’s completely wrong.
The hiring process needs to evolve too.
At HackerRank, we’re changing three things:
- Tasks: Algorithmic questions → real work in code repositories
- Evaluation: Code correctness → AI fluency and judgment
- Candidate experience: IDE → agentic development environment
We’ve packaged this into Chakra, our agentic interviewer.
Candidates get a realistic problem and access to AI tools. They solve it as they would in the real world. Chakra then digs deeper: Why did you choose that approach? What would you change? How did you validate the AI-generated code?
You can now see how well someone solved the problem and not just the output.
Do algorithm questions still have value? Yes, they do but the problem is the weightage associated with them.
Vivek
Co-founder & CEO