Trying to find an example of the “walking a thin line” idiom is easy. Think of HR managers who have to align company goals and employee satisfaction!

HR leaders no longer just stick to legal and compliance issues; they are now strategic business partners with a key role to play in shaping the company’s culture and taking the company closer to realizing its vision.

The talent management and performance review processes are certainly not what we’d refer to as all in a day’s work. To add to their cup of woes, they have “mundane” tasks—finding top quality hires, retaining them, ensuring there are no pains areas in employee engagement, staving off all kinds of legal hassles—which require them to be the go-to person while being innovative, proactive, and brimming with energy.

Apparently, this is possible.

Thanks to the digital era, the market is now flooded with tools, apps, and processes to help HR pros kick back and relax. For instance, HR innovation was the theme of the successful “Hack the Experience” hackathon sponsored by Brilliant Ink. The event held in San Francisco in 2014 drew over100 professionals collaborated to come up with solutions to improve employee engagement.

Hackathons—an underrated tool

Hackathons can give you the vision. You can create employee experiences that are compelling and fun. These high-energy events are much more than people working collaboratively on a brilliant idea using software and hardware to solve a problem. Let’s see how.

80% of Fortune 100 companies use hackathons to drive innovation. You too can! Learn how

Expect the unexpected

Who hasn’t been guilty of failing to recognize talent right under the nose? It happens.

You can fix this. Conduct an internal hackathon to assess your company’s existing employee pool. You will be amazed at the “hacks” your employees can come up with.

Tech companies benefit greatly from holding hackathons for its developers where they have to think outside the box and prove their mettle under time and problem constraints.

“It can also provide good clues on design sensibilities, presentation skills and team collaboration ability of the engineer,” says Ravi Gururaj, chairman of the Nasscom Product Council.

And how right he is.

HR managers should advise team leads to gauge the competency of their team members before putting in requests for urgent hires.

“If you’re inside a company and convinced you have the best thing and if only you could get visibility in front of your CTO—then an internal hackathon is a great way of enticing the internal developers to skip to the top of the list, get an exclusive peak of data or even incubation,” says Delyn Simmons from Mashery.

People can get all fired-up when they realize they aren’t going to be putting the company at risk by implementing avant-garde ideas in their everyday projects. At an internal hackathon, employees are encouraged to come up with actionable solutions. Give them a carte blanche.

Like Sabeen Ali, founder of AngelHack, says, “They (employees) get to lower their typical boundaries, typical restriction, and build something that they think isn’t part of their immediate role or immediate responsibility. There’s a freedom to it.”

It is a chance for you to tap into potential talent without having to spend time and money looking for skills outside the organization. Say goodbye to a pile of résumés, and say hello to some vacation days.

Get your company to adopt it as a business practice.

Wipro held an internal hackathon for its employees in June 2014.

Wipro CEO T K Kurien said, “We intend to do one hackathon every month. You realize people’s competency once you go through a hackathon. You find that competency sometimes doesn’t reside at the top of the pyramid; it lies right at the bottom.”

Be ready for unprecedented employee engagement

You want engaged employees, people who are passionate about their work and enjoy a sense of belonging in the company. Engaged employees believe in innovation and helping the organization go forward. The not-so-engaged employees will go through motions, but they won’t do much more. The actively disengaged employees undermine team accomplishments, showing their unhappiness every chance they get. Gallup says that businesses in the U.S. lose $350 billion every year because of disengaged employees!

HR managers can unleash the phenomenal power of engaged workers by ensuring employee commitment, making them go the extra mile for the company only because they want to. They can use hackathons as tools to bring about meaningful change. Through hackathons, HR leaders drive engagement by focusing on self-directed and dynamic learning, a diverse and flexible work environment, encouraging empowered teams and transparency and honesty by the management, facilitating talent mobility, and ensuring a culture of recognition.

Using tools such as hackathons, HR can help build camaraderie and cohesiveness. Along with getting rid of organizational silos and fostering innovation, such hackathons set the scene for employee recognition and other employee-focused initiatives such as enhancing employee engagement for better productivity and overall profitability.

