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Goodbye to Google Code Jam
- uptownfunk 4y ago>>After nearly 20 years of Code Jam, it's time to say goodbye. While Code Jam will not continue as planned, we invite you to participate in our Competitions' Farewell Round on Saturday, April 15 at 14:00 UTC.
- O__________O 4y agoAppears answer is staff responsible were laid off: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-did-google-close-its-coding-competitions https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-did-google-cl...
- uptownfunk 4y agoBummer! Had a lot of reach and great tool to encourage future engineers. These events make it seem like the era of big fancy cool tech companies is over. Of course you have the emergence of other tech companies like open AI.
- versteegen 4y agoWow. I have to agree that knowing the reason for this tarnishes my image of Google by bringing home the reality of the layoffs.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoWell, they announced they're shuttering it. Oddly, there is zero information as to why.
- warkdarrior 4y agoIt's being replaced by a ChatGPT-controlled competition.
- suddenclarity 4y agoSupposedly the recent reduction in employees mostly targeted non-profit areas and several or the managers in charge of this were fired. I guess the befit nowadays after 20 years didn't justify the cost. I doubt you can put a positive spin on it so no reason to go into details?
- gpm 4y agoIt was probably also primarily valuable as a recruiting tool, and if they're not recruiting as heavily it no longer makes as much sense to invest in it.
- atleastoptimal 4y agoThe age of men is over. The time of the bot has come.
- chuckledog 4y ago(10000 years later) The age of the bot is over. The time of the elves has come.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoWe must keep going forward in time until a backwards time machine is invented.
- paulpauper 4y agoThere is no need for coding competitions anymore. The competition is Leetcode. The prize: a high paying job.
- postalrat 4y ago1. Build an AI that beats all humans in leetcode 2. Take all high paying jobs 3. Profit
- rvz 4y agoIndeed. It is a product of decades of quantitative easing, near zero interest rates and a tech bubble that needed to collapse. Thanks to GPT-4 and other LLMs, this have driven the need for coding competitions and interview tests like Hackerrank, Leetcode, Codility to zero and having almost no use since everyone will just Ch(e)atGPT the coding interview or competition.
- Barrin92 4y ago>almost no use since everyone will just Ch(e)atGPT pretty easily solved with covid-era online exam surveillance, i.e. camera on, screen shared and live explanation of your solution. But honestly not even that is necessary because cheating on online tests isn't new and companies are aware of it. ChatGPT didn't invent someone else taking a test for you.
- nearmuse 4y agoSounds really weird because you still have to screen people for software engineering jobs, while administering problems in an in-person interview is how it was being always done before coding competition platforms. As to the platforms themselves, they are still usable for in-person interviews and practice.
- whiplash451 4y agoCheatGPT. Love the pun :)
- startupsfail 4y agoIn general Online Rounds of coding competitions are no longer going to work. As GPT-4 had been shown to outperform humans on the coding competition tasks. You can have it assisted, but this quickly becomes a “who can afford more compute” competition. RIP coding competitions. Incidentally, World Finals: up to 2020, it was held in a location in the US or Europe, and has been online since. Pretty incredibly, Gennady Korotkevich has won the title every year since 2014 – except once.
- nmca 4y ago> GPT-4 had been shown to outperform humans on the coding competition tasks This is not true as of March 2023 (hard to prove a negative of course but look at the percentiles in the GPT4 report)
- ajkjk 4y ago> GPT-4 had been shown to outperform humans on the coding competition tasks citation?
- schrodinger 4y ago[flagged]
- lovecg 4y agoI haven’t seen a clear answer on this actually - there was some confusion if the training data contained solutions for older problems, and if it underperforms on previously unseen ones. Plus it still seemed to underperform on medium and hard problems? Does anyone in the know have a summary on this?
- nozzlegear 4y agoSometimes things that have been discussed as possibilities on this forum begin to be repeated and taken as fact. One might say that this forum has hallucinated the capabilities of this bot beyond its actual capacity, and the hallucination grows daily. A citation is indeed needed.
- gfd 4y agoTopcoder will also be having their final TCO this year: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/113201 https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/113201 Google Code Jam and TCO were the two biggest onsite competitive programming event that's not targeted at students. This is a huge blow to the sport.
- dilyevsky 4y agoWow topcoder too? What a shame. End of an era
- balaji1 4y agothey don't mention why it's ending?
- c7b 4y agoGPT?
- GuB-42 4y agoWe just did a competitive coding event and one of us based his strategy on ChatGPT, which was allowed. That got him through the qualification rounds, but then ended in the middle of the pack, which I think matched his skills as a non-ChatGPT coder. So, not a significant advantage, and none of the top performers used ChatGPT. The thing is, most of the times, ChatGPT gives a wrong answer, so you need to look at the code, understand it, point out the mistakes and have ChatGPT output the corrected code. Sometimes manual correction is required, and sometimes, rewording of the question is required. It won't do everything for you unless you are particularly lucky, you still need to be a competent coder to work with it.
