Sachin Gupta

Few people know this, but Vivek and I began working on HackerEarth even before we graduated. Specifically, we were working on MyCareerStack, and several elements from that time laid the foundation for what would become HackerEarth.

I moved to Bangalore in July 2012 to work at Google. Three months later, we were accepted into GSF Accelerator and officially started HackerEarth in November 2012.

From the very beginning, we’ve been a design-focused company. Our design may not have always been flashy, but it’s always been simple and functional.

While many startups invest heavily in branding early on, we chose a different path. For the first three years, we consciously delayed creating a brand identity or a logo for HackerEarth.

Of course, we did need a logo when starting out—for startup competitions, visiting cards, T-shirts, and laptops. So we created a simple one:

It was straightforward: our name in a nice font on a background we liked. It served its purpose well and became recognizable.

We delayed creating a new identity mainly because we were still discovering who we were. The first three years were filled with exploration, pivots, and growth. We needed that time to truly understand our purpose.

Today, I’m proud to say that we’ve reached a point where our identity is clear. And interestingly, it aligns perfectly with what we started with: a platform for developers who love to code. These two elements have always been at the core of HackerEarth, and nothing represents that better than our new logo.

We’ve made a few changes—dropped camel case, moved away from a standard font, and created a custom typeface that’s more casual and fun. The standout is the redesigned ‘h’, which embodies the spirit of a programmer: code.

If that isn’t clear, take a look here:

The ‘h’ stands for “hacker,” the first half of our name and the core of our community. Hackers are builders, challengers, and lifelong learners. Every HackerEarth user is a hacker at heart.

The little underscore below the ‘h’ symbolizes the blinking cursor from a console—the same one you see when you code. It’s familiar, iconic, and deeply personal to every programmer. Our logo reflects the playground of a hacker.

This logo is our declaration: HackerEarth is a platform for hackers, built by hackers. We are passionate about code, about writing better code, and about becoming better programmers—every single day.

According to a slightly dated but still relevant research, top performers are 400% more productive than average workers in an organization. For a SaaS company, these “10x developers” could very well be responsible for accomplishing about 80% of the work your team gets done.

Skilled developers are hard to find as is. So, when you have heavy lifters in your team, it’s important to give them every opportunity to grow and enhance their skill set; thereby helping your business in the long run. One of the ways you can do this is through ingraining a continuous skill assessment process into your work day.

Yes, you already did a skill assessment when hiring your team.

However, it shouldn’t just stop there.

Let me tell you why. According to a 2018 McKinsey Global Institute report, as many as 375 million workers (approximately 14% of the global workforce) will have to change by 2030 because of digital transformation, automation, and advancements in Artificial Intelligence.

This rapid rate of tech advancement has opened up a ‘skill gap’ in our industry. Businesses are looking to predict upcoming needs and trends and be product-ready for the future, but they are working with teams that are not equipped to handle these demands. Many companies focus on hiring developers who can fill an immediate gap, rather than on people they can develop over the course of a career. Add to this the demands of a rapidly changing workplace and further gaps soon appear.

This skill gap, if left unchecked, can cause:

• A loss in productivity across your tech teams
• A higher rate of attrition among your top developers
• Lowered employee morale
• A dip in work quality
• Roadblocks in business expansion
• An inevitable loss of revenue

When you extrapolate these problems out across the entire tech industry, the issues become even more significant. Talent shortages caused by the skill gap could become widespread, recruiters would have a hard time finding role-specific personnel, and most importantly; there could also be a lack of skilled managers to train novice team members. Building future-ready teams in the present would then just be a pipe dream.

Currently, most companies fix this skill gap short term by outsourcing or hiring more contract/temporary workers. This is, however, not a strategic long-term solution. The better practice is to hire good developers and help them grow and adapt to changing business needs through constant learning and development.

