Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google stopping coding competitions

developers.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 335 posts

Re: Google stopping coding competitions

#121

Post by gwern »

Jun8 wrote: post #6

Is there any other, more gracious, way to interpret this as Google retiring for on being Google, if so I’d like to know. I think the direct impact of these competitions to hiring were minimal. The biggest impact was to have thousands perhaps millions of coders and researchers see Google as the place to be. As the place that gets it. The Mecca of coderdom, if you will. Now they are just another corporation. I hope the…

I wonder if AlphaCoder was the writing on the wall? Go out on top rather than tainted with scandal and unhappiness polluting memories?

Re: Google stopping coding competitions

#122

Post by realslimjd »

roncesvalles wrote: post #113
nemo44x wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's such a bad CEO that I can't believe he's still in the seat. Just the way he let the employees revolt and embarrass him. If he had any dignity or pride he would have resigned then. He may know all the facts on how businesses should be run and is a good guy, but he has 0 leadership skills. Just an awful, terrible leader. The ChatGPT fiasco is further evidence the place has been mismanaged the last 8 years.

If a person is in a $200m per year job, they're primarily incentivized to keep the job for as long as possible. This one objective dwarfs any other consideration in every decision that the person makes. And sure, 99% of his compensation is Google stock, but at those magnitudes the marginal utility of the dollar is zero. What's the difference between $100m and $200m anyway?

$100,000,000

Re: Google stopping coding competitions

#123

Post by steve_adams_86 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #86
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tip outs are better in bougie joints frequented by tech workers. This sounds a little trickle-downy. Why not strive for an economy where people doing important work like feeding their communities just... Don't need to be tipped? I know it sounds crazy in today-terms, but if it makes any sense, it makes tipping culture look like more of a problem than a boon to anyone receiving the tips.

The exact mechanism of employee compensation here doesn't matter. Either the tech worker pays $30+6 tip for a meal and the server makes $10, or the tech worker pays $36 with no tip for a meal and the server is paid more and still makes $10, it doesn't matter. The point is that a restaurant needs a large number of rich clientele in order for the restaurants' employees to make a lot of money.

My problem is primarily when the restaurants use tipping as variable compensation where the minimum compensation is arguably lower than it should be. There should always be a sane minimum wage, and it seems absurd to me that there are places where 1. the minimum wage is not substantial enough to live on and 2. servers aren't entitled to it, and rely on tips to attain a wage they can survive on.

As such I really do prefer the model where the food covers all wages with no employees being deprived of minimum wages. If tipping is provided on top, great – it's nice to say thanks if it's culturally acceptable. On the other hand, it's not okay to have to depend on those tips.

This is an opinion, but even major cities with high living expenses where minimum wages are provided seem problematic. In my city we had a brief period where more than minimum wage was offered due to worker shortages, but those days are over. Now servers are being hired back at $15.50 per hour which is an insanely small amount to live on. Shifts are provided such that you can never be considered full-time, depriving you of various benefits many would consider essential.

Do tips _really_ make up for that? No health benefits, not enough hours to work in order to earn a reliable minimum income, no regular hours, etc. What a shitty deal.

Sure, it could motivate people to "do better", but that's not always an option and it means we've essentially got a meat-grinder of an occupation that churns out people in a cycle of exploitation. Why not do better?

My shittiest jobs were miserable but at least I was compensated well. And I could be pretty brain-dead to do it. Stacking wood for kilns, pushing it through machines, bundling it, etc. I made way more than today's minimum wage, got vacation time, health benefits, etc. doing that stuff, but I did it 15 years ago.

I get that margins are slim in the food industry so that isn't possible today. My point is more like, maybe we should collectively work towards rectifying that and consider what we've got today to be a problem.

Of course I'm open to being totally wrong. There are a lot of forces at work, I'm not all that smart, and I just don't like the idea of being a server and having that experience. I'd personally prefer to pay a little more to alleviate that, but I know many would prefer to pay even less still.

Re: Google stopping coding competitions

#124

Post by sesteel »

roncesvalles wrote: post #113
nemo44x wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's such a bad CEO that I can't believe he's still in the seat. Just the way he let the employees revolt and embarrass him. If he had any dignity or pride he would have resigned then. He may know all the facts on how businesses should be run and is a good guy, but he has 0 leadership skills. Just an awful, terrible leader. The ChatGPT fiasco is further evidence the place has been mismanaged the last 8 years.

If a person is in a $200m per year job, they're primarily incentivized to keep the job for as long as possible. This one objective dwarfs any other consideration in every decision that the person makes. And sure, 99% of his compensation is Google stock, but at those magnitudes the marginal utility of the dollar is zero. What's the difference between $100m and $200m anyway?

Agree 100%. This is what stifles innovation and kills companies, people moving into positions where they make more than they ever have before and their goal is look good to financial stakeholders and maintain their position as long as possible. Although difficult for other reasons, I think I prefer working with true visionaries.

