One of my good friends had applied to a 1YoE+ opening in a well known big MNC. He was contacted by the recruiter about this opportunity. First round was screening on HackerRank. He said the questions were easy, like the smoothest cake walk anyone can have. But he faced a lot of issues with the online IDE that the platform provides and he could not complete the test in time and hence got rejected.
I too had applied for the same opening right after him. I did not face many issues in my test, but there were issues which irritated me. After giving the HackerRank test, I casually pinged him and while talking about it, I got to know that we both had got the same set of questions asked. And the fun fact was, though our approaches were a bit different(like very minor), the output obtained was the same. But weirdly, despite getting the same outputs, all my test cases passed while his had failed. How is that possible, is something both of us are wondering about RN.
I suggested him to reapply by creating a completely new profile and everything because, he's a far better developer than me who deserves this opportunity, and it's sad to see him loose such a good opportunity to work at one of the dream teams.
But he said he can't take that path I recommended because he would feel guilty about it, knowing that he already knows the test questions and would easily clear that, which feels like cheating.
I'm asking amazing people here what he should do ? Do what I said OR just let go of it assuming it was his fate ?
We have been actively applying to many openings but because we don't have more than a YoE, we have barely got opportunities coming our way. So, I suggested to him "desperate times call for desperate measures".