Programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by collyw » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 4:49 PM UTC

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…

I have refused to do a couple of time pressure hacker rank challenges as part of a job interviews recently, as it is not how I work on a day to day basis. I was good at these sort of things fresh out of university 15 years ago. I have never had to implement any algorithm under time pressure in my professional career.

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

#32

Post by fatjokes » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 4:50 PM UTC

butwhy wrote: post #25

Nah. That's how Facebook hired interns in The Social Network, so it must be a great strategy.

Sadly, IIRC, the ICPC/IOI/TCO/GCJ/etc don't have drinking components.

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

#33

Post by gwern » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 4:52 PM UTC

oskarth wrote: post #23

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…

Yeah, this might be an instance of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox - correlations after selection/conditioning may be different than before.

Not well known, but relevant to a lot of the stuff about Google's hiring in particular (eg I wasted a lot of time explaining to people 2 years ago or so that Google's HR guy saying that intelligence didn't matter to their hiring decisions != intelligence doesn't matter to job performance (it does, as has been demonstrated many times), because Google was already selecting for <1% of the population.)

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

#34

Post by namelezz » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 4:52 PM UTC

Google keeps proving itself as a king of hyping. Their employees periodically make sound statement regarding to winning programming competitions as not being a good indication of effective employees but they only consider hiring those who can crack programming competition questions during their short interview session. Good for you if you want to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree.

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

#35

Post by collyw » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 4:53 PM UTC

emerongi wrote: post #6

splike wrote: post #2

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

Have other people look at your code? If it's easy to understand, to modify etc - it's good. Otherwise, less good.

assuming it works in the first place.

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

#36

Post by fatjokes » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 4:54 PM UTC

Considering that playing office politics is a key part of being "good on the job", I believe the sensationalized title. The top programming contest folk I knew were as socially awkward as they were brilliant.

Based on my (admitted small) social circle, this means they excel at algo trading firms. A lot of trading teams I know of are headed by former Putnam/ICPC/IOI/IMO/etc. top rankers. The politics there are simple: did you make money?

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

#37

Post by Beltiras » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

victorhn wrote: post #28

wyldfire wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The team can be lone-wolf organized thou since (for on-site competitions) each team only has one computer. The one I did we were 3 in the team. We divvied up the problems and each took turns hacking out the solution. Yes we consulted each other on the solution we were doing but mostly we worked on our own problem. This might have been a defective strategy since we missed the top ranked team by one problem, but had 3 nearly finished solutions when the buzzer rang.

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

#38

Post by DanAndersen » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

It is funny how our industry enjoys building competitive hoops for us to jump through (see also programming interviews that you have to study for). We reject employers judging devs on how many WPM they can type, why do we do this to ourselves?

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

#39

Post by diminoten » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 4:59 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #31

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…

I have refused to do a couple of time pressure hacker rank challenges as part of a job interviews recently, as it is not how I work on a day to day basis. I was good at these sort of things fresh out of university 15 years ago. I have never had to implement any algorithm under time pressure in my professional career.

Why must it be "how you work on a day to day basis"?

Why must interviews only be about exactly what you're being hired to do?

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

#40

Post by skwirl » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 5:00 PM UTC

zk00006 wrote: post #12

People participating in competition and winning (or not) are in my opinion self driven individuals that are more suited to build their own company as opposed to be a good employee.

"Here are the exact specifications of the format of input and output into a console application, and the exact specifications of how the output must relate to the input. You have one hour to do this and your program must finish running within X seconds of being invoked on our test input."

I can't see how being talented at this would have any connection to talent at building a company, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if it was negatively correlated. I'm not really sure talent at winning programming competitions could be positively linked to other than talent at winning programming competitions. Valuable industry tasks differ substantially from what is done in a programming competition.