Research shows that companies that invest in L&D see a 10% increase in their employees’ productivity. Upskilling teams is also considerably more cost-effective than replacing members with new hires. Apart from providing high quality learning content a critical step in creating an efficient L&D program is identifying the existing skill gap in your organization, and monitoring employee progress on a regular basis. This is where continuous skill assessment comes into play.

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Suggested Reading: Building Future-Ready Tech Teams

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Continuous skill assessment can amplify L&D.

Skill assessment can add to your organization’s learning and improvement program. When used properly, it’ll help you provide constant feedback on your team’s progress and problems, and intervene in a timely manner where needed.

[caption id="attachment_30994" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] 4 key reasons to implement continuous skill assessment for your tech team[/caption]



With a well-structured continuous skill assessment process, you can easily:

• Define and create a skills inventory for your team
  Begin by defining competencies needed for each job, or job family. Using a standardized framework will help you search and analyze the data to determine staff and skills gaps.
• Assign individuals to teams or projects based on knowledge and skill set
  IBM has a tool called Talent Match that allows leaders to identify employees with specific verified skills. A similar skills inventory for your workplace can help you put your best developer on the job every single time and get the best ROI for your effort.
• Create a learning culture
  With the skills inventory in place, you can support a continuous learning culture in your organization where employees, managers, and teams are individually, and collectively, responsible for seeking out the knowledge or skills required. In addition, knowledge and skills are shared among teams, coaching and mentoring is done easily, and the end result is a more agile organization.
• Guard against groupthink
  It is vital that members have formal structured learning so that everyone in the team has the scope and depth of skills needed to support each other’s work. This diversity in knowledge and expertise also has another benefit. It guards against groupthink which can very easily lead your team down the wrong path.

None of this, however, is a one-time activity.

Technology and related business needs are always changing, so it is important your skills inventory, and the skill assessment process also is adaptive.

I recommend leaders use an iterative approach to maintaining a continuous skill assessment program. For instance, skill competency reviews can be done in tandem with performance review cycles, thereby ensuring that teams are up to date with business requirements. This will also provide a better benchmark to adjust the skill assessment if so needed.

Keeping pace in a rapidly evolving world requires a workforce that is nimble, and can quickly identify the right skills and the people who possess them. This can only be done with a structured, standardized, and continuous model of skill evaluation and development.

As someone wisely said, innovation comes with learning, right?

When the pandemic began, businesses were focused on putting their heads down and weathering an uncertain economic environment. For many, this meant a temporary freeze on hiring. As things thawed, hiring came back, but this time, it was virtual.

A Gartner poll found that “86% of organizations were incorporating new virtual technology to interview candidates” by the second month of the COVID-19 pandemic. This mad scramble to integrate new interviewing tools was, for some, disorienting. In tech hiring, it’s been a godsend. While we still appreciate face-to-face interaction, the digital nature of remote interviews comes with so many benefits that we won’t be doing whiteboard coding challenges with candidates ever again.Here are three reasons why:

1. Less work = More data

I work in tech, and I love data. Tech companies evangelize harvesting data wherever possible, but before the pandemic, interviews were a data dark spot. Most of the information conveyed lived either in the mind of the interviewer or via their notes. Even if there were coding assessments that added a quantitative element to the interview, these were often done on whiteboards or pieces of paper that then needed to be digitally transferred. The result was that interviewers often spent an extra 30 minutes simply capturing what had already transpired.

Today, the entire process is digital, which means that so much more data is automatically captured, and it’s now being put to use. We have transcription tools and video recordings that make reviewing the interview that much easier.

According to our annual State of Developer Recruiting 2020 report, 56.9% of recruiters said a major benefit of remote interviewing came from pair programming with a collaborative code editor, as this automatically captures and assesses a candidate’s coding skill in a collaborative, work-like environment. We even have automatic feedback generators that request performance input after specific questions. These are then compiled into an after-action report that simply needs to be edited rather than written from scratch.

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Check out our annual 'State of Developer Recruiting' report here!

