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Google stopping coding competitions
- thenightcrawler 4y agoBut why
- graphGL 4y agoChatGPT
- andrepd 4y agoThe program who can't answer anything that is not the stackoverflow answer you get when you Google your prompt? I don't follow.
- apetresc 4y agoChatGPT solved many of the AoC 2022 problems with no assistance, and those are written in an even more obfuscated style than GCJ. I imagine the LLMs of this summer and next summer would blow through most of the early rounds of GCJ with ease.
- moira11 4y agoAoC tasks are much easier than usual Competitive Programming tasks. AoC is pretty much undergraduate class level (whereas some Competitive Programming problems ended up being turned into actual papers) and the main difficulty in tasks is in implementing the solution rather than coming up with a tricky idea. Also, in AoC time complexity doesn't matter at all - all you need is any solution. Classic Competitive Programming problems have both a memory and a time limit. Most of them have a simple brute force solution but the trick is finding an efficient algorithm. However, I can see Google execs thinking the same and using this explanation as the reason to close the competition.
- revskill 4y ago[flagged]
- npretto 4y agois this a sign that finding developers is not that hard anymore, and they don't need to organize these competitions with the hiring budget?
- UncleOxidant 4y agoOr maybe they've laid off the group that was in charge of organizing these competitions? Or will soon?
- mredigonda 4y agoThey did, indeed, lay off the group in charge of organizing these competitions (or at least the Google Code Jam Program Manager). https://twitter.com/jonathanirvings/status/1622075521487208449 https://twitter.com/jonathanirvings/status/16220755214872084...
- guluarte 4y agonah, it's google shutting down a random thing like always
- mredigonda 4y agoGoogle Graveyard: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- paxys 4y agoProbably more a sign that these competitions don't help with hiring in any substantial way.
- mredigonda 4y agoI believe they do help, but certainly hiring doesn't seem to be a priority for them at the moment. It's strange that they decided to discontinue the entire competition instead of just cancelling this year's one, though.
- Jun8 4y agoIs there any other, more gracious, way to interpret this as Google retiring for on being Google, if so I’d like to know. I think the direct impact of these competitions to hiring were minimal. The biggest impact was to have thousands perhaps millions of coders and researchers see Google as the place to be. As the place that gets it. The Mecca of coderdom, if you will. Now they are just another corporation. I hope the couple of hundreds of hours of manpower they save by cancelling is worth this hit.
- naillo 4y agoGoogle has never looked more tired and more prone to be overtaken.
- VBprogrammer 4y agoHonestly I was searching for something the other day and between displaying an excessive number of YouTube links (was not in a position to watch a video) and the adverts it was less useful that Yahoo! Circa 2006.
- eitland 4y agoI have long since switched to Kagi and I am a happy paying customer. I can adjust my results, block or prioritize, but I rarely do that. What I sometimes do however is I write a bug report whenever bad results sneak in. In a matter of hours a human looks at the results, verifies or ask follow up questions and in a few days or max < 1month a fix is out. No more having to deal with a search engine that ignores both doublequotes and the verbatim operator (that is both Google and DDG and Bing). Actually, the last few months before I got access to Kagi I used (and paid for) search.marginalia.nu . It was actually and honestly better for certain queries, especially things like arcane git knowledge or (I think) the nerdier parts of history.
- pancrufty 4y agoWhich Google are you referring to exactly? With its many successful products, I don’t see Google being overtaken anytime soon. Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds. I see them just coasting, but an overtake is unlikely in this decade. “The New Bing” sounds interesting but that’s not all that Google is about, it’s not 2002 anymore.
- gkoberger 4y agoWe could lament them shutting it down, but why not thank them for doing this for 20 years? That's a LONG time to do anything, and despite what Google has become, it absolutely defined tech culture. Now it's obvious and commonplace, but an employee-centric company was revolutionary at the time. Things like this changed the lives of every single person here, either directly or indirectly. And best yet, it's a chance for other companies to take up the mantle. Rather than wishing Google kept playing their same old hits over and over for 2 decades, there's more oxygen for new companies to take the lead.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago[flagged]
- burnished 4y agoTip outs are better in bougie joints frequented by tech workers. This isnt a contradiction to your main point, maybe more of a damning with faint praise if anything.
