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I don't see how it would be negative correlation or even zero. Winning a competition shows a certain amount of raw talent. For someone who only programmed for

by fsk 12y ago

I don't see how it would be negative correlation or even zero. Winning a competition shows a certain amount of raw talent. For someone who only programmed for competitions and never worked on a serious project I could see it being a negative, but with some experience the competition winner should (on average) do better than average.

brudgers 12y ago
Programming contests are winner take all. Contemporary professional practice emphasizes collective success, teamwork, and group ownership of code. Two processes that select for opposite traits will often have negative correlation.
_delirium 12y ago
This is looking at a correlation among people who were hired by Google, which is a fairly specific population, and one that's actually in part selected by the same variable being studied, which complicates things further. There are a lot of possible mechanisms by which the correlation might've been produced, if it's valid. One is that winning programming competitions is anti-predictive of job performance (the interpretation this summary takes). But another is that Google puts (or previously put) too much positive weight on winning programming competitions in their hiring vs. other factors. If Google were, for example, more willing to overlook other weaknesses in people who had won programming competitions, or treated them more leniently in interviews, that would be another mechanism for producing a population of hires where those who won programming competitions were worse at their jobs.
- fsk 12y ago
  I see what you're saying. The programming contest winner will do better on the algorithm brainteaser questions, so is more likely to get hired, even if he's lacking the ability to do better after he's hired. A 30 minute interview question is more like a programming contest question than a serious project. It sounds his conclusion is measuring a defect in their hiring process more than "programming contest winners tend to make worse employees".
colechristensen 12y ago
If you watch the video linked in the post it makes more sense. Contest winners are pretty good employees, but the best employees usually aren't contest winners. Cranking out solutions fast is good for winning contests but not as good for writing great code. If you can win a contest, writing code quickly is probably a pretty big part of your skillset which you'll probably use in your job too, and that skill is negatively correlated with writing excellent code. Still _good_ employees, just not the best. In a similar vein, students graduating with 4.0 GPAs are often not the best employees because quite often dedication to grades means neglecting the social growth and other non-graded activities, learning, and experience available at universities.
nulltype 12y ago
Well imagine comparing person A who worked on a serious project and won 10 programming competitions vs person B who worked on 11 serious projects.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Supposedly, to draw a correlation you should try to hold everything else constant, otherwise you don't know what's actually correlating.
  - fsk 12y ago
    That actually was the best point in the whole thread. "Won programming contest and was hired by Google" is not the same sample set as "won a programming contest". Once you add "and was hired by Google", all sorts of sampling bias is added. To make it a really valid comparison, you'd need to track "won a programming contest and was not hired by Google" and "won a programming contest and never applied to Google".

by fsk 12y ago

brudgers 12y ago

Programming contests are winner take all. Contemporary professional practice emphasizes collective success, teamwork, and group ownership of code. Two processes that select for opposite traits will often have negative correlation.

_delirium 12y ago

This is looking at a correlation among people who were hired by Google, which is a fairly specific population, and one that's actually in part selected by the same variable being studied, which complicates things further. There