Pi Wen Looi, the president of Novacrea, a California-based business management consulting firm, and the head judge of “Hack the Experience,”said, “Employee engagement is a complex problem. There’s more than one thing that feeds into whether or not a person is engaged. A hackathon like this gets a lot of people thinking about the problem in different ways. You’re kind of attacking it from different angles.”

Companies such as LinkedIn and Facebook are also using hackathons to tackle low levels of employee engagement. In the LinkedIn HR hackathons, “interns with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and disciplines” from the Silicon Valley compete to come up with innovative solutions to help HR execute its priorities successfully.

So, what’s stopping you from doing one for your company? Disrupt HR!

You could take a leaf out of CISCO’s notebook and reconfigure the HR function.

Build innovative tangible products

In the hackathon lingo, the word innovation is perhaps the most hackneyed. But there really isn’t another term that quite crystallizes what these events embody. Here are a few examples of what the coming together of enthusiastic minds can achieve. Products may not be fully fleshed out but the promise they hold is immense.

At HackerEarth internal hackathons have become de rigeur to break everyday monotony and unlock excellence. Held every quarter, the company had 10 so far. Five ideas shortlisted from every hackathon go into production. Over 50 products have been rolled out, either to customers or internal teams. Code Monk, Wordsworth, Flash, and Optimus. No, they aren’t names of Transformers! These are some of the wildly successful products HackerEarth’s teams created at internal hackathons. Code Monk is an app for learning programming on the go; it’s been downloaded 88,000 times in six months. Wordsworth is an internal grammar and guideline checking tool. Flash is a caching system that decreases the page load time, thereby enhancing customer experience and improving page ranking. BlackOps is an in-house mail engine which saves more than $3500 per annum, and Optimus is a bot which monitors, reports, and resolves issues in the infrastructure saving us countless man hours. What you need to know is that none of these tools were a part of the plan or roadmap. They wouldn’t have come about without internal hackathons.

Madhusudhan Anand, Engineering Manager at HackerEarth, said, “The coming together of teams boosts morale when everyone ideates together to solve a problem and having fun while doing so greatly improves engagement. Then the camaraderie that comes from people working across different parts of the organization has always been a great way to strengthen communication and foster a sense of collaboration, community, and innovation that comes with being a part of the HackerEarth Family.”

Watch your company culture get upvoted

As an HR manager, if you can’t come up with ideas to boost the sagging spirits, why not ask the employees to identify ways to address the pain points? At Big Spaceship, the overnight hackathon Hack the Spaceship was about finding creative ways to improve company culture.

You can teach the employees what the company is about.

One of the best examples of reinforcing company values through internal hackathons is by doing what Atlassian, a Sydney-based enterprise software company, does. The employees wait for the ShipIt days. The challenge embodies the company’s values: be the change you seek, play as a team, and build with heart and balance. People don’t take them too seriously or get too competitive. They have 24 hours of fun, enjoying fantastic interdepartmental collaboration, and reaping rewards of many kinds.

You only need look at what Facebook’s hackathons did for its culture.

In Pedram Keyani’s words: Hackathons organically encourage culture-building and collaboration within the company without any top-down guidance. Employees, both new and old, work together quickly and efficiently, improvising and brainstorming, failing and winning, and achieving new levels of interpersonal harmony.

At hackathons, employees are likely to make a couple of lasting friendships, and they come to depend on each other in positive ways. The chances these employees will recommend the company to people outside are quite high.

Talent retention becomes easier; disgruntled employees become fewer.

Hiring becomes the easiest part of the job

If you are talking external hackathons, then HR managers responsible for recruitment already know what this is about.

Finding game changers within the organization could happen with internal hackathons. But if it doesn’t, then you need to look elsewhere. As an HR manager, you can get the management to host or attend hackathons to capture the right talent.

Community building and entrepreneurship are not the only focus areas of hackathons now. They are routinely used to recruit people with the right skills and attitudes.

