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Goodbye to Google Code Jam

codingcompetitions.withgoogle.com

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Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#141

Post by nostrademons »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #140
nostrademons wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's there to find the non-networked developer - the kid in their mom's basement who is not in Silicon Valley or possibly not even in the U.S. and doesn't know anyone who works at Google, but learned to program on their own. Ironically this is the sort of developer that HN says can't get FAANG jobs because they lack the credentials and connections.

> Ironically this is the sort of developer that HN says can't get FAANG jobs because they lack the credentials and connections. That's correct. As the reddit post noted, there is no benefit to coming to Google's attention via Code Jam. They'll give you an interview that way, but they'll also give an interview to anyone else who wants one. And the approach you take to Code Jam is actually harmful to your performance i…

They don't give interviews to just anyone who applies. IIRC the first time I joined (2009, interviewed in late 2008) the stat was that ~2.3 million people had applied to Google, ~1000 had been hired that year, and your odds of getting in were like 2000:1. There were pretty well-known tricks for getting past the initial resume screen, like getting a referral, having an Ivy League degree, having a hot tech company on your resume, or coming through a recruiting avenue (eg. GSoC or TopCoder) that Google sponsored.

Maybe the interview:applicant ratio is better now that there's ~100K engineers rather than ~8K engineers, but a quick back of the envelope calculation indicates it's still likely not everyone that applies. On my team last year (before the hiring freeze) maybe ~20% of engineers do interviews regularly (a bit better than it was in ~2010), and we'd usually limit it to 1/week. That's ~20K interviewers * 50 interviews = 1M interviews/year, which is definitely better odds than in 2008, but still nowhere near enough to interview everyone who applies even if the number of applicants hasn't grown at all since 2008.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#142

Post by versteegen »

bragger wrote: post #136
geraldwhen wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…yes? Lol. I’ve moonlighted on upwork for easy cash in the past. Not all of us made 200k/year in our first job out of college a decade and a half ago. Yes, I was part of a USA team in an international competition. I won our region. For what it’s worth, competitive programming isn’t like sports. The playing field isn’t that good, and the amount of work it takes to make it past regionals and to an international competi…

The field is definitely weak. I got a top 50 result in round 3 (but not top 25) of my first GCJ, my second programming contest ever, the first being the one time I showed up for one in college, and that score was ahead of some ICPC and IOI gold medalists. My only preparation being doing a few practice problems from prior years and making a blank C++ file with some includes, an empty main function, and "using namespac…

Let's admit it (your username does), you're very good. Code Jam seems to reward problem solving and maths/CS ability far more than programming ability, relative to other coding competitions. The most important thing is analysing the problem, not memorising standard algorithms. That's why you could do so well with so little competition experience. And why I have stuffed up so many GCJ rounds.

That said, sometimes the field really is weak. I finished in the top 1000 on the first Distributed Code Jam and got a t-shirt just because... less than 1000 qualifying contestants were willing to even figure out the novel setup and compete. (Actually I did badly.)

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#143

Post by geraldwhen »

versteegen wrote: post #142
bragger wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The field is definitely weak. I got a top 50 result in round 3 (but not top 25) of my first GCJ, my second programming contest ever, the first being the one time I showed up for one in college, and that score was ahead of some ICPC and IOI gold medalists. My only preparation being doing a few practice problems from prior years and making a blank C++ file with some includes, an empty main function, and "using namespac…

Let's admit it (your username does), you're very good. Code Jam seems to reward problem solving and maths/CS ability far more than programming ability, relative to other coding competitions. The most important thing is analysing the problem, not memorising standard algorithms. That's why you could do so well with so little competition experience. And why I have stuffed up so many GCJ rounds. That said, sometimes the…

Most people will not be able to solve longest common substring without being familiar with the problem ahead of time, and many programming problems can be broken down or transformed into similar algorithms.

Identifying root applicable algorithms and reproducing them quickly is what you study when competing in programming competitions.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#144

Post by UncleMeat »

polskibus wrote: post #100
gregdoesit wrote: post #94

For anyone wondering about the underlying reason for these events suddenly being cancelled: it is connected to Google laying off the team that organized these four events, as part of their January job cuts. I covered more details I could find a few weeks ago [1] [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/google-coding-competition...

That is so bad. They could’ve left 1 or 2 for the benefit of CS as a whole. They are undercutting their own future talent pool this way.

One of the biggest questions when doing layoffs is whether you should kill entire teams or cut more teams by a small amount. A 1-2 person team is often very bad for people's careers and creates major sustainability problems when people take vacations or leave or whatever.

I am sad that codejam is gone. I'm not certain that a skeleton crew would have been good for the skeleton crew.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#145

Post by phendrenad2 »

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…

Competitive coding is completely unrelated to leetcode. You can't get good at competitive coding by doing leetcode, and you can't get good at leetcode by doing competitive coding.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#146

Post by phendrenad2 »

sacnoradhq wrote: post #51

It's funny how age of an event is used to justify that something should be stopped. So sunset Google Search too? It seems to be a Google thing to do: randomly start and discontinue things without much thought.

This is how much of the world works, sadly. This is why brands refresh their logos every 5-10 years, to avoid becoming the old, the stale, the has-been. It seems to me that for some reason, this effect particularly affects software developers, because we are the first to call finished, stable open-source libraries "abandoned" if someone doesn't make a pointless git commit every 3 months.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#147

Post by thaumasiotes »

nostrademons wrote: post #141
thaumasiotes wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ironically this is the sort of developer that HN says can't get FAANG jobs because they lack the credentials and connections. That's correct. As the reddit post noted, there is no benefit to coming to Google's attention via Code Jam. They'll give you an interview that way, but they'll also give an interview to anyone else who wants one. And the approach you take to Code Jam is actually harmful to your performance i…

They don't give interviews to just anyone who applies. IIRC the first time I joined (2009, interviewed in late 2008) the stat was that ~2.3 million people had applied to Google, ~1000 had been hired that year, and your odds of getting in were like 2000:1. There were pretty well-known tricks for getting past the initial resume screen, like getting a referral, having an Ivy League degree, having a hot tech company on y…

> the initial resume screen

At least as things stood last year, Google does the resume screen after the interview, not before.

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