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Programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job

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Re: Programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job

#21

Post by brudgers »

fsk wrote: post #8

I don't see how it would be negative correlation or even zero. Winning a competition shows a certain amount of raw talent. For someone who only programmed for competitions and never worked on a serious project I could see it being a negative, but with some experience the competition winner should (on average) do better than average.

Programming contests are winner take all. Contemporary professional practice emphasizes collective success, teamwork, and group ownership of code. Two processes that select for opposite traits will often have negative correlation.

Re: Programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job

#23

Post by oskarth »

It's still a positive predictor in general. It just means that, beyond a certain point, it's a negative predictor. Just like a GPA of 3.5+ is probably positively correlated with getting tenure, but maybe getting 4.0 is worse than getting 3.9.

Watch the actual video to get the real take away:

I think what it meant was that, everybody who gets hired at Google is pretty good. If I just had to pick someone off the street, I really want that contest winner, I got to take him every time. Or her. But if it's somebody who passed the hiring bar, then they are all pretty much at the same level. And maybe the ones used to winning the contest, they are really used to going really, really fast and cranking the answer out and moving on to the next thing. And you perform better on the job if you are a little more reflective. And go slowly and make sure you get things right. -- Peter Norvig.

Re: Programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job

#24

Post by diminoten »

This just smacks of defensive justification for lack of participation. "I don't do this and I don't want to do this, so I'm going to bash it and the people who do it so I can pretend I'm making a choice instead of just being lazy". It's a little bit like the folks who say, "I'm saving myself for marriage" when in reality they've never been on a date in their lives.

Pretending like people can't think in more than one mindset is an inaccurate model. I've never done an honest-to-goodness coding competition, but I can imagine someone who does code competitively to think very differently when they're competing vs. when they're designing/implementing a solution as a professional endeavor.

Someone would have to explain to me in much more detail how this "negative correlation" is established before I believe it.

Re: Programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job

#26

Post by _delirium »

fsk wrote: post #8

I don't see how it would be negative correlation or even zero. Winning a competition shows a certain amount of raw talent. For someone who only programmed for competitions and never worked on a serious project I could see it being a negative, but with some experience the competition winner should (on average) do better than average.

This is looking at a correlation among people who were hired by Google, which is a fairly specific population, and one that's actually in part selected by the same variable being studied, which complicates things further.

There are a lot of possible mechanisms by which the correlation might've been produced, if it's valid. One is that winning programming competitions is anti-predictive of job performance (the interpretation this summary takes). But another is that Google puts (or previously put) too much positive weight on winning programming competitions in their hiring vs. other factors. If Google were, for example, more willing to overlook other weaknesses in people who had won programming competitions, or treated them more leniently in interviews, that would be another mechanism for producing a population of hires where those who won programming competitions were worse at their jobs.

Re: Programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job

#27

Post by colechristensen »

fsk wrote: post #8

I don't see how it would be negative correlation or even zero. Winning a competition shows a certain amount of raw talent. For someone who only programmed for competitions and never worked on a serious project I could see it being a negative, but with some experience the competition winner should (on average) do better than average.

If you watch the video linked in the post it makes more sense.

Contest winners are pretty good employees, but the best employees usually aren't contest winners. Cranking out solutions fast is good for winning contests but not as good for writing great code. If you can win a contest, writing code quickly is probably a pretty big part of your skillset which you'll probably use in your job too, and that skill is negatively correlated with writing excellent code.

Still _good_ employees, just not the best.

In a similar vein, students graduating with 4.0 GPAs are often not the best employees because quite often dedication to grades means neglecting the social growth and other non-graded activities, learning, and experience available at universities.

Re: Programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job

#28

Post by victorhn »

wyldfire wrote: post #10
splike wrote: post #2

How did they quantify "being good on the job"?

Based on the research I've read, one of the most valued skills for workers is communication/teamwork. I'll speculate wildly that the loners who perform well at these tasks don't have the leadership/teamwork skills that are so highly desirable.

Almost all of the programming competitions are individual, one of the most prestigious (ACM ICPC) though is a team based programming contest.

Re: Programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job

#29

Post by zodiac »

diminoten wrote: post #24

This just smacks of defensive justification for lack of participation. "I don't do this and I don't want to do this, so I'm going to bash it and the people who do it so I can pretend I'm making a choice instead of just being lazy". It's a little bit like the folks who say, "I'm saving myself for marriage" when in reality they've never been on a date in their lives. Pretending like people can't think in more than one…

> Someone would have to explain to me in much more detail how this "negative correlation" is established

I think it's just a statistical correlation they found in the hiring data.

Re: Programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job

#30

Post by Ruberik »

fridek wrote: post #5

That's not a surprise really. A typical competition may be won by a programmer scoring 90/100 on four out of five tasks and 20/100 on the last one. Such performance at work would likely result in a quick termination.

For the majority of these competitions, the programmer you described would have zero points. If you don't get 100/100 on a task, you get no points. The IOI is a notable exception.
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