- diceduckmonk 4y agoAffluent people existed before Google and tech workers.
- steve_adams_86 4y ago> Tip outs are better in bougie joints frequented by tech workers. This sounds a little trickle-downy. Why not strive for an economy where people doing important work like feeding their communities just... Don't need to be tipped? I know it sounds crazy in today-terms, but if it makes any sense, it makes tipping culture look like more of a problem than a boon to anyone receiving the tips.
- mikrl 4y agoServers love tip out. They can make hundreds a night and possibly even what a junior SWE can (pro rata) if they’re good. If you want fierce resistance from servers - ask them to split tips more equitably with the kitchen - offer to abolish the tip system altogether and just pay them $15/h flat, hell even $25/h
- comonoid 4y ago[flagged]
- naillo 4y agoInteresting that just a few days ago they posted about opening basically the same thing but focused on ML https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/02/MLOlympiad2023.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/02/MLOlympiad2023.htm... Interesting contrast and I guess a sign of the changing tides.
- warkdarrior 4y agoBingo! It just means that developer as a job is on the way out and in 20 years everyone is going to be a prompt engineer. Hence getting rid of coding competitions and sponsoring ML competitions instead.
- jldugger 4y ago20 years from now prompt engineering wont be required. We might still call it prompt engineering tho.
- andrepd 4y agoI bet strong money against that.
- scottyah 4y agoThat's a good point, they probably couldn't think of a good way to prevent cheating with ML assist. They even have their own AlphaCode that'd beat most competitors.
- visarga 4y agoToday - everyone googling on SO to solve problems. Future - everyone will be prompting AI to solve problems. As long as we all get basically the same tools, the difference comes from the developer. Electricity is also a huge productivity booster, but it doesn't advantage any one person, all have access to the same energy infrastructure. Youtube has educational and artistic content for everyone, but we need to actually use it to get the benefits - it depends on us.
- agolio 4y agoAm I missing something or are these just regular Kaggle competitions, but with no prizes? What is google offering, other than the branding? Why are competitors motivated to take part?
- cmckn 4y agoI attended a Google "coding day" event years ago in Boulder, CO, while in college. It wasn't "Code Jam," but I can't remember the name for the life of me. It was a sort of lab-format hackathon where I was placed on a team and we had to build something (after being given some vague prompt). Google employees would roam around and answer questions, give direction, etc,; and prizes were given at the end. I believe the year I attended was the last before this particular event was cancelled. I can't really argue for it to continue, I don't feel like I got much out of it besides a day off-campus and a free lunch; but it was kind of fun.
- SquareWheel 4y agoQuite sad to see. It seems like they're still doing Summer of Code and CTF events, at least?
- Eumenes 4y agoWas just going to ask about Summer of Code
- blindriver 4y agoThank you Sundar for getting rid of the frivolous, Silicon-Valley-esque things like coding competitions for kids, extricating all of the humanity and decency that made Google so inefficient with money, and for doubling down on your focus to turn Google into the next iteration of Cisco, Oracle and IBM. It's exactly what this world needs, so you are the perfect leader for this.
- mouse_ 4y agoSundar is a scapegoat.
- MetaverseClub 4y agoI'm offering to play the scapegoat for him and only asking for half of his compensation.
- geodel 4y agoGreat idea! Reach out to Google board. They'd be thrilled to see double the talent at half the price.
- agentwiggles 4y agoI'll be his scapegoat for a mere 10th of what he makes! You can blame me for anything you dislike that Google does. As a matter of fact, I think we could crowdfund this. Watch this space for a link to my Patreon, where you can pay a mere $10 per month to blame me for things that upset you. If you'd like to sign up for my special High Flyers VIP pricing, you can even call me and rant at me for the decisions of companies and governments that bother you. I can take it! The buck stops here!
- whatshisface 4y agoAside from the fact that most of Google's upper levels want this to happen, isn't it true that Sundar wants it to happen too?