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This means that interviewers spend less time writing and more time carefully weighing a candidate’s skill. Starting digitally puts all the data at our fingertips and allows us to make the most informed decision. Instead of a data dark spot, remote interviews are now richer than a resume.

2. Geographic flexibility

There’s no question that tech has a talent shortage. Only 60% of all tech positions are filled. When we were dependent on in-person interviews, we constrained our talent pipeline even further. With tech roles only becoming more important over time, we can’t think locally about tech hiring anymore.

The pandemic opened up new talent reserves in geographically diverse locations. We can now hire anyone from anywhere. Analysis from the State of Developer Recruiting 2020 revealed that 50.6% of recruiters said that remote interviews are beneficial due to their logistical flexibility. A further 40.4% said they saved significant time. Remote interviews with built-in features like pair programming and real-time code editing—which now constitute 11.1% of all remote coding interviews conducted—have basically solved the problem of onboarding the most qualified candidates regardless of location.

There is now a bigger pool of tech talent that can work from anywhere, and assessing them remotely has never been easier. In fact, 30.7% of recruiters said that remote hiring had actually increased their talent funnel. As the global workforce becomes even more accustomed to remote work, this means that remote interviews will be a feature of the hiring process for years to come.

3. Reduced bias

More than half (57.6%) of enterprises have placed extra emphasis on hiring for diversity in 2020. As much as I love meeting candidates face-to-face, first impressions are often clouded by personal biases that can unintentionally limit diversity. Recruiters and hiring managers tend to prefer candidates that mirror their own backgrounds in what has been termed by researchers “Looking Glass Merit.” While interpersonal and other soft skills are absolutely important, face-to-face interviews sometimes overvalue them relative to hard skills.Thankfully, remote interviews add a layer of separation that gives interviewers input on things like body language without placing undue influence on them. While 10.2% of recruiters at SMEs say that challenging unconscious bias is still a major pain point, and 13% of recruiters are specifically choosing assessment tools that help eliminate bias in the interviewing process.One way to combat this problem is to mask personally identifiable information (PII) during remote interviews so a candidate’s skills can speak for themselves. This means that name, gender, academic background, etc. are hidden during the interview itself, so the interviewer’s impression of a candidate is solely based on their skills.

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Looking for an objective, bias-free interview tool? Take HackerEarth's FaceCode for a spin right now!

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A remote interviewing future

Even after a vaccine is widely available and things start to return to “normal,” we won’t be looking back at how we used to hire. I may still meet candidates for in-person interviews from time to time but will certainly continue to use digital interviewing tools for a better interviewing experience.Today, hiring—especially in tech—is more competitive and geographically untethered than ever, so we need to make the interviewing process as convenient and flexible for candidates as possible. In the end, remote interviewing saves the company and the candidate time, and more importantly, allows interviewers to limit bias significantly relative to in-person interviews. These more objective interviews are helping managers create the best teams where skills matter. P.S. - An edited version of this article was published in FastCo.

I’m writing this from a newly locked-down chilly California; reflecting on 2020 and all that it has taught us. Nikola Tesla, whom many tech enthusiasts worship, is supposed to have said “our virtues and failures are inseparable, like force and matter.” Just as how hardship and learning are intrinsically intertwined.

For businesses, 2020’s learnings have mostly centered around ‘our people’. First up, the people who make up our loyal client base and whom we are grateful for. Next, the dependable teams who stood by us through pay cuts, layoffs, and policy changes. This focus on ‘people’ has also had a very sharp impact on the HR-tech industry -- in a way, it’s been a culmination of all the innovations that have made up this decade of AI and automation-led hiring. Distilling this impact in a page is hard, but the Christmas decorations are calling so I’ll do my best.

There are four phrases we’ve all heard often this year. I think they’d do well for an abridged guide to 2020, and what they’ve taught me about tech hiring. Let's begin.

1. ‘Can You Hear Me?’

