Facebook Recruiting III - Keyword Extraction | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Recruiting III - Keyword Extraction

kaggle.com

42 pointsantgoldbloom16 comments

The winners, the people who provide the best set of predictions based on an analysis of a database of millions of text questions, will get jobs at Facebook.

Actually, it looks like the winners will just get interviews at Facebook.

I think Kaggle is a very interesting site and company, but I think it's a stretch say they hold "data science" competitions. Most of their contest are extremely limited in scope to applying machine learning to pre-sanitized data sets. This really covers only a small part of what practicing data scientists do.

Indeed. From https://www.kaggle.com/c/facebook-recruiting-iii-keyword-ext...:

Highly ranked contestants who indicate their interest will be considered by Facebook for interviews, based on their work in the competition and additional background.

Not much of a prize.

The previous Facebook competition didn't provide sanitized data for that reason. https://www.kaggle.com/c/facebook-ii/data

Kaggle is an interesting site. But the cynic in me says these contests/competitions are just a cheap way of effort harvesting. For a pittance, the companies sponsoring these contests are getting tremendous value in return. If you are a statistician/analytics person, there is no reason to let your value and skills get commoditized in this manner.

Last I heard, Kaggle charges $10,000/month for a competition.

The dollar equivalent of the value the companies get in return would be an order of magnitude more than what Kaggle charges the companies/clients that sponsor the contests.

That doesn't mean it's "cheap", for the same reason Oracle isn't cheap or a private plane charter isn't cheap.

Getting a job at Facebook, actually does not feel like winning to me.

How will this "baffle normal people"? If by normal people you mean people who aren't data scientists, then sure, it will. It'll baffle them in the same way the bar exam will baffle "normal" people, those who aren't trying to practice law.

Anyway, this sounds like a great way of candidate hunting, and a refreshing solution to all of the "interviews are broken" posts that have been around lately.

businessinsider articles are written for those with the attention span and IQ of goldfish

It's so baffling that even the news about said competition are baffling.

Why don't the moderators of this forum at least write a notification of the changed title and link? Some of the comments here don't make sense as a result.

Not only that, the whole purpose of this submission makes no sense as a result. It used to be a businessinsider.com article with proper context, explaining what Kaggle is, why Facebook was using it, and what StackExchange is. It was a journalism piece, maybe a bad one, but it fit the criteria of why we read articles.

Now it links to Kaggle directly with a title that makes no sense whatsoever and provides absolutely no context. So instead of getting contextual information intended for mass consumption (an article), we got nothing of value. Great job.

Did past competition winners end up with a position at Facebook?

I don't know for sure, but I think it was only good for an interview. There wasn't any kind of legally binding language in the contest rules, and the fact that I received a ping from Facebook recruiters despite finishing past 50th place in the competition makes me feel like it was a fishing expedition. It's money well spent for Facebook when you consider that they probably aren't paying more than 50k to Kaggle to host the competition and probably get at least two hires out of each one.

I understand that it was only good for an interview and does not guarantee a job. I would still like to know if Facebook did indeed hire someone (and not just "call for interview") via the Kaggle gate. Basically, I am looking for an all and out success story.

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