- VHRanger 4y ago
- amaranth1 4y agoAs someone who participated in their competitions for years, this feels really sad. The decision to shut down everything at once also looks hasty. Why not at least leave the website running for the times things will get better? Many competitions skipped some difficult years but returned. Thanks for all these years, Google, still hoping that this decision could be revised.
- TimTheTinker 4y agoIt seems like large companies are like government: Just like there's a power vacuum that causes governments to exist, there's an economic vacuum that causes large companies to exist. The question is not if these things will exist, but how and why -- and especially with what limits. It's sad to see Google -- the once very promising small company with big ideas -- getting sucked into the vacuum.
- manachar 4y agoI often think of markets in pseudo-evolutionary terms. The types and sizes of companies that survive are those that fit the environmental pressures. One common trend in evolution is toward gigantism in places of intense competition. Whales, for example, may be as large as they are to avoid having to compete or be eaten by smaller animals. Being bigger means they eat more, leaving fewer resources for competitors. It can be quite the winning strategy. At least so long as the environment can provide enough stability to feed such large organisms in the manner in which they are evolved to exploit. For companies, being large means you can always buy the competition or make sure the barrier to entry is too high for competition (thinner profit margins, "free" services, regulatory capture, etc.). It works, and quite well. These large corporations can withstand enormous financial shocks, and if they can't, they get purchased by those that can. For most mature markets this generally seems to shake out to most of the product area being divided between two or three big players and a host of smaller companies at the edges. Oddly enough, when things are stable being large may be a winning strategy, but it is also very fragile and if the whole system gets disrupted, can be the first to fail when things change too much.
- jjoonathan 4y ago> there's an economic vacuum that causes large companies to exist The size of these vacuums is a direct result of policy. Tax policy, liability policy, antitrust policy -- there are a dozen levers we could pull to create a corporate landscape that looks very different. But yes, with the levers in their current positions, what we see here is inevitable.
- astrange 4y ago
- Eumenes 4y agoCode Jam/Summer of Code was a great indicator from a hiring perspective ... When I see a junior candidate who participated in those, it was always a good sign. I wonder if they are trying to reduce "training" of talent that could be potentially made into competition.
- thiago_fm 4y ago[flagged]
- rvz 4y agoAnother product of the near-zero interest rate phenomenon that needed to go.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoBefore jumping on the "Google is now Oracle" bandwagon, curious with anyone with even a little inside baseball knowledge can comment on the reasoning behind this. Because if it's for penny-pinching, "we need to be more efficient" reasons, then yeah, I'm ready to jump on the bandwagon too. But someone else posited it may be more that they want to focus on new skills needed for AI, for example (i.e. "Software 2.0" vs. "Software 1.0" skills, to borrow a term from a recent HN post) - in that case, would make sense. All that said, by shutting down without announcing a reason, Google must've known people would speculate and likely assume it's because of the "Google = Oracle" reasoning. So I'm certainly leaning towards the "this is pretty sad" side of things.
- eastWestMath 4y agoYeah I’ve always been a bit leery of code competitions. I saw a lot of undergrads spend a lot of effort on these contests, and I was never convinced it was the best use of their time (especially because the university I did my graduate studies at had a professor who put a lot of effort into running the competitive programming club). I think a group of 15-20 bright and enthusiastic CS students under the guidance of a tenured CS professor could accomplish a lot with the time/effort they were spending and learn just as much!
- frontman1988 4y ago[dead]
- jcranmer 4y agoThere are some good things about coding competitions, if done well: * Introduction of developers to a core kit of useful algorithms * Practical examples for developers to design algorithms that require adaptation (e.g., how to adapt the bipartite matching algorithm to tripartite) * Training people in how to debug their code--the most useful competitions are the ones where programmers don't always have access to the computer, so you have to be able to step through your code without running it At the same time, however, I think there is rapidly diminishing returns here. You'll get a lot of the first bit of effort you put into programming competitions, but then the improvement you get is incredibly incremental. I'm especially unimpressed by race-to-the-finish kind of competitions, since I think the skills it requires to get very high on the leaderboards are not useful.
- tomr75 4y agois this because people will just use chatGPT to cheat?
