I Failed a HackerRank Test This Week

This week I took a technical assessment for a Senior Frontend Developer role at a tech company. The process was long, from the screening call all the way to a HackerRank test at the end. Fifteen minutes, eleven multiple choice questions, a mix of CSS, JavaScript, networking, and React.

I scored 62 percent. Below their cutoff. I did not pass.

Did it sting? Of course. Ten years working as a frontend developer, and I tripped on questions that, looking back, were honestly pretty basic.

Where I tripped

Two questions scored a flat zero. One asked how to update state in a React class component with this.setState. The other asked what JSX is and where it gets transpiled to.

I understand both concepts fine. The problem is that I have spent years working with functional components and hooks. Class components are like a language I used to speak and barely touch now. Asked cold, my brain needed a second to switch back, and a second is exactly what you do not have in the last rushed moments of a timed test.

The rest was networking. CORS, mixed content, the difference between localStorage and cookies. Honestly, that is material I rarely touch head on day to day. Not because it does not matter, just because the daily work does not always force me to think about it.

What I took from it

A fifteen minute test does not decide how good you are as a developer. It measures how ready you are to answer specific things under time pressure, and often those are things you have not handled directly in a while.

The more useful thing to sit with is why I fell where I did. For me it means going back to the fundamentals now and then, not just the stack I reach for every day. Working with modern tooling for long enough quietly lets a few basics slip, and you only notice when someone asks for them again, like now.

If you are an experienced developer and you have ever failed a test that was supposed to be easy, I get it. Sometimes the longer you work, the easier it is to forget the basics you once knew cold, simply because you stopped using them.

What I am doing now

I put together my own practice material, aimed right at the spots where I fell. React class components, basic networking, CSS specificity. Everything that failed me is now a list I am working through one item at a time.

The failure still does not feel great. But at least now I know exactly what to fix, and that beats not knowing at all.

If you are going through the same thing, give yourself a moment to be disappointed first. Then figure out exactly what needs work, and start there.