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Goodbye to Google Code Jam

codingcompetitions.withgoogle.com

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Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#31

Post by actuator »

musicale wrote: post #27
actuator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a joke? It is like any other sport or Olympiad, it involves solving faster, accurately and potentially of problems you haven't seen before. There is no direct correlation between competitive programming like CodeJam/ICPC and leetcode. They don't target the same audience at all. I couldn't get to the top of these but I do admire people who do, they are some of the absolutely brilliant people I have worked wi…

> There is no direct correlation between competitive programming like CodeJam/ICPC and leetcode What is the difference that you see between these sorts of algorithm puzzle contests? Is there some reason that people who are good at one contest would be bad at another, similar contest?

The main difference is the audience of both is different.

Leetcode works like this. Company A is asking these 100 questions with this frequency; let me solve these questions so that when I encounter these in the interview I can solve them then. The whole premise of Leetcode is on giving a question bank to what is already being asked. The aim is to clear the base bar a company has set.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#32

Post by rvz »

paulpauper wrote: post #12

There is no need for coding competitions anymore. The competition is Leetcode. The prize: a high paying job.

Indeed.

It is a product of decades of quantitative easing, near zero interest rates and a tech bubble that needed to collapse.

Thanks to GPT-4 and other LLMs, this have driven the need for coding competitions and interview tests like Hackerrank, Leetcode, Codility to zero and having almost no use since everyone will just Ch(e)atGPT the coding interview or competition.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#33

Post by actuator »

musicale wrote: post #28
actuator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a joke? It is like any other sport or Olympiad, it involves solving faster, accurately and potentially of problems you haven't seen before. There is no direct correlation between competitive programming like CodeJam/ICPC and leetcode. They don't target the same audience at all. I couldn't get to the top of these but I do admire people who do, they are some of the absolutely brilliant people I have worked wi…

> problems you haven't seen before Having seen similar problems really helps though.

Yes, it does. Just likes it helps in Maths or Physics Olympiad or any other ranked entrance examinations. Patterns are there in most real world problems as well, the more you have tackled before, the easier it is for one to see a pattern.

Just like any sport as well

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#34

Post by krackers »

krackers wrote: post #30
startupsfail wrote: post #7

In general Online Rounds of coding competitions are no longer going to work. As GPT-4 had been shown to outperform humans on the coding competition tasks. You can have it assisted, but this quickly becomes a “who can afford more compute” competition. RIP coding competitions. Incidentally, World Finals: up to 2020, it was held in a location in the US or Europe, and has been online since. Pretty incredibly, Gennady Kor…

>As GPT-4 had been shown to outperform humans on the coding competition tasks On the same frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297067 Food for thought. Also by their own paper it has only a codeforces rank of 392 which is below 5th percentile.

Also a cute prompt I saw on the same twitter thread

```

This is a variant of the monty hall problem:

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. IMPORTANT: All the doors are transparent. Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who clearly knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

```

The response from chatGPT (v3, non plus) is:

```

Yes, it is to your advantage to switch your choice.

In this variant of the Monty Hall problem, the fact that the doors are transparent does not change the underlying probability of the problem.

```

I wonder how gpt-4 does. There does seem to be a bit of overfitting, but I consider the prompt fair enough and even called out the trick in capital letters, so that even a tired human should be able to get the answer.

Edit: An even more obvious variant of the prompt is seen in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192466, which goes further and spells out that the contestant explicitly picks the door with the car. ChatGPT still gets it wrong.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#35

Post by adam_arthur »

actuator wrote: post #26
pclmulqdq wrote: post #10

Competitive coding has always been a bit of a joke, but it's a great entry vector for kids to get introduced to programming (and eventually software engineering). I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this, though. I have always been suspicious that the existence of the game of competitive coding has been used to kind of justify the "leetcodification" of the tech interview circuit, and (IMO) that can't go away soon…

Why is it a joke? It is like any other sport or Olympiad, it involves solving faster, accurately and potentially of problems you haven't seen before. There is no direct correlation between competitive programming like CodeJam/ICPC and leetcode. They don't target the same audience at all. I couldn't get to the top of these but I do admire people who do, they are some of the absolutely brilliant people I have worked wi…

Depends what you’re hiring for.