- moira11 4y agoI know a competitive programmer who actually has been to Code Jam finals. He says ChatGPT wouldn't be able to solve the majority of tasks that are used in algorithmic competitions like Code Jam. ChatGPT might be able to do some of the simplest tasks, but Code Jam had a few rounds of increasing difficulty and at some point it wouldn't help much. The last round is actually in-person so there would be no influence of ChatGPT there at all (Edit: correction, the final round used to be in person, but it has moved online since Covid) Also, even if people do use ChatGPT, that shouldn't be a problem - it's a tool like any other. Programmers use tools all the time. Is it cheating if someone uses Wolfram Alpha or Stack Overflow to solve a programming task at hand?
- webmaven 4y agoMaybe Google's Bard does better at this type of task.
- shp0ngle 4y agoSo after 20 years - who won? Who is the Best Coder?
- shadowgovt 4y agoThe real Best Coder was the friends we made along the way.
- webmaven 4y agoThe real Best Coder was inside us all along.
- TigeriusKirk 4y agoSpeak for yourself
- bberrry 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich
- shp0ngle 4y agoWow. This guy looks good.
- fatjokes 4y agoHoly shit I didn't expect an answer but yup... There he is.
- Chamix 4y agoWon nearly every single coding jam (8/9) he was in, highest code force rating of all time, 6x consecutive IOI gold, yea he’s the cut and dry winner.
- aws_ls 4y agoAlso known as 'tourist'. He is the best in the world on several platforms, including codeforces[1] which has the cultural leadership now for algo coding competitions. [1] https://codeforces.com/profile/tourist https://codeforces.com/profile/tourist
- proudfoot 4y agoI can't imagine this cost very much to keep running.
- shadowgovt 4y agoGoogle is still a company where (especially for projects like this) the work is done by engineers volunteering time outside of their core job description. It may be as simple as "Morale dropped too low for the folks there to feel like it was worth it to continue," or "They let go of the people who were volunteering their 20% time to make this happen."
- ghaff 4y agoAnd spending time even if it's ostensibly "your" time outside of your core job on something that no one up your management chain cares about, or worse actively disapproves of you working on, isn't the best place to be in.
- proudfoot 4y agoI can't imagine this costs much to keep running.
- sfmike 4y ago[flagged]
- antondd 4y agoIt's been an interesting experience watching the primo crop of Silicon Valley sweethearts coming out of age and turning into this generation's IBMs, Oracles, and Ciscos. "He who slays the dragon shall become one".
- panic 4y agoThe trick is to slay the dragon and then go home. If you stick around the gold and treasure for too long, that’s when it starts to get dangerous.
- throwayyy479087 4y agoAtlassian nailed this. So has Vercel - do one thing perfectly.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- phist_mcgee 4y ago>Atlassian >One thing perfectly
- paxys 4y agoWhat does Atlassian do perfectly? And please don't use the J word.
- throwayyy479087 4y agoJIRA.
- hackernewds 4y agoYou gone and done it. Also JIRA is wack.
- 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dtc2302 4y agoHave they announced a reason behind this. I was new to the competitions, just started last year and was looking forward to another year of them. They were a great break from my college course work on the days they happened
- dooglius 4y agoIt's weird that there is no reason given here. It's not that I expected a real reason, but there isn't even a fake PR buzzword-filled explanation, there's just... nothing.
- victor9000 4y agoThis usually means that the real reasons are not particularly flattering.
- pdhborges 4y agoIs there a backup for all the problems and solutions?
- ghuysmans 4y agoI'm working on tools to backup problems and analyses, including images and sample inputs: https://github.com/ghuysmans/ccwg-archive https://github.com/ghuysmans/ccwg-archive. Their API is open.
- UltimateEdge 4y agoDo you know any other projects working on something like this? I imagine most commenters here would be very grateful for a google competition archive. The reason I'm asking is that I'm very surprised to see your repo/project with so little attention (in this thread and on GitHub).
- sam1r 4y agoIn other words.. “We have enough coders, thank you!” ( pssst … actually we have too many )
- neilv 4y agoMaybe Google is trying to shake up their diversity of thinking, and next on the chopping block are the Leetcode hazing filter, and the misaligned promotion system? One can dream.