Re: Google stopping coding competitions

#125

Post by irowe »

Reason077 wrote: post #47
reptation wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

n=1 but the built-in Maps on iphone seems to be fine these days. Doesn't steer me wrong, integrates with a car. Not sure what the moat here is other than name recognition or current popularity. Perhaps app integration or API consumption?

Apple Maps, and the huge number of products based on OpenStreetMap are perfectly fine as maps. And actually, even better than Google Maps in many cases. But where Google Maps still dominates is in its unrivalled, global point of interest (POI) data. Accurate business locations, opening hours, photos, reviews, etc... nobody else comes close.

Clicking the auto-link of my address on an iOS device will open a route in Apple Maps to an address with a different street name on the wrong U.S. state. Apple Maps has come a long way, but it still doesn’t cut it.

Re: Google stopping coding competitions

#126

Post by bsaul »

lwneal wrote: post #115
blindriver wrote: post #18

Thank you Sundar for getting rid of the frivolous, Silicon-Valley-esque things like coding competitions for kids, extricating all of the humanity and decency that made Google so inefficient with money, and for doubling down on your focus to turn Google into the next iteration of Cisco, Oracle and IBM. It's exactly what this world needs, so you are the perfect leader for this.

Sundar is the Steve Ballmer of Google. And that's fine! Ballmer was a competent if uninspiring CEO: Microsoft under his leadership missed many new opportunities, but still made lots of money. Most importantly, Ballmer's tenure is what made it possible for Satya Nadella to pivot Microsoft into what it is today. Realistically, Windows Phone was never going to beat Apple, Bing was not going to beat Google, Yammer was no…

Fully disagree with windows phone. It never reached enough maturity to be a true competitor to ios, but it absolutely could have won over android. the gui was truely innovative (with the « tiles » system), and the general feeling and smoothness was absolutely better than android. Microsoft missed a huge opportunity there. It never was a technical problem, MS knows how to make operating system. It was only a strategical one. Ballmer is 100% to blame for that.

Re: Google stopping coding competitions

#127

Post by lizard »

SteveNuts wrote: post #59
Jun8 wrote: post #6

Is there any other, more gracious, way to interpret this as Google retiring for on being Google, if so I’d like to know. I think the direct impact of these competitions to hiring were minimal. The biggest impact was to have thousands perhaps millions of coders and researchers see Google as the place to be. As the place that gets it. The Mecca of coderdom, if you will. Now they are just another corporation. I hope the…

As a nerdy kid growing up, Google always felt like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory to me. There was somewhat of a feeling of mystery about the things they were working on, and when things like Gmail were unveiled it felt like such a wonder. Now they just seem like a worse version of Microsoft to me, at least Microsoft knows how to deal with enterprises.

> at least Microsoft knows how to deal with enterprises.

For what it's worth, this was a big part of why I had a positive image of Google. Enterprises are boring, especially when it comes to technology. They make boring decisions about technology because they are almost always made based on bullet lists of half-truths, rather than by the people who actually have to use it.

Google seemed to make things for the users. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, none of these had feature parity with their competitors at the time, but they were just so much better to use that people abandoned those enterprise products, even if their company was the one paying for them, and Google's popularity skyrocketed.

Many years ago my university asked the students to decide between Google and Microsoft for the (student) email platform. The impression I got from IT folks I knew was that they were strongly in favor of Microsoft. But when both companies were asked to make presentations to the students, I remember leaving the Microsoft one thinking they weren't even trying.

Re: Google stopping coding competitions

#128

Post by moondistance »

lwneal wrote: post #115
blindriver wrote: post #18

Thank you Sundar for getting rid of the frivolous, Silicon-Valley-esque things like coding competitions for kids, extricating all of the humanity and decency that made Google so inefficient with money, and for doubling down on your focus to turn Google into the next iteration of Cisco, Oracle and IBM. It's exactly what this world needs, so you are the perfect leader for this.

Sundar is the Steve Ballmer of Google. And that's fine! Ballmer was a competent if uninspiring CEO: Microsoft under his leadership missed many new opportunities, but still made lots of money. Most importantly, Ballmer's tenure is what made it possible for Satya Nadella to pivot Microsoft into what it is today. Realistically, Windows Phone was never going to beat Apple, Bing was not going to beat Google, Yammer was no…

Demis Hassabis has my vote.

Re: Google stopping coding competitions

#130

Post by webmaven »

moira11 wrote: post #106
tomr75 wrote: post #61

is this because people will just use chatGPT to cheat?

I know a competitive programmer who actually has been to Code Jam finals. He says ChatGPT wouldn't be able to solve the majority of tasks that are used in algorithmic competitions like Code Jam. ChatGPT might be able to do some of the simplest tasks, but Code Jam had a few rounds of increasing difficulty and at some point it wouldn't help much. The last round is actually in-person so there would be no influence of Ch…

Maybe Google's Bard does better at this type of task.
Post reply on HN