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Comment by gregdoesit | Hacker News Reader

For anyone wondering about the underlying reason for these events suddenly being cancelled: it is connected to Google laying off the team that organized these four events, as part of their January job cuts. I covered more details I could find a few weeks ago [1]

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/google-coding-competition...

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I appreciated the quote from your article that: "Based on information from insiders, Google’s coding competitions engaged more than 300,000 software engineers external to Google, annually. These coding competitions assisted in the hiring of thousands of software engineers each year, who were directly sourced from these events."

These views reflect that Google Code Jam was a very significant source for recruitment. In contrast, when I searched about whether Code Jam was a significant part of Google's recruitment strategy, one of the top results on Reddit on r/cscareerquestions really underplayed the recruitment part, by non-Google employees giving advice about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/p7ioku/w...

The r/cscareerquestions commenters there could still have a point that it was more direct to take other approaches to applying to the company instead of Code Jam, but the general dismissive attitude of the top-upvoted commenter (e.g.: "No benefits. If anything, might even be harder to get interviews cause the guys grinding for those contests don't have time to make a proper resume.") really overemphasized an opinion based on speculation, instead of taking a more balanced view that recognized that Google Code Jam was run with a large motivation to recruit developers.

"People, mostly children and very young adults, talking confidently about topics they have no idea about" can basically be Reddit's official slogan.

> In contrast, when I searched about whether Code Jam was a significant part of Google's recruitment strategy, one of the top results on Reddit on r/cscareerquestions really underplayed the recruitment part

Google has a very standardized recruitment procedure. Once you're in the pipeline, you're judged with the same standards as everybody else (algo interview, system design...). Whether you're a Code Jam champion or not. Where Code Jam could help is to get contacted by a recruiter, but a simple referral could be enough for that, so it's not that hard to enter their recruitment pipeline.

Also, Code Jam problems are much harder than what you'd get in a coding interview, so it's not the best use of your preparation time to land a job at Google. Leetcode problems are more similar to what they ask.

It's there to find the non-networked developer - the kid in their mom's basement who is not in Silicon Valley or possibly not even in the U.S. and doesn't know anyone who works at Google, but learned to program on their own. Ironically this is the sort of developer that HN says can't get FAANG jobs because they lack the credentials and connections.

> Ironically this is the sort of developer that HN says can't get FAANG jobs because they lack the credentials and connections.

That's correct. As the reddit post noted, there is no benefit to coming to Google's attention via Code Jam. They'll give you an interview that way, but they'll also give an interview to anyone else who wants one.

And the approach you take to Code Jam is actually harmful to your performance in Google's hiring interviews, to the degree that the recruiter who contacts you based on your Code Jam record gives you a specific warning that Code Jam people tend to have a common set of problems (in terms of how their interviews are rated) and you shouldn't treat the interview as being similar to participating in Code Jam.

They don't give interviews to just anyone who applies. IIRC the first time I joined (2009, interviewed in late 2008) the stat was that ~2.3 million people had applied to Google, ~1000 had been hired that year, and your odds of getting in were like 2000:1. There were pretty well-known tricks for getting past the initial resume screen, like getting a referral, having an Ivy League degree, having a hot tech company on your resume, or coming through a recruiting avenue (eg. GSoC or TopCoder) that Google sponsored.

Maybe the interview:applicant ratio is better now that there's ~100K engineers rather than ~8K engineers, but a quick back of the envelope calculation indicates it's still likely not everyone that applies. On my team last year (before the hiring freeze) maybe ~20% of engineers do interviews regularly (a bit better than it was in ~2010), and we'd usually limit it to 1/week. That's ~20K interviewers * 50 interviews = 1M interviews/year, which is definitely better odds than in 2008, but still nowhere near enough to interview everyone who applies even if the number of applicants hasn't grown at all since 2008.

> the initial resume screen

At least as things stood last year, Google does the resume screen after the interview, not before.

There's a difference between "does Code Jam help attract quality candidates to Google" and "does participating in Code Jam help a candidate in getting a job at Google". Presumably, Google cares about the former, and participants care about the latter. Both statements can be true or false to various extents regardless of each other.

This is really sad. What’s even more sad is that the person who made this descision will probably never know how much damage it did to Google’s reputation. Code Jam had what I think were the most well designed and insightful problems in all of competitive programming, not to mention innovative problem types and judging systems.

Google, you have just disappointed and pissed off many of the best algorithmic programmers in the world. They will not forget this. Is that who you want to be?

People are still going to apply to work in Google in droves. No need to be so melodramatic.

I'm not sure it's a given that Google was actually getting any kind of reputational benefit from Code Jam. As an example, the last significant submission on HN discussing Code Jam was 8 years ago. It only came up in HN comments a handful times per year, and are not particularly positive (not negative either, just neutral). Can you quantify that reputational benefit somehow?

Why is running a competition really well for 15 years something to be pissed off about? Why not be dissapointed at Microsoft, Amazon and Apple for not running their own competitions, as well or better?

Couldn't this be confusing cause and effect? The article seems to insinuate that the product was cancelled because the team was laid off to save costs. But couldn't there be an unrelated reason why Google wanted to cancel the product, which then lead to the decision to lay off the team?

I could imagine that with the advent of the likes of GPT, Google may have concluded that the competition has lost its utility in identifying talented coders to recruit.

You are overthinking this - the team that managed this got laid off that’s there’s no more Ai story to it.

That is so bad. They could’ve left 1 or 2 for the benefit of CS as a whole. They are undercutting their own future talent pool this way.

Unless they see Bard as fulfilling that.

One of the biggest questions when doing layoffs is whether you should kill entire teams or cut more teams by a small amount. A 1-2 person team is often very bad for people's careers and creates major sustainability problems when people take vacations or leave or whatever.

I am sad that codejam is gone. I'm not certain that a skeleton crew would have been good for the skeleton crew.

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