The last year of this decade has literally Zoom-ed past us. *Insert wise chuckle*.Zoom fatigue has been real, but so has this incessant need to stay connected. I cannot recall another moment in my living years when checking up on your neighbors, colleagues, and the alley cat was the coolest thing to do. We’ve cared more than we ever did in 2020.As I have learned from my conversations with many hiring managers, this ‘connectedness’ has its pitfalls when it comes to working. Burnout has been a beast, and so wellness breaks, carer’s leave, and flexi-work hours have become our biggest allies. As we saw in our ‘State of Developer Recruitment 2020’ report, companies have changed their EVPs (Employee Value Propositions) to reflect how they’ve been looking after their employees. To me, this phrase isn’t just about a work call gone wrong. It’s also a siren call for businesses to become more empathetic and ‘hear’ their employees out. I take that as a big positive. All industries; and especially the tech world with its love for deadlines, could do with some more empathy.

2. Cookathons, Marathons, And Almost Everything-athon

I love cake, but the constant smell of #quarantinecooking on my Instagram has been giving me nightmares lately. I get why; when the world outside was going to pieces it was but natural that we gravitate internally, towards all that we hold dear.For some, it was cooking, for others a new-found fascination with running on empty beaches. Developers took the extra time on their hands to find their own version of #QuarantineandChill by upgrading their coding skills. Customer needs have changed, and businesses now need developers who can enable transformation with ease. With COVID and the need to augment traditional human interaction with technology solutions, sharp coding skills have become necessary. Upskilling is also going to be an ongoing theme for the future, and companies looking to build healthy tech teams better include this on the list.

This year, we’ve seen the HackerEarth developer community grow 1.6x to 5 million skill-seekers. Our Slack channel has been abuzz with AMAs, webinars, podcasts and so much more. We thought conducting virtual hackathons wouldn’t be the same, but instead, we saw a lot of developer love pour in for our online events. From India’s first hackathon aimed at helping the LGBTQ+ community to hacking COVID, we found enthusiastic participants for every challenge. We helped companies organize virtual hackathons to keep their tech teams perked up and beat the WFH monotone. The demand for hackathons for boosting internal engagement and upskilling has grown tremendously this year, providing new - and exciting - options for the HackerEarth team as well.

3. Stop The Count

This election chant, and its inherent divisiveness and biased nature, has defined the US in 2020. The aftershocks spilled over global boundaries and gave us a new lens to filter our actions. George Floyd, BLM, and a notable CEO apologizing publicly for his insensitive comments, all forced us to take stock of our own unconscious biases.

Tech hiring is famously riddled with biases. Developers from non-Ivy league colleges face a lack of opportunities due to their academic background. The percentage of African-American employees in tech remains low, even in the big companies (2.9% at Salesforce, 3.8% at Facebook, 4.4% at Slack, 4.5% at Microsoft, and 6% at Twitter), and this number decreases further when we look at those in leadership roles.

The conversation around bias is always painful. Acknowledging that we might unintentionally harbor prejudices can be life-changing, but it is here that we honestly mustn’t stop the count. Whether it is our dislike of face tattoos or people with pink hair, these prejudices need to be packed up and buried in a deep, dark grave.

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Also Read: 7 Types Of Hiring Bias And How To Avoid Them

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It heartens me to know that many tech recruiters are showing these biases the door. They have, in fact, prioritized diversity and geographically-unspecific hiring during this year and adopted tools to help achieve this. In Q3 2020, for instance, we saw a massive adoption of our developer assessments platform which assists in skill-based hiring. The use of our technical interview solution FaceCode, with its blind hiring feature, also increased dramatically. Overall, we have experienced a 250% YoY increase in remote assessments, and a 4,000% YoY increase in remote interviews conducted via FaceCode (Q3 2019 vs. Q3 2020).