HR can network with the organizers to get access to interesting profiles. When you attend events, building rapport can’t hurt. Understand what the hackathons are about, and find out why the participants are attending them.

Scout for tech talent at relevant hackathons, and you’ll meet your target before you know it.

Don’t wait for the flip side. There isn’t one.

People love to hate HR, but you don’t need to give them reasons.

HR doesn’t have to be the bearer of bad tidings always. And there are enough hours in a workday to get everything done.

You can do more than “slapping bandages on problems.”

Getting people strategies and business needs to be looking at the same end goals requires more than a little nudge in the right direction.

Whether you are tasked with protecting company culture, getting the brightest minds, retaining talent, or upping employee engagement rates this quarter, there’s help.

You just need to look in the right places.

Looking to conduct online coding tests to hire developers for your organization? Try HackerEarth Recruit free for 14 days to start creating tests for your candidates right away.

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I Used AI to Build a "Simple Image Carousel" at VibeCodeArena. It Found 15+ Issues and Taught Me How to Fix Them.

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My Learning Journey

I wanted to understand what separates working code from good code. So I used VibeCodeArena.ai to pick a problem statement where different LLMs produce code for the same prompt. Upon landing on the main page of VibeCodeArena, I could see different challenges. Since I was interested in an Image carousal application, I picked the challenge with the prompt "Make a simple image carousel that lets users click 'next' and 'previous' buttons to cycle through images."

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Within seconds, I had code from multiple LLMs, including DeepSeek, Mistral, GPT, and Llama. Each code sample also had an objective evaluation score. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many solutions for the same problem. I picked gpt-oss-20b model from OpenAI. For this experiment, I wanted to focus on learning how to code better so either one of the LLMs could have worked. But VibeCodeArena can also be used to evaluate different LLMs to help make a decision about which model to use for what problem statement.

The model had produced a clean HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The code looked professional. I could see the preview of the code by clicking on the render icon. It worked perfectly in my browser. The carousel was smooth, and the images loaded beautifully.

But was it actually good code?

I had no idea. That's when I decided to look at the evaluation metrics

What I Thought Was "Good Code"

A working image carousel with:

Clean, semantic HTML
Smooth CSS transitions
Keyboard navigation support
ARIA labels for accessibility
Error handling for failed images

It looked like something a senior developer would write. But I had questions:

Was it secure? Was it optimized? Would it scale? Were there better ways to structure it?

Without objective evaluation, I had no answers. So, I proceeded to look at the detailed evaluation metrics for this code

What VibeCodeArena's Evaluation Showed

The platform's objective evaluation revealed issues I never would have spotted:

Security Vulnerabilities (The Scary Ones)

No Content Security Policy (CSP): My carousel was wide open to XSS attacks. Anyone could inject malicious scripts through the image URLs or manipulate the DOM. VibeCodeArena flagged this immediately and recommended implementing CSP headers.

Missing Input Validation: The platform pointed out that while the code handles image errors, it doesn't validate or sanitize the image sources. A malicious actor could potentially exploit this.

Hardcoded Configuration: Image URLs and settings were hardcoded directly in the code. The platform recommended using environment variables instead - a best practice I completely overlooked.

SQL Injection Vulnerability Patterns: Even though this carousel doesn't use a database, the platform flagged coding patterns that could lead to SQL injection in similar contexts. This kind of forward-thinking analysis helps prevent copy-paste security disasters.

Performance Problems (The Silent Killers)

DOM Structure Depth (15 levels): VibeCodeArena measured my DOM at 15 levels deep. I had no idea. This creates unnecessary rendering overhead that would get worse as the carousel scales.

Expensive DOM Queries: The JavaScript was repeatedly querying the DOM without caching results. Under load, this would create performance bottlenecks I'd never notice in local testing.

Missing Performance Optimizations: The platform provided a checklist of optimizations I didn't even know existed:

No DNS-prefetch hints for external image domains
Missing width/height attributes causing layout shift
No preload directives for critical resources
Missing CSS containment properties
No will-change property for animated elements

Each of these seems minor, but together they compound into a poor user experience.

