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Programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job

catonmat.net

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

#91

Post by cloakandswagger »

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.

You can draw the relation to some extent. When I conduct interviews for software developers it's a 50/50 split between technical acumen and cultural fit. I've often brought on people who flunked the technical part of the interview just because they have good energy and a likable personality.

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

#92

Post by fsk »

icebraining wrote: post #60
nulltype wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That actually was the best point in the whole thread.

"Won programming contest and was hired by Google" is not the same sample set as "won a programming contest". Once you add "and was hired by Google", all sorts of sampling bias is added.

To make it a really valid comparison, you'd need to track "won a programming contest and was not hired by Google" and "won a programming contest and never applied to Google".

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

#93

Post by jschwartzi »

diminoten wrote: post #87
jschwartzi wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what?

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

I mean what other components of your competence do the timed coding exercises reveal?

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

#94

Post by dhbradshaw »

tedsanders wrote: post #42

Not to be gratuitously negative, but... All of these claims from Google that say competition performance hurts or that GPA doesn't matter are missing one huge thing: selection bias. Google only sees the performance of the employees that it hires, not the performance of the employees that it doesn't hire. Because of this, the data they analyze is statistically biased: all data is conditioned on being employed by Googl…

You nailed it. This is the comment I was going to try to write if I couldn't find it here.

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

#95

Post by tokenrove »

I can imagine how this could happen, even though, as others have pointed out, there's no concrete evidence presented here.

I was somewhat obsessed with programming competitions as a teenager, and the first time I made it to a national-level competition I was shocked to discover that most of the people at that level were more "math people" than "coding people". Most of them had no interest in building real software. (This is not to slight them; they were also way smarter than I was.)

One of the reasons I stopped doing competitions is that I realized that, once you have your bag of tricks (especially things like dynamic programming, network flow, and the usual set of algorithms), programming competitions in the style of the IOI have nothing to do with programming.

However, I bet winners of contests like the IOCCC or the ICFP programming contest would be strong programmers with good on-the-job performance, though. (Or even winners of voluntary programming "contests" like Ludum Dare.)

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

#97

Post by kentonv »

dang wrote: post #88
kentonv wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see. Thanks for the clarification. (Seems as usual, I underestimated the complexity of HN's algorithms...)

Looks like his comments are un-flagged now.

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

#98

Post by skj »

What's going on is that practicing for programming competitions (which is needed to perform well in that venue) gives you a leg up on Google-style interviewing skills, but not a leg up on Google-style day-to-day demands.

As a consequence, among those who do get the job, those who were good at competitions have a correlation to not being quite as good at the day-to-day, since there are some in that category who would not have got the job without the competition experience.

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by stretchwithme »

gwern wrote: post #33
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…

Intelligence SHOULD have mattered when that HR guy was hired.

Perhaps he means it in the Carol Dweck sense, that how we view our failures is what determines our success. IQ tests only measure what we've learned already, not our attitude towards learning.

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