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

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

#81

Post by vijayr » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 8:45 PM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #72

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…

Being a champion at something requires excruciating narrow focus on something for unusually long time. If you are getting GPA of 4.0 or play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 3 or deadlift 400 pounds or in top 1000 chess players - you probably have to work on it for hours a day for years while ignoring everything else (of course unless you are one of those 1 in million polymath). People getting in to final rounds of p…

Could boredom be a factor? Most programming jobs aren't very challenging, we just do the same thing over and over again with little variation.

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

#82

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

asdfologist wrote: post #69

benhamner wrote: post #68

This is flat out wrong. It disagrees with every other data point I have, so I'm very skeptical with both the methodology (which is opaque) and the conclusion. From all of my experience at Kaggle (we run machine learning competitions), with our community, and from being close to programming competition sites & understanding their communities, doing great at competitions is an unambiguously positive signal. (It's worth…

I think you're conflating positive correlation with getting hired vs positive correlation with doing well on the job (once hired). See oskarth's comment at the top. No one disputes that doing great at competitions is a positive predictor for getting hired.

[deleted]

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

#83

Post by irishcoffee » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 8:53 PM UTC

oskarth wrote: post #75

sytelus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a champion at something requires excruciating narrow focus on something for unusually long time. If you are getting GPA of 4.0 or play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 3 or deadlift 400 pounds or in top 1000 chess players - you probably have to work on it for hours a day for years while ignoring everything else (of course unless you are one of those 1 in million polymath). People getting in to final rounds of p…

In general these things tend to follow a logistic curve. It's a useful meta-skill to know when investing more time has marginal utility. I think your examples are great, if you just change deadlift 400 pounds to maybe ~500-600 pound, (or roughly 2.5-3x bodyweight for adult men) [1]. Most adult men can reach a 400 pound deadlift in less than 2-3 years of lifting (that's I mention this only because a lot of people here…

I agree. I was actually pretty excited he said 400 lb. deadlift. I'm in the high 300's and felt accomplished for a second. But you're correct, the 500-600-700 range is where the big kids play, and it takes years and years to get there.

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

#84

Post by anotherThrowawy » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 9:09 PM UTC

venomsnake wrote: post #65

codingdave wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and many of the programmers I find in the corporate world do neither. But that is probably for another discussion.

Why code when you can go full dilbert on corporate politics.

There's a lot to gain by respecting your coworkers and developing the communication skills required to tactfully ask about their work.

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

#85

Post by jschwartzi » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

diminoten wrote: post #62

collyw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to think it is at least somewhat related to what I am doing, rather than a lucky dip of a question that I might get or might not. I am a way better software engineer than 15 years ago, yet I am worse at these sort of "challenges".

There's a lot more to being a software engineer than coding competence, and timed questions reveal the non-coding competence parts of your abilities more than anything else. Perhaps you're not as good as you think.

Like what?

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

#86

Post by xxxyy » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

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.

Interviews are incomparably easier than good programming competitions.

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

#87

Post by diminoten » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

jschwartzi wrote: post #85

diminoten wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot more to being a software engineer than coding competence, and timed questions reveal the non-coding competence parts of your abilities more than anything else. Perhaps you're not as good as you think.

Like what?

Seriously?

Less than half of a software engineer's daily work is actually coding.

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

#88

Post by dang » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 9:40 PM UTC

kentonv wrote: post #66

orborde wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation?

Ruberik ran Google Code Jam for several years. (Or maybe someone registered his handle on HN just to forge this comment, but that seems like a silly thing to do.) EDIT: To be clear, Ruberik is NOT an impostor, and it's sad that someone is now going around flagging his comments.

> it's sad that someone is now going around flagging his comments.

No user flagged those comments. Some comments (e.g. by noob accounts from Tor IPs) are moderated by default because of past activity by trolls. These eventually get unflagged. We're going to open the unflagging part to the community soon, but that work isn't done yet.

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

#89

Post by elliptic » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 9:52 PM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #72

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…

Being a champion at something requires excruciating narrow focus on something for unusually long time. If you are getting GPA of 4.0 or play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 3 or deadlift 400 pounds or in top 1000 chess players - you probably have to work on it for hours a day for years while ignoring everything else (of course unless you are one of those 1 in million polymath). People getting in to final rounds of p…

Your point is well taken, but with some training most healthy men can deadlift 400 pounds.

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

#90

Post by cloakandswagger » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 10:17 PM UTC

vijayr wrote: post #81

sytelus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a champion at something requires excruciating narrow focus on something for unusually long time. If you are getting GPA of 4.0 or play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 3 or deadlift 400 pounds or in top 1000 chess players - you probably have to work on it for hours a day for years while ignoring everything else (of course unless you are one of those 1 in million polymath). People getting in to final rounds of p…

Could boredom be a factor? Most programming jobs aren't very challenging, we just do the same thing over and over again with little variation.

I doubt it. Most programming jobs are repetitive, but they still consume an average of 8-10 hours of each weekday.

A lot of the winning contestants in things like Topcoder are people from countries where it's lucrative and desirable to get a few hundred dollars for a day's worth of algorithm writing.