Code Quality Issues (The Technical Debt)

High Nesting Depth (4 levels): My JavaScript had logic nested 4 levels deep. VibeCodeArena flagged this as a maintainability concern and suggested flattening the logic.

Overly Specific CSS Selectors (depth: 9): My CSS had selectors 9 levels deep, making it brittle and hard to refactor. I thought I was being thorough; I was actually creating maintenance nightmares.

Code Duplication (7.9%): The platform detected nearly 8% code duplication across files. That's technical debt accumulating from day one.

Moderate Maintainability Index (67.5): While not terrible, the platform showed there's significant room for improvement in code maintainability.

Missing Best Practices (The Professional Touches)

The platform also flagged missing elements that separate hobby projects from professional code:

No 'use strict' directive in JavaScript
Missing package.json for dependency management
No test files
Missing README documentation
No .gitignore or version control setup
Could use functional array methods for cleaner code
Missing CSS animations for enhanced UX

The "Aha" Moment

Here's what hit me: I had no framework for evaluating code quality beyond "does it work?"

The carousel functioned. It was accessible. It had error handling. But I couldn't tell you if it was secure, optimized, or maintainable.

VibeCodeArena gave me that framework. It didn't just point out problems, it taught me what production-ready code looks like.

My New Workflow: The Learning Loop

This is when I discovered the real power of the platform. Here's my process now:

Step 1: Generate Code Using VibeCodeArena

I start with a prompt and let the AI generate the initial solution. This gives me a working baseline.

Step 2: Analyze Across Several Metrics

I can get comprehensive analysis across:

Security vulnerabilities
Performance/Efficiency issues
Performance optimization opportunities
Code Quality improvements

This is where I learn. Each issue includes explanation of why it matters and how to fix it.

Step 3: Click "Challenge" and Improve

Here's the game-changer: I click the "Challenge" button and start fixing the issues based on the suggestions. This turns passive reading into active learning.

Do I implement CSP headers correctly? Does flattening the nested logic actually improve readability? What happens when I add dns-prefetch hints?

I can even use AI to help improve my code. For this action, I can use from a list of several available models that don't need to be the same one that generated the code. This helps me to explore which models are good at what kind of tasks.

For my experiment, I decided to work on two suggestions provided by VibeCodeArena by preloading critical CSS/JS resources with <link rel="preload"> for faster rendering in index.html and by adding explicit width and height attributes to images to prevent layout shift in index.html. The code editor gave me change summary before I submitted by code for evaluation.

Step 4: Submit for Evaluation

After making improvements, I submit my code for evaluation. Now I see:

What actually improved (and by how much)
What new issues I might have introduced
Where I still have room to grow

Step 5: Hey, I Can Beat AI

My changes helped improve the performance metric of this simple code from 82% to 83% - Yay! But this was just one small change. I now believe that by acting upon multiple suggestions, I can easily improve the quality of the code that I write versus just relying on prompts.

Each improvement can move me up the leaderboard. I'm not just learning in isolation—I'm seeing how my solutions compare to other developers and AI models.

So, this is the loop: Generate → Analyze → Challenge → Improve → Measure → Repeat.

Every iteration makes me better at both evaluating AI code and writing better prompts.

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What This Means for Learning to Code with AI

This experience taught me three critical lessons:

1. Working ≠ Good Code

AI models are incredible at generating code that functions. But "it works" tells you nothing about security, performance, or maintainability.

The gap between "functional" and "production-ready" is where real learning happens. VibeCodeArena makes that gap visible and teachable.

2. Improvement Requires Measurement

I used to iterate on code blindly: "This seems better... I think?"

Now I know exactly what improved. When I flatten nested logic, I see the maintainability index go up. When I add CSP headers, I see security scores improve. When I optimize selectors, I see performance gains.

Measurement transforms vague improvement into concrete progress.

