The Wrong Test for the Wrong Job
A network engineer applies for a senior infrastructure role. She has eight years of experience: firewall policy management, BGP route troubleshooting, data-center cabling audits, and a dozen midnight incidents she resolved before the business noticed anything was wrong. The hiring team sends her a LeetCode-style challenge. She is asked to reverse a linked list and implement a binary search tree. She scores in the 40th percentile. The recruiter moves on.
That scenario is not hypothetical. It plays out constantly at companies that default to software-engineering assessment pipelines for roles that have nothing to do with writing algorithms. The result is a systematic filtering-out of experienced IT operations and infrastructure professionals, people whose value lives in a completely different skill domain.
What Coding Challenges Actually Measure
Coding-challenge platforms were built for one purpose: screening software engineers who write production application code. They are good at that. A candidate who can implement a graph traversal efficiently under time pressure probably has strong fundamentals in computer science and can reason about complexity.
But that skill set maps poorly, sometimes not at all, to the work of:
- A helpdesk technician diagnosing a user who cannot authenticate after a password reset
- A Linux sysadmin tracing a service that fails silently on boot
- A cloud engineer debugging why an S3 bucket policy is blocking a Lambda execution role
- A cybersecurity analyst hunting a lateral movement pattern in auth logs
- A network engineer whose OSPF adjacency dropped at 2 a.m. with no change ticket open
None of those tasks require implementing a hash map from scratch. All of them require reading system state, interpreting tool output, and making a correct decision in a constrained environment. That is a fundamentally different cognitive task, and no amount of algorithm scoring tells you whether a candidate can do it.
The Structural Problem: Platforms Optimized for One Track
The major coding-challenge platforms (HackerRank, LeetCode, Codility, and similar tools) share a common architecture. They present a problem statement, accept code in a chosen language, run it against test cases, and return a pass/fail score. That pipeline assumes the deliverable is executable code.
IT operations work does not produce executable code as its primary output. It produces:
- A correctly configured firewall rule
- A repaired systemd unit file
- A working VPN tunnel with the right cipher suite
- A properly scoped IAM policy
- A clean incident resolution with the right commands run in the right order
You cannot evaluate those outcomes by running them through a unit-test harness. You need a live environment, a real terminal, and a rubric that checks actual system state after the candidate acts. Coding platforms do not have that infrastructure, so they do not offer that assessment. The result is a blind spot that covers most of the IT workforce.
Why Resumes Do Not Close the Gap
When assessment tooling fails, hiring teams fall back on resumes and interviews. Both have well-documented reliability problems. A resume that lists "Cisco IOS," "AWS," and "Active Directory" tells you nothing about whether the candidate can actually configure a VLAN trunk or troubleshoot a broken trust relationship. Certifications help somewhat, but a certification exam is multiple-choice, not hands-on, and it tests knowledge of concepts rather than execution under realistic conditions.
Structured technical interviews help more, but they are expensive, inconsistent across interviewers, and difficult to scale. Two interviewers asking the same candidate about subnetting will reach different conclusions based on how they probe and what they weight. That inconsistency is not a people problem; it is a process problem. Without a shared, deterministic rubric applied to a shared, observable task, you are comparing apples to opinions.
Recruiters who have been burned by strong-resume, weak-performance hires know this intuitively. The question is what to replace the broken process with, not whether to replace it.
What a Relevant Assessment Actually Looks Like
An IT operations assessment needs three things that coding challenges do not provide.
First, a live environment. The candidate needs a real terminal connected to a real (or realistically simulated) system. Not a description of a system. Not a multiple-choice question about what command they would run. The actual shell, the actual tool, the actual error output.
Second, a scenario with operational context. "Fix the broken SSH service on this host" is a valid scenario. "A user reports they cannot reach the internal wiki; here is the network topology" is a valid scenario. These mirror the actual tickets and incidents that define the job. They create conditions where judgment, not memorization, is what gets tested.
Third, deterministic rubric scoring. The scoring cannot depend on an evaluator's impression or an AI model's interpretation. It needs to check specific, observable system states: Is the service running? Is the correct port open? Is the configuration file syntactically valid and semantically correct? Pass or fail on each criterion, aggregated into a transparent score. That is reproducible. That is defensible. That is what makes the result useful to a recruiter who did not watch the session.
The Tracks That Get Missed Most Often
Some IT disciplines suffer more than others from the coding-challenge default. Helpdesk and desktop support roles are almost never assessed with any structured tool, because the work looks "soft" to hiring teams that equate rigor with code. In practice, a skilled helpdesk technician is running a diagnostic workflow under time pressure with a frustrated user on the line. That is assessable; it just requires the right scenario.
Networking is another gap. Routing protocols, ACLs, NAT rules, and VLAN configurations are highly technical and highly consequential, but no coding platform touches them. The same is true for Linux system administration, where the real skill is reading logs, understanding process trees, and knowing which lever to pull when a system is degraded but not fully down.
Cybersecurity operations, specifically the blue-team and analyst roles, are similarly underserved. Identifying a suspicious process, correlating log entries, or hardening a misconfigured service requires hands-on terminal work that a quiz cannot replicate.
OpsTicket, a product of IT Custom Solution LLC, was built specifically for these tracks. It delivers real terminal scenarios across helpdesk, networking, cybersecurity, cloud/DevOps, Linux sysadmin, and AI foundations, scored by a deterministic rubric so the result means the same thing regardless of who reviews it. Recruiters get a verifiable certificate tied to actual task performance, not a self-reported skill list. Pricing starts at $49 per month on the Pro tier; details are at tryopsticket.com/pricing.
A Short Takeaway
If your hiring process routes IT operations candidates through a coding-challenge platform, you are measuring the wrong thing and discarding qualified people as a direct consequence. The fix is not to lower the bar; it is to use a bar that is relevant to the job. Live terminal scenarios with deterministic scoring exist. They are not exotic or expensive. They are just not the default, yet.
Audit one open IT ops role this week. Ask whether the current screening tool can actually verify the skills that role requires. If the answer is no, that is the gap to close first.
If you want to talk through how to build a more accurate screening process for IT infrastructure roles, reach out to us and we can walk through what a practical setup looks like for your team.