Uber Recruiting Engineers By Randomly Sending Coding Game To Play During Rides (businessinsider.com)

An anonymous reader links to a Business Insider report: Uber has found a new way to lure engineers to work for the fast-growing startup. The taxi-aggregator service tests coding skills of select riders during their ride. Uber insists that it is not using individual information to identify recruits, but are just identifying geographies where tech jobs are concentrated to find candidates. "The option to play gives interested riders the opportunity to show us their skills in a fun and different way -- whether they code on the side or are pursuing a career as a developer," a Uber spokesperson said. If they accept the test, Uber challenges the ride with three coding problems to solve, each with a 60-second countdown, and scores them based on their answers. Uber is not the only Silicon Valley giant which has found a "creative" way to hire people. Last year, we saw Google offer at least one person a job based on his search queries.

Comments

How the hell

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Can you need so many people for something like this? Marketers and lawyers, sure, but how many technical people do you need for this?

I'm baffled.

Re:How the hell

[quantaman]

Can you need so many people for something like this? Marketers and lawyers, sure, but how many technical people do you need for this?

I'm baffled.

To do a basic version? Not many. To do the best version? Lots.

For the app itself that's fairly easy, but you need to test and patch on every conceivable platform and keep the look and feel as clean as possible.

On the back end side you need 100% uptime or as close to as possible, you've got a crap load of data coming in, GPS, customer profiles, driver info, etc.

There's also a lot of nice haves, what should a driver do between fares? Is there somewhere they should go to anticipate the next fare or should they just hang tight and save fuel?

As well Uber's been criticized a few times for their surge pricing algorithms jumping during an emergency, would be smart to follow twitter or some news sites, detect the emergency, and skip the surge pricing.

That's not even counting their foray into self-driving cars, that's going to need an army.

If you have enough money finding jobs for those devs isn't hard.

This is mostly a test of vestibular function.

[Brannon]

I would vomit over every square inch of that car if I tried to code while moving. Am I in the minority here?

If I ever meet the guy who decided to put TVs (that are impossible to turn off) in the back of every NYC cab I am going to vomit on him.

Sample question

[OzPeter]

Dear Uber Passenger who has been picked up at location A and is wanting to be taken to location B.

We would like to test your skills as a developer by seeing how well you can solve the following simple tasks:

What are the
    1. Fastest
    2. Shortest
  3. Most interesting

Routes between location A and location B

Please pass on your answers to your driver so that he/she/it can rate your abilities.

This is, of course, "creative" bullshit

[gweihir]

You cannot identify or hire good engineers via "puzzles". Why do you think Google is stagnating for about forever now? They make the same mistake.