- kuboble 4y agoI have won a couple of t-shirts in Google code Jam and got to the third round once. One year I was competing from my honey moon. I was never really good but it was one of the competitions I have greatly enjoyed. Especially when one could still run the code locally and submit solutions in any language possible. There were pepole who made an effort to solve every problem is different language. I haven't competed last 5 or so years, but I will shed a tear for Google Code Jam.
- w10-1 4y agoGoogle, Apple, and perhaps 2-3 other companies, have the weird characteristic that they are unimaginably enormous, AND the vast majority of their value is actually goodwill. It's true that Apple makes good devices and Google does good search, but their competitors are good enough. What distinguishes Apple and Google from their competitors is that we like them more. Not "we" the technical literati, but "we" billions of users. As a result, they are SO careful about maintaining that goodwill. But is this careful as in afraid, or careful as in focused? Google spent time building it, but now seems to want only not to screw up. Apple is still building. It's always trying to build it, probably because it spent its 1990's adolescence as an outcast. Twitter and Facebook are similarly large and had similar initial stories, but of late have induced massive distrust. People are there only because they have to be, and they're struggling. Apple and Google see Twitter and Facebook as examples of what NOT to do with your goodwill. Apple's growth and technical chops keeps investors at bay. But Alphabet's sprawling failures have heightened criticism, as Google-X and other nice-to-have's haven't turned out any measurable benefit (and measurement is how Sundar justifies his strategies). So fingers-crossed that Google's quiet retrenchment doesn't result in a Twitter explosion. I'm not confident that switching out Sundar would help more than it hurts (which is the FUD that he lives by). More importantly, the industry-wide refocusing on AI produces lots of demo-ware, but no business on a scale that could grow Google or Microsoft. That coming implosion worries me. What's lost in the rush to AI is the question of bureaucracy: how to keep these massive organizations from being self-serving, particularly to the extent they engage with the outsourcing and consultancy that drive financialization. WFH likely increases bureaucracy by privileging process and work-product over brainstorming and risk-taking, so my bet is still on Apple weathering the storm better than the others.
- njb311 4y agoI read that as Google ‘Stopping Coding’ Competitions, which would hint at the process by which they kill all those projects.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shadowtree 4y agoThe Elves are leaving Middle-Earth.
- disqard 4y ago(for those who might miss this reference) https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
- phist_mcgee 4y agoWe now have to do a formal expense report for friday drinks in the office. They've also taken away the company credit card so that all employees must go through the dreaded Finance hurdle to have any fun.
- xealgo 4y agoIt seems all of the things that made Google an attractive company to work for have been slowly fading away through the recent years. Many of these big tech companies started off being scrappy and fun, which arguably is what made them so innovative.
- barbariangrunge 4y agoThey still hold coding competitions, they just call them job interviews and take all the fun/fun parts out of it and cause you to hate programming puzzles instead of loving them
- bla3 4y agoLooks like Cat Allman was let go in the big layoffs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Allman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Allman I'm guessing that's the reason for this. I wonder what this means for Summer of Code.
- Master_Odin 4y agoFrom my perspective as a maintainer in a project that's been in GSoC last 5 years, I'd be way more concerned if Stephanie Taylor was laid off (and she hasn't yet) as she's been the absolute face of it on the mailing lists and point of contact into Google.
- nostrademons 4y agoCoding competitions were always a recruiting tool. Now that Google basically isn't hiring, it makes sense that they're winding down the coding competitions. If we ever get back to having a Google that's competing for the best engineering talent, they'll probably reinstate them, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
- fooker 4y agoI wonder if Google Summer of Code is next.
- dredmorbius 4y agoI was wondering what was happening with Google's open source team notably Chris DiBona. Riffed, as noted by SJvN at The Register (<https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/>) and discussed here (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558576>) about a month ago . Chris made a brief comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34563641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34563641>.
- rpigab 4y agoI really liked Hashcode, even if I've only participated in 3-4 different events, this was my favourite. One of my favourite Google things actually. Sad to see it go, but hey, it's their thing, they can do whatever they want with it.
- ghostface12 4y agoYo