- c7b 4y agoYeah, but with the breakneck speed at which this field is moving, how long will it be before we have dedicated 'Coding Competition' models (if they don't exist already somewhere)? I can't help but reminded of AlphaGo. When Lee Sedol saw the footage of the AI beating the then European champion, he was like 'That's neat, but it would still take a decade of training to get to world champion level'. That was about half a year before he crushingly lost to it. We just underestimate how fast those models can evolve. I know that playing a well-defined game against itself is an ideal setting for RL models, and that language models use very different architectures. Nonetheless, I still think it's reasonable to think that coding competitions may soon go the way of chess,..., where humans stand no chance against the best machines. Not that that's a reason to cancel them immediately like Google just did (after all, chess is arguably thriving), but that's a different story.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoCompetitive coding has always been a bit of a joke, but it's a great entry vector for kids to get introduced to programming (and eventually software engineering). I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this, though. I have always been suspicious that the existence of the game of competitive coding has been used to kind of justify the "leetcodification" of the tech interview circuit, and (IMO) that can't go away soon enough.
- actuator 4y agoWhy is it a joke? It is like any other sport or Olympiad, it involves solving faster, accurately and potentially of problems you haven't seen before. There is no direct correlation between competitive programming like CodeJam/ICPC and leetcode. They don't target the same audience at all. I couldn't get to the top of these but I do admire people who do, they are some of the absolutely brilliant people I have worked with. I have seen how they employ their rapid understanding, breaking down and debugging skills in real world programming as well. Coming to this argument about even algo/DS interviews, could you suggest an algorithmic interview replacement, that is not time consuming, is objective, language agnostic and scales well with the size of a company? It is not like these companies are not having past experience, system design interviews. They do have them as well but they cover subset of what all you would want to check. I would have expected to read more reasonable opinion on HN.
- musicale 4y ago> There is no direct correlation between competitive programming like CodeJam/ICPC and leetcode What is the difference that you see between these sorts of algorithm puzzle contests? Is there some reason that people who are good at one contest would be bad at another, similar contest?
- actuator 4y agoThe main difference is the audience of both is different. Leetcode works like this. Company A is asking these 100 questions with this frequency; let me solve these questions so that when I encounter these in the interview I can solve them then. The whole premise of Leetcode is on giving a question bank to what is already being asked. The aim is to clear the base bar a company has set.
- Daishiman 4y agoI guess Google really isn't the company it used to be.
- geodel 4y agoOh yes, while everything and everyone is exactly same as they were 20 years back.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoMost technical people at megacorps these days are incentivized to show how quantifiably influential their work was, even if it's 110% BS. Meanwhile, apps get shittier, open source contributions are bloated or useless, and generally there's no incentive to refactor or fix anything unless it's broken today.. and then to only fix it however without considering reducing the mountain of tech debt.
- jhoechtl 4y agoI can't help but I have the feeling Google is burning money at an unprecedented rate.
- 93po 4y agowhy not just go look at the public financials?
- wslh 4y agoAre nowadays good hackathons a good way to train for professional development? I used to compete in the early 90s in computing olympiads but now find that the work coding problems are more about integration of existing stuff that solving difficult problems. This is a generalization and talking about what is normal.
- MPlus88 4y ago[dead]
- benatkin 4y agoMore like withoutgoogle.com
- sacnoradhq 4y agoIt's funny how age of an event is used to justify that something should be stopped. So sunset Google Search too? It seems to be a Google thing to do: randomly start and discontinue things without much thought.
- phendrenad2 4y agoThis is how much of the world works, sadly. This is why brands refresh their logos every 5-10 years, to avoid becoming the old, the stale, the has-been. It seems to me that for some reason, this effect particularly affects software developers, because we are the first to call finished, stable open-source libraries "abandoned" if someone doesn't make a pointless git commit every 3 months.
- whiplash451 4y agoLooks like the google hashcode is gone as well. Sad.
- AddictedA1 4y agocause there is already lot of competitive coders that wont even getting jobs.
- say_it_as_it_is 4y agoIs anyone going to export the problems and solutions from archive code jams onto github?
- gregdoesit 4y agoFor 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-competitions/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/google-coding-competition...
- polskibus 4y agoThat 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.
- zsims 4y agoUnless they see Bard as fulfilling that.
- UncleMeat 4y agoOne 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.
- insightcheck 4y agoI 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/whats_the_hype_with_codejam/ 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.
- mFixman 4y agoThe Google Code Jam and other programming competitions motivated me and an entire generation to focus on programming as a fun pursuit and a healthy side of competition. While I'm very sad that it's gone, I'm very thankful to the Code Jam team for these 20 years of work put into competitions and in inspiring me into coding for fun. If anybody here had any teenage students who are mildly interested in programming, I'd really recommend getting them into CodeForces or any of the few remaining competitions. They are more accessible than coding olympiads like IOI, and it's the perfect way to develop a programming muscle while being in contact with a community of peers.
- jatins 4y agoMany students in my college got their first taste of programming from competitions like CodeJam, Facebook's Hacker Cup et al. Sad to see them going away. Though it did inspire a new generation of programmers and for that long live Code Jam!
- msteffen 4y agoI wonder if they’ll keep the site up or the old problems around. Some of them were great.
- GTP 4y agoDo they have an archive of their challenges?
- pawelwentpawel 4y agoWhile I participated in the Google Code Jam, my favourite was Hash Code - the team programming competition. The problems were more open ended and being able to work with a team was really great fun. Also, much more resembling a real-world practical scenario. Sad to hear that Google is closing them down, really feels like an end of an era.
- ftxbro 4y agoGoogle is investing in Starlink and Space-X so maybe they are pivoting to a new kind of jam.