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Are Contests the Best Way To Find Programmers?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Tech firms are engaging in several non-traditional hiring methods, from programming contests to finding the right people via algorithm. One of the more popular methods: set up a coding challenge or programming contest to bring out interested parties, with the top prize being a trip to the sponsoring company's headquarters to interview for a job. Look at what Facebook is doing in this area, sponsoring several Kaggle.com programming contests to find the best programmers; it also makes use of the site InterviewStreet to screen potential applicants. In theory, any company can build and run a contest online. But is it really the best way to go about hiring a programmer (or any other tech-minded employee, for that matter)?"
to find programmers who like contests.
No experienced competent software engineer would ever enter one of these code contest. If you need good engineers try offering the best compensation and the best working conditions.
Maybe I misunderstand the nature of these contests, but what I produce in 4 weeks is different than what I produce in 4 days. I have to make serious trade-offs that will impact the software design significantly and will not reflect what my vision would be for the "big picture" goals like clarity, maintainability, modularity, safety, error handling and all manner of best practices.
I wouldn't want a prospective employer to judge me based on the stuff I can churn out in a flash, unless that's the nature of the work they have in mind for me.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
I'm not going to go out on a limb and claim to be one of the best programmers.
However, I don't have time to do programming constests with my day job being rather busy. I generally give a lot to that job so I'm not going to spend time coding when I get home on the weekend.
I'd imagine that I'm not particularly unique in this regard.
On the other hand, you wil find good programmers who have no time commitments other tha coding, so I guess it does work out well.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Programmers and related IT folk are the absolute bottom of the corporate barrel - below custodians, below security guards, below the cafeteria staff. Only programmers / analysts / sysadmins / etc. are expected to take 6 month "contract-to-hire" positions. Only IT professionals can work in a job hierarchy with very few, if any, opportunities to advance to senior management. Mainly only IT professionals are told to take salary cuts, work extra hours, and train their successors due to outsourcing.
And now you want a contest to decide who to hire? Do accountants, operations staff, finance staff, and marketing have contests to see who will be hired? Even in sales you're hired for a position - you need to meet your quota, but there's none of this patently demeaning treatment of IT professionals as mere expendable cogs in the machine.
So what if you win the contest? Are you expected to perform at that amped up level every day of your work career? Are you supposed to quit when some new young buck / buckette does better in the contest next year? Is your education, prior experience, ability to work with others totally irrelevant? And damnit, do you have any sense of dignity in your job?
I've worked in IT for 15 years. During that time I've seen friends from undergraduate days and graduate school days move steadily up the ladder while nearly every person I've worked with in programming are stuck in the same ruck - everyone's a "Senior Engineer" or "Architect." And now we can look forward to job duels? Coding against each other endlessly in a competition to stay gainfully employed.
Don't accept this garbage. Being a productive employee is far more than just the ability to spew some excellent code in a contest. We have to make our field a profession, not a joke.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
" but aren't these large companies wanting to raise the H-1B visa limits because of allegedly poorly trained/inexperienced programmers?"\
no. They want highly trained and experienced people to work for cheap.
We have plenty of programmers in the US, but we have the gall to want to be reasonably paid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Also it's a long-term contest (8 weeks) instead of the "overnight hackathon challenge" you might be thinking of. You can make several submissions and get feedback for how your algorithm is doing, and how it stacks up to other teams. ...
Everyone complains about the HR "minefield" that sorts candidates by requiring useless or immaterial experience instead of raw coding ability. This is a new type of job search that doesn't have these problems.
This has worse problems. They plan to get a useful difficult alogorthm solved for free. (And multiple variations on it too.) This will apparently will require teams weeks of efforts to come up with. That's hundreds even thousands of hours of free unpaid labour.
I should have strata's landscaping done like this. Instead of paying a landscaper to come by everyweek I'll just hold a contest, and have 50 contractors each come in one week and do their thing. At the end I hire the best one for a one year contract.
The year after that... I'm not sure he's the best one anymore... I'll need another contest.
Free landscaping every other year is a pretty sweet deal.
The only flaw in the ointment is that unlike programmers, landscaping contractors don't work for free. And they don't buy into idiotic arguments that the best landscapers love landscaping and want to spend their time off doing it for free too.