Firstly the interview should be structured with an aim to maximize correlation between success on the interview and success on the job. If you’re not thinking along these lines you aren’t even playing the game.

For most startups, the right criteria to screen for is pace and quality of code, plus work ethic.

You can ask a relatively easy coding problem, whether it be algorithmic/data structure, or more real world, that 99% of people will be able to solve, but still apply a high bar for what’s considered passing. Can they code the obvious solution quickly and effortlessly? I dont care at all if you’re able to produce a solution, I care about the path to that solution.

Screening for the straight arbitrary algorithmic/design diagram problems has hordes of people who have trained to the test. At scale hiring these people may work through selecting for people with decent work ethic to grind problems, but you’re not going to get consistently great people this way. Lots of false negatives and positives.

Having hired over 100 engineers in the bay area, judging by coding competency first was always more effective than judging based on quick shot leetcode/algorithmic aptitude. You can easily grind canned algorithms to pass a leetcode style interview, but you can’t fake coding proficiency.

If you’re hiring for DB or ML developers, obviously theory is more important. But 90+% of you are not

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#37

Post by actuator »

adam_arthur wrote: post #35
actuator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a joke? It is like any other sport or Olympiad, it involves solving faster, accurately and potentially of problems you haven't seen before. There is no direct correlation between competitive programming like CodeJam/ICPC and leetcode. They don't target the same audience at all. I couldn't get to the top of these but I do admire people who do, they are some of the absolutely brilliant people I have worked wi…

Depends what you’re hiring for. Firstly the interview should be structured with an aim to maximize correlation between success on the interview and success on the job. If you’re not thinking along these lines you aren’t even playing the game. For most startups, the right criteria to screen for is pace and quality of code, plus work ethic. You can ask a relatively easy coding problem, whether it be algorithmic/data st…

For startups I agree, they should definitely customize their interview rather than copying big tech pattern.

The kind of interview you describe is something Stripe also does, but I have seen even this resulting in non objective selection criterias. Like one Stripe employee told me that they prefer if someone uses a map rather than iterating on a list, as it is cleaner. While I agree with the sentiment; I don't think it is a good filter to add in the interview.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#39

Post by uptownfunk »

O__________O wrote: post #5
uptownfunk wrote: post #2

>>After nearly 20 years of Code Jam, it's time to say goodbye. While Code Jam will not continue as planned, we invite you to participate in our Competitions' Farewell Round on Saturday, April 15 at 14:00 UTC.

Appears answer is staff responsible were laid off: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-did-google-cl...

Bummer! Had a lot of reach and great tool to encourage future engineers. These events make it seem like the era of big fancy cool tech companies is over. Of course you have the emergence of other tech companies like open AI.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#40

Post by milemi »

startupsfail wrote: post #7

In general Online Rounds of coding competitions are no longer going to work. As GPT-4 had been shown to outperform humans on the coding competition tasks. You can have it assisted, but this quickly becomes a “who can afford more compute” competition. RIP coding competitions. Incidentally, World Finals: up to 2020, it was held in a location in the US or Europe, and has been online since. Pretty incredibly, Gennady Kor…

I’m sure it outperforms the general population since most people can’t code a hello world, or regurgitate an answer to a problem they have been trained to answer but have no understanding of like ChatGPT can. But if a minimally competent human gave me a completely nonsensical answer to a question they haven’t seen before, the way ChatGPT does so confidently, I would think one of us had a stroke.

I would expect a journalist who never had do think through a theory of computation course to make breathless claims that ChatGPT can “solve programming problems“, but I’m pretty surprised to hear so many people who have jobs in tech repeating these claims, especially since all it would take them to trip up ChatGPT is a few seconds to type in a slightly unfamiliar or non-trivial question. It’s like a kind of second-order Turing test: if you think ChatGPT can program, you’re not a real programmer.

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