3. Competition Accelerates Learning

The leaderboard changed everything for me. I'm not just trying to write "good enough" code—I'm trying to climb past other developers and even beat the AI models.

This competitive element keeps me pushing to learn one more optimization, fix one more issue, implement one more best practice.

How the Platform Helps Me Become A Better Programmer

VibeCodeArena isn't just an evaluation tool—it's a structured learning environment. Here's what makes it effective:

Immediate Feedback: I see issues the moment I submit code, not weeks later in code review.

Contextual Education: Each issue comes with explanation and guidance. I learn why something matters, not just that it's wrong.

Iterative Improvement: The "Challenge" button transforms evaluation into action. I learn by doing, not just reading.

Measurable Progress: I can track my improvement over time—both in code quality scores and leaderboard position.

Comparative Learning: Seeing how my solutions stack up against others shows me what's possible and motivates me to reach higher.

What I've Learned So Far

Through this iterative process, I've gained practical knowledge I never would have developed just reading documentation:

How to implement Content Security Policy correctly
Why DOM depth matters for rendering performance
What CSS containment does and when to use it
How to structure code for better maintainability
Which performance optimizations actually make a difference

Each "Challenge" cycle teaches me something new. And because I'm measuring the impact, I know what actually works.

The Bottom Line

AI coding tools are incredible for generating starting points. But they don't produce high quality code and can't teach you what good code looks like or how to improve it.

VibeCodeArena bridges that gap by providing:

✓ Objective analysis that shows you what's actually wrong
✓ Educational feedback that explains why it matters
✓ A "Challenge" system that turns learning into action
✓ Measurable improvement tracking so you know what works
✓ Competitive motivation through leaderboards

My "simple image carousel" taught me an important lesson: The real skill isn't generating code with AI. It's knowing how to evaluate it, improve it, and learn from the process.

The future of AI-assisted development isn't just about prompting better. It's about developing the judgment to make AI-generated code production-ready. That requires structured learning, objective feedback, and iterative improvement. And that's exactly what VibeCodeArena delivers.

Here is a link to the code for the image carousal I used for my learning journey

#AIcoding #WebDevelopment #CodeQuality #VibeCoding #SoftwareEngineering #LearningToCode

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Revolutionizing Mobile Talent Hiring: The HackerEarth Advantage

The demand for mobile applications is exploding, but finding and verifying developers with proven, real-world skills is more difficult than ever. Traditional assessment methods often fall short, failing to replicate the complexities of modern mobile development.

Introducing a New Era in Mobile Assessment

At HackerEarth, we're closing this critical gap with two groundbreaking features, seamlessly integrated into our Full Stack IDE:

Now, assess mobile developers in their true native environment. Our enhanced Full Stack questions now offer full support for both Java and Kotlin, the core languages powering the Android ecosystem. This allows you to evaluate candidates on authentic, real-world app development skills, moving beyond theoretical knowledge to practical application.

Say goodbye to setup drama and tool-switching. Candidates can now build, test, and debug Android and React Native applications directly within the browser-based IDE. This seamless, in-browser experience provides a true-to-life evaluation, saving valuable time for both candidates and your hiring team.

Assess the Skills That Truly Matter

With native Android support, your assessments can now delve into a candidate's ability to write clean, efficient, and functional code in the languages professional developers use daily. Kotlin's rapid adoption makes proficiency in it a key indicator of a forward-thinking candidate ready for modern mobile development.

Breakup of Mobile development skills ~95% of mobile app dev happens through Java and Kotlin — This chart illustrates the importance of assessing proficiency in both modern (Kotlin) and established (Java) codebases.

Streamlining Your Assessment Workflow

The integrated mobile emulator fundamentally transforms the assessment process. By eliminating the friction of fragmented toolchains and complex local setups, we enable a faster, more effective evaluation and a superior candidate experience.

Old Fragmented Way vs. The New, Integrated Way — Visualize the stark difference: Our streamlined workflow removes technical hurdles, allowing candidates to focus purely on demonstrating their coding and problem-solving abilities.