4. The New Normal

Ah yes! The war cry of all those fed up with the pandemic. Hate it as much as you want, our personal lives will carry the imprint of COVID for years to come. Sanitizers will have a dedicated place at the altar even post-COVID.Professionally, too, the “new normal” will be colored by the remnants of 2020. The empathy we talked of before means that companies would not be forcing apprehensive employees to return to workplaces anytime soon. Remote working and hiring will be the norm, putting a bigger spotlight on skills than before.What this has taught us in tech hiring is that it doesn’t matter where a developer works from, or what’s their academic pedigree. What’s most important is how skilled a developer is, and how quickly they can pivot and adapt to changing business needs. Our survey shows that recruiters are prioritizing geography-unspecific hiring to bring talented developers on board. Most businesses have contingency plans, but a ‘what if’ year like 2020 can throw all that on its head. A 5-star resume will not help you in such circumstances. The right set of skills always will.

To Borrow From The Great Tesla, Again.

“As I review the events of my past life I realize how subtle are the influences that shape our destinies.”If years could be weighed, 2020 would be a metric ton of unexpected left curves, adaptability, and finding the silver lining behind everything. If a year could make you spiritual, 2020 was the one tailor-made for it.Five Christmases from now, the year the world stopped might feel like a distant memory. The subtleties of 2020 will, however, continue to shape our collective destinies for a long while. For those of us in the tech world, it presents a unique opportunity to make electricity out of hatred (Tesla 3.0), and light up the coding hallways with boughs of holly, and hope.

Happy 2021.

Few people know of it, but Vivek and I had started working on HackerEarth even before we graduated from college. To be specific we were working on MyCareerStack, but few things that we did during that time laid the foundation for HackerEarth.

I graduated and moved to Bangalore in July 2012 to work at Google. 3 months later, we were accepted in GSF Accelerator and started HackerEarth officially in November of 2012.

From the start we have been a very design focused company, our design might not have been very savvy, but it has always been functional and simple!

I have often seen this, a lot of startups invest significantly in branding, even before they launch. We, on the other hand, have been very different. For the last 3 years, we have been consciously putting off the topic of branding and having a logo for HackerEarth.

Of course, when you start, you need to have a logo, it goes in all the startup competitions where you apply, it goes on your very first visiting card, it goes on the T-shirt that you decide to wear everyday to office and it goes on your laptop. We had one too.

Doesn't require machine learning to understand this logo. We took the company name, chose a nice font and put it on a background color we liked. The logo is really simple, but it served its purpose, people recognize this.

Up-till now, we have consciously shied away from creating a logo and hence creating an identity. The less significant reason is that creating a logo takes a lot of thought, and hence a lot of time. And when you are running fast with a lean team, one tends to pass over frivolities as long as things are functional.

However the actual reason is, the last 3 years have been about soul searching. When we started, back in 2012, we knew what we wanted to do, but we didn't know it enough to have a clear identity. During this time, we have had our share of learnings, pivots, discoveries and changes.

Today I am happy to say we finally have the right amount of understanding to come up with our identity. And it might seem ironic but it's no different from what me and Vivek started with. We knew we were building a platform for developers and we knew developers love to code. These two things have been core of everything we have done at HackerEarth, and nothing symbolizes that better than our brand new logo

We have made a couple of changes to our identity, we dropped the camel case (it always gave a little corporatish look), did away with the standard font, created a new custom font which is a little more casual, a bit more fun and conceptualized the 'h' that embodies the spirit of a programmer - code.

If you didn't get what I mean see this

Let's drill this down a little deeper. 'h' represents the term hacker, which is not only first half of our name, but represents who this community is for. Hackers are doers, hackers love to build things, hackers look up to a challenge and hackers strive to be better every day. And each and every HackerEarth user is a passionate hacker.

And the little underline of 'h' is nothing other than the familiar blinking cursor of your console. It's the same cursor that you have grown comfortable and which probably in some way defines you. This logo represents the playground of a hacker.

The logo is an attempt to say what HackerEarth truly is, we are a platform for hackers and like each and every one of you, we are passionate about writing code, writing better code and being a better programmer every single day.