I shouldn’t care about something so small. I really shouldn’t. The world is in the midst of a horrific pandemic which has triggered a severe economic recession. There are riots, clashes between citizens and their governments, and chaotic events occurring everywhere. And what I’m about to discuss is so small in light of everything going on in the world that I really shouldn’t care.
And yet…I do.
I haven’t been doing any challenges on HackerRank in a while due to lack of free time. But I still login from time to time when I get an email alert about new comments in the challenge discussions. When I logged in tonight I discovered that one Shehan Jayalath had taken my B8 solution from Saving Humanity (By Vectorizing The ALU), stripped the header, and posted it in the challenge discussion as if it was his own. Sure enough, when I looked him up on the Leaderboard he had also submitted my solution verbatim to get a free 100 points.
And companies wonder why they struggle to find programmers who can actually program.
Shehan Jayalath’s post to the discussion forum can be found here. My reply can be found here. And if you’re logged into HackerRank you can see that Jayalath used my solution for free points here.
Now, I’m not naive. I am aware that plenty of people copy/paste their way to points and awards on HackerRank. (If you’re a prospective employer looking at anything from HackerRank on a candidate’s resume, you should be aware of this too.) And I knew when I made my blog post that the solutions would be copy/pasted into HackerRank for free points. Some people go there to learn, some people go there to build fake points and awards. It is what it is.
But if you’re going to post another person’s solution in the Discussion tab, have the decency to attribute it to them.
And if you’re reading anything I have to say about HackerRank challenges I hope you have the self respect to use my posts and code in order to learn and not to cheat. If you like my approach, try re-writing it yourself without having mine open as a reference. See what you can improve. Earn the points. Don’t just copy/paste.
And do not ever publicly claim anyone else’s work as your own, on HackerRank or any where else.