Quantifiable Impact on Hiring Success

A seamless and authentic assessment environment isn't just a convenience, it's a powerful catalyst for efficiency and better hiring outcomes. By removing technical barriers, candidates can focus entirely on demonstrating their skills, leading to faster submissions and higher-quality signals for your recruiters and hiring managers.

A Better Experience for Everyone

Our new features are meticulously designed to benefit the entire hiring ecosystem:

For Recruiters & Hiring Managers:

Accurately assess real-world development skills.
Gain deeper insights into candidate proficiency.
Hire with greater confidence and speed.
Reduce candidate drop-off from technical friction.

For Candidates:

Enjoy a seamless, efficient assessment experience.
No need to switch between different tools or manage complex setups.
Focus purely on showcasing skills, not environment configurations.
Work in a powerful, professional-grade IDE.

Unlock a New Era of Mobile Talent Assessment

Stop guessing and start hiring the best mobile developers with confidence. Explore how HackerEarth can transform your tech recruiting.

A New Era of Code

Vibe coding is a new method of using natural language prompts and AI tools to generate code. I have seen firsthand that this change makes software more accessible to everyone. In the past, being able to produce functional code was a strong advantage for developers. Today, when code is produced quickly through AI, the true value lies in designing, refining, and optimizing systems. Our role now goes beyond writing code; we must also ensure that our systems remain efficient and reliable.

From Machine Language to Natural Language

I recall the early days when every line of code was written manually. We progressed from machine language to high-level programming, and now we are beginning to interact with our tools using natural language. This development does not only increase speed but also changes how we approach problem solving. Product managers can now create working demos in hours instead of weeks, and founders have a clearer way of pitching their ideas with functional prototypes. It is important for us to rethink our role as developers and focus on architecture and system design rather than simply on typing c

The Promise and the Pitfalls

I have experienced both sides of vibe coding. In cases where the goal was to build a quick prototype or a simple internal tool, AI-generated code provided impressive results. Teams have been able to test new ideas and validate concepts much faster. However, when it comes to more complex systems that require careful planning and attention to detail, the output from AI can be problematic. I have seen situations where AI produces large volumes of code that become difficult to manage without significant human intervention.

AI-powered coding tools like GitHub Copilot and AWS’s Q Developer have demonstrated significant productivity gains. For instance, at the National Australia Bank, it’s reported that half of the production code is generated by Q Developer, allowing developers to focus on higher-level problem-solving . Similarly, platforms like Lovable or Hostinger Horizons enable non-coders to build viable tech businesses using natural language prompts, contributing to a shift where AI-generated code reduces the need for large engineering teams. However, there are challenges. AI-generated code can sometimes be verbose or lack the architectural discipline required for complex systems. While AI can rapidly produce prototypes or simple utilities, building large-scale systems still necessitates experienced engineers to refine and optimize the code.

The Economic Impact

The democratization of code generation is altering the economic landscape of software development. As AI tools become more prevalent, the value of average coding skills may diminish, potentially affecting salaries for entry-level positions. Conversely, developers who excel in system design, architecture, and optimization are likely to see increased demand and compensation.
Seizing the Opportunity

Vibe coding is most beneficial in areas such as rapid prototyping and building simple applications or internal tools. It frees up valuable time that we can then invest in higher-level tasks such as system architecture, security, and user experience. When used in the right context, AI becomes a helpful partner that accelerates the development process without replacing the need for skilled engineers.

This is revolutionizing our craft, much like the shift from machine language to assembly to high-level languages did in the past. AI can churn out code at lightning speed, but remember, “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” Use AI for rapid prototyping, but it’s your expertise that transforms raw output into robust, scalable software. By honing our skills in design and architecture, we ensure our work remains impactful and enduring. Let’s continue to learn, adapt, and build software that stands the test of time.

Ready to streamline your recruitment process? Get a free demo to explore cutting-edge solutions and resources for your hiring needs.

Hackathons—HR’s best friend

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