CodeSprint programming contest to match developers to companies

A company runs the risk of exposing other hiring biases by using these services, or pre-interview puzzles. If someone solves the problems, yet is not offered an interview, it makes the hiring process seem more opaque and arbitrary, not less.

I enjoy programming puzzles and solved the puzzles for Spotify one weekend. I sent in my resume to see what would happen. I was rejected about 2 hours later. I went in thinking it was cool that Spotify was so meritocratic to use programming puzzles as a hiring filter, but came out thinking the process is just totally arbitrary.

With all due respect, on the surface this seems like a way to find desperate 20-somethings with stamina, a serious Red Bull habit, and a willingness to work obscene hours.

For people with experience and multiple job offers which most likely are the types company's want or at least should be trying to hire, there is no incentive to utilize these services in my mind. While I'm sure there are a few great applicants, I'd guess the quality of the applicant pool is going to be quite low in that the cost benefit analysis for a very qualified person is not so great. If anything, I'd probably see it as a red flag on a company that is hiring heavily from services like these.

This sounds absolutely awful from a candidates point of view. 48 hours is a very long time for what is effectively an extended technical interview.

The hackathon format works well for one-off fun events, but no-one should ever be pulling 48 hour coding stints at work. Being charitable, I guess this tests how well people perform under crunch conditions - but would you want to work for a company which is actively planning to crunch?

This is as shallow as interviews get. In terms of the interview process, I agree with a post yesterday where the writer was explaining how the more you interview people, the more you move away from the solve-a-problem interview technique and shift toward analyzing the recommendations the person has. Recommendations provide the signals you need: gets work done, drive, communication skills, people skills, work style, etc. Then you ask for a source code sample to examine what goes on under the hood and you're finished.

Wow, we did not expect to see this level of criticism from the comments.

A lot of the focus is on the 48 hour period, in that it's basically way too long to expect you guys to participate. We don't expect people to code all 48 hours; the decision was basically "make it a weekend long", but we are not tied in any way to that time period. Would it be much better if we shortened the time period to 24 hours? (We can't shorten it any more than that; as this is a global competition, everyone needs to have the same amount of daytime) The goal is not to have you guys burn yourselves out. The goal is to assess you all as quickly as possible.

From our perspective, we sort of viewed CodeSprint as a time saver; everyone you apply to nowadays requires some sort of technical proof. Sometimes you can get away with it if you have a github with a lot of open source projects, but not everyone has that.

With CodeSprint, you get to choose among a variety of problems, and companies with those specific problems get to find you. Because they receive the full code solutions, our goal is for CodeSprint to consolidate and replace the "do-a-technical-problem" part of the normal interview process. Except, this time around, this one set of problems is what's used for multiple companies, instead of just one.

I think people are missing the point of Codesprint. The point is not that 48 hours is too long etc. etc. (enough coders spend 54hrs at Startup Weekend) or that you are working for free for a big co.

The main point is that tech talent is extremely hard to find. Therefore it is valuable for companies to find someone who walks the talk.

For someone who is a good hacker and is just entering the job market, this is the real shit. No BS, no fake answers, no "i-want-to-change-the-world crap" - just being able to solve the problems at hand. And, these are the kind of people who end up changing the world by being part of sexy startups and maybe even starting up on their own later. Heck, if you are real hacker, 48hours of challenges is the best way to spend that time.

Nice error handling from them...

  A Database Error Occurred

  Error Number: 1048

  Column 'email' cannot be null

  INSERT INTO `recruit_hackers` (`email`) VALUES (NULL)

  Filename: /var/www/istreet/html/recruit/models/supermodel.php

  Line Number: 335

Just to clarify a quote: “Everything will be based on performance — how fast they code, how many they get right.”

This is a slight misrepresentation of the original intent. What we meant to say is that we measure code execution speed, not how fast people type.

I'll be glad to prove my hacker chops, what's the rate?