Vivek Ravisankar
Co-founder and CEO, HackerRank. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@rvivek ↗hackerrank.com ↗
He co-founded HackerRank with Harishankaran Karunanidhi, which in 2011 became the first Indian startup to graduate from Y Combinator. He oversees HackerRank's technical assessment and developer-hiring platform, focusing on skills-based recruitment and developer evaluation.
2shows
2appearances
47statements
8resolved
7supported
0contradicted
88%fully supported
Everything Vivek Ravisankar said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Ravisankar: Developer workforce will expand significantly in the future
“I actually think you're going to see a proliferation of developers. I think you're going to see Way more developers in, in the future. I think the job role will change for sure. I think it's not going to stay the same, but I think you're going to see way more.”
Ravisankar: Tech hiring slope and junior demographics will rebound in six months
“I predict that you're going to see a very different chart on both the slope of the hiring curve, as well as the demographic of the type of hires in the next Six-ish months.”
HackerRank: Junior developer assessments and interviews are up 20-25% year-over-year
“Are companies sending assessments to junior versus senior? How many people they are interviewing? It's grown about 20 to 25% year over year relative to all of the other, other news, news items that you see on social media, where it's like, hey, declining, ever…”
Ravisankar: AI-native companies are the least AI-forward in technical hiring processes
“The AI native or AI forward companies are the least AI forward when it comes to interviewing at high end process.”
Ravisankar: Human craft will become more valuable as AI advances
“I actually think the more AI becomes powerful, the more valuable human craft and other elements are going to become because people are going to easily determine, oh, this is all done by AI. I'm just going to attribute a lower value.”
Ravisankar defines the next-gen 10x developer by fundamentals, AI, and taste
“So this is how we define the next-gen developer or the Tenex developer. You're strong in fundamentals of software engineering. You can use AI across all phases of SDLC. You have very good knowledge of AI concepts and you build with good taste and business acum…”
HackerRank evaluates candidates on reviewing AI-generated PRs, not prompt engineering
“The way we test for the usage of agent stuff is less about, can you prompt the agent to do the work, but more in terms of, hey, I've actually generated a bunch of PRs from Devin or Cloud Code or Gemini or like Codex or whatever. Can you go ahead and like revie…”
Ravisankar: AI still produces poor presentations, financial models, and documents
“It still doesn't create good presentation. Still doesn't create good financial models. Still writes like pretty poor docs.”
Ravisankar: Forward deployed engineer is the hottest tech role after AI researcher
“The hottest role right now, other than AI researcher is probably forward deployed engineers who are now like in, in like go to market.”
Ravisankar: 90-day bootcamps promising expert status act as a negative signal
“I mean, there are a lot of them who, there are a set of bootcamps who say, you know what, come here, doesn't matter whether you know how to code or not, I'll help you become a great React developer in 90 days. I mean, it's, that's not how it works, right? And …”
Ravisankar: Truly great developers code to build things, not for salaries
“In a very longer term the really great developers are people who did it, not because they'll get a job, but because they really wanted to,
Build something. They really wanted to get this, whatever the idea that they had in mind out.”
Ravisankar: Developers motivated by money hit ceilings sooner than builders
“If you had a monetary value associated with it you might just focus a lot on that and you will reach a ceiling pretty soon. This is just my hypothesis. So versus if you're, if you really
Fall in love with the idea of building or creating new things. The ceili…”
Ravisankar: Top '10x' developers are distinguished by strong business acumen
“The other thing that I'm starting to see happen across a lot of different companies, and even Hackerank has incorporated this, is the business acumen the level of business acumen that you have as a developer. Usually it is, it's always developers or builders. …”
Ravisankar: Startups should recruit their first ten engineers from untapped talent pools
“The current ways of doing proxy on GPAs and degrees is bad, and you have to figure out your first 10 people almost from that untapped pool. I think it helps a lot in your drive and motivation for the long term. That's just my hypothesis, but I just have one da…”
Ravisankar: HackerRank finds new grads adopt AI much faster than seniors
“Even in our own company, it's been way easier to get new grads and early talent just, like, be much more AI native than I have to, like, push really hard on the senior engineers and others.”
Ravisankar: Developer hiring is shifting to real-world codebase assessments
“And now where do we see companies Going is towards evaluating them on real-world tasks on code repositories. That's where, like, the world is going.”
Ravisankar: Future coding interviews will test production debugging and logs
“We also think the next evolution is going to be beyond code repositories because again, As much as IDE and AI system and code repository is like the home for developers, that's not the only place that they work in. It's always like the prod is down. Okay. So y…”
Ravisankar: AI development has split into asynchronous agents and IDE copilots
“The way we think about that is I mean, like the way we think about that and we define our hiring process also like that is there are two major work types of workflows in, in, in today's world that developers use. One is you're going to tell an agent or actuall…”
HackerRank lets non-engineers assign low-priority tasks directly to AI agents
“Even internally, we're getting to, in our company, we're getting to a point of, it's not just like developers, but solution engineers, support people, being able to tag something like a dev in to say like, hey, there's a typo in this added message, go, go fix …”
Ravisankar: Technical interview integrity is about following rules, not avoiding AI
“The way we define integrity is it's not about whether you use AI or not. It's about whether you follow the rules.”
Ravisankar: Chegg is the top assessment leak source, LeetCode not in top five
“Chegg is the biggest offender, but I love Chegg as a company and things, I know they're going through hard times, but
rooting for them.
I hope they come back.
Oh no.
But Chegg is like right up there.
There are other forums, StudyX. It doesn't really leak.
We …”
HackerRank trained model detecting external coding tools with 85-90% precision
“We have trained our own plagiarism model, which can detect whether you're using an external tool to write code or not with about, like, 85 to 90% precision.”
Ravisankar: Junior interviews test AI copilot coding; senior interviews test architecture
“So from a rubric perspective, I would say new grads fundamentals and like much more hands-on coding with AI assistant for senior It is still fundamentals, but much more of code review and architecture and system design and other aspects of it.”
Ravisankar: Large Services Firms Push AI Harder Due to Labor Margins
“The companies that are pushing AI hard comes a lot from services organizations. These are very large services organizations, consulting services organizations. I think I can understand why, because it's This is like a margin business. You are selling human lab…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Vivek's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, HackerRank | 1 | 26 | 86% 6/7 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |
 LATENT SPACELEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, HackerRank | 1 | 21 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Latent Space → |