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Comment by benofsky | Hacker News Reader

Very smart (and relatively cheap) way to find good engineers!

Pseudo-related random anecdote: In college (circa 2005) I came across some programming puzzles Facebook had posted for people interested in jobs. I thought Facebook might be an interesting place to work, so I came up with solutions to a couple of them, but never sent them in because I wasn't graduating for a year or two.

I mentioned this to a few friends who laughed at the idea of working at Facebook. Not so funny now, eh?

Sadly some programmers today still laugh at that idea.

Exactly this. I remember there were 5-6 problems they had: Gamblor, Prime Bits, SuperPatterns, a Unicode problem, and perhaps another graph related one. I managed to finish maybe four of them in my spare time at college, and wasn't too excited about working for Facebook. At the time I thought it was just a poor substitute for MySpace, which I didn't have much respect for anyway, and that it was technologically uninteresting. So, I never sent them in.

Makes you wonder about what prospective employers people are laughing about today.

I remember in 2007 I was at the Zynga party in Portreo Hill. thrown with some other startups. I think at the time it was only 17 people, and they were looking for engineers.

My friends and I were like, nah, another silly gaming company. Now their cap is almost equal to EA.

The beauty of the valley that every 5 years the landscape changes and roles reverse.

Be nice to other people, your fellow engineers, your employees if you are a manager, as they might be your boss in few years.

Something that I am learning myself, live and learn.

I don't know about that. While being a good hacker probably correlates with being a good engineer, I think that the focus on "hacking" excludes a lot of very capable people. I know from personal hiring experience that a lot of qualified people are put off by the emphasis on being a hacker.

To expand on this, I don't think winning a multi-round programming competition (that is, successfully solving multiple algorithm-based problem statements under a time constraint with the highest accuracy and speed) is the best indicator of a good hire.

I wish more programming competitions followed the format of the ICFP. 72 hours, teams of a half dozen or so, solving an open-ended problem, often an optimization problem where an exact solution is NP-hard. You're judged by how well you do, not by whether you get the correct answer (which often isn't computationally feasible anyway).

That seems to most closely approximate real-world programming problems.

I completely agree the ICFP contest matches real-world problems better. I can't recommend it enough. The longer timeframe requires discipline and good planning, while also providing a bit of a buffer for early (minor) mistakes.

Having a strong and well organized team is huge. You'll learn a lot about your teammates in the process, both behaviorally and technically. However, I've had to go solo the last two years and still enjoyed it immensely - it just changes how you prioritize some of the development.

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