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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

#51

Post by zk00006 »

skwirl wrote: post #40
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…

I agree, if you consider such question I don't see any relation either. What I meant was a general competition (not strictly programming). If you participate, it means that you want to achieve something, hence self motivation. Of course self motivated employees are great for the company, no doubt about it. But I feel that too much of it may conflict with the interest of the company.

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

#52

Post by orborde »

Ruberik wrote: post #17

The conclusion this article offers is drawn from a badly flawed study from over a decade ago, which Google decided neither to publish nor to use the conclusions from. A machine learning system was trained at Google as an attempt to do "scientific hiring." As their ground truth, the team used the performance reviews of people who had already been hired at Google . To optimistically give it the benefit of every doubt,…

Citation?

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

#53

Post by blazespin »

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…

So, what he's saying, if you have nothing else that shines on your resume - highlight your programming contest wins. After you have some more stuff under your belt (patents, project wins), than stop emphasizing the contests.

Indeed, what Norvig might be missing, is that the more methodical folks might also be contest winners but they chose not to highlight that because they don't think it's worth talking about compared to their other accomplishments.

You can only put so much on a resume.

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

bnegreve wrote: post #16

Since job interviews and competitions are somewhat similar, I wonder if this also applies to job interviews. I mean, job interviews are very competitive, they are time constrained, and they result in a binary decision made by some external authority, just like competitions.

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by victorhn »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #48

What none of these tests, contest or not, can filter for is long term work ethic, dedication and creativity. Of course, these may not be important for all jobs. It is easy for some personality tyles to get excited and focused in the context of an event. It is a very different story to dedicate yourself intensely to a project or a codebase for years. I know people who suck at tests who blow away just about anyone due…

A contest winner may be either very naturally talented implying great creativity but not saying anything about work ethic or dedication. Or the person can be not that naturally talented, but had to work a lot (work ethic and dedication) to get good at it and win the competitions. At the highest levels though, i would think you would need all 3 to win an international contest.

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

#57

Post by fsk »

_delirium wrote: post #26
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 interpr…

I see what you're saying. The programming contest winner will do better on the algorithm brainteaser questions, so is more likely to get hired, even if he's lacking the ability to do better after he's hired.

A 30 minute interview question is more like a programming contest question than a serious project.

It sounds his conclusion is measuring a defect in their hiring process more than "programming contest winners tend to make worse employees".

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

#59

Post by kenferry »

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.

The hard part of really building something is keeping to it over long periods of time, though. That seems quite different from being up for a competition.

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

#60

Post by icebraining »

nulltype wrote: post #43
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.

Well imagine comparing person A who worked on a serious project and won 10 programming competitions vs person B who worked on 11 serious projects.

Supposedly, to draw a correlation you should try to hold everything else constant, otherwise you don't know what's actually correlating.
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