pkrumins
6 HN mentions · mentioned in 6 months, 2017–2023
1:08 · 67K views · Apr 5, 2015
A one-minute clip of Peter Norvig saying that Google found programming contest success correlates negatively or poorly with job performance. The description links to a blog post discussing it.
Used as the go-to citation in LeetCode and hiring debates that competitive programming skill is not a good signal for hiring.
6 comments from Hacker News
>were hit with antitrust litigation starting around 2010 because they were all involved in colluding to reduce the ability of devs to switch jobs I didn't know that, really interesting detail. >no one wants to admit they don't know what they are doing. Interesting perspective, though I don't know about the vodoo part. They seem to be taking the matter quite seriously, at least google does. Take the matter of competitive programming: Peter Norvig says they were checking, if taking part in programming contests would correlate with good performance at the job [1]; I think having read somewhere that Norvig revised his negative judgement later on, as they had examined more data [2]. (actually that would mean that they didn't act on the data to begin with, well well). These companies are good at data processing, any data that is, at least they seem to be taking it dead seriously (disclaimer: I never worked at google, though I have managed to fail at interviewing there, however i am not sure if i would have accepted an offer ;-) [1] this video [2] [LINK]
> Obviously, each company can't blindly trust the interviewing practices of everyone's previous employer. Yet, they copycat each other on this. > after you've been programming for 10 years ...as I said, you're not desperate enough, so you become picky how you spend your time. > Companies aren't going out of their way to make it harder to hire good employees into their own companies. Lowering the churn rate has a higher priority. > The problems are designed to test CS skills. No, these problems are designed to test CP skills. Even Norvig admits it has nothing to do with being a good dev/hire: this video > How else would you suggest reorganizing the interviews to test for CS skills? How Caltech, MIT, Harvard, ETH, etc... test for CS skills? Certainly not with CP riddles - unless you take a CP course, which indeed is a separate [optional] course at some of those universities for interview preps specifically.
As few comments already mentioned, post college, preparing for this type of thing immensely helps in job interviews. I find it very hard to clear job interviews and in 2017 alone, I appeared for ~25 job interviews. I'm very convinced that competitive programming skills gives you a leg up in job interviews. Many people may already may know this, but Peter Norvig indicated that it correlates poorly with on the job performance (at least at Google) [1]. I wonder why, then, companies still continue to do this style of interviews. [1] this video
You did emphasize it was the best result, so it's hard to argue that you selected for it. Back in 2015 Peter Norvig discussed an analysis at Google that suggested doing well at coding contests was a negative indicator of job performance: this video Presumably they do well at these sorts of questions, but that doesn't imply the same actual effectiveness.
There was a Google talk some years ago that brought up this same idea with regards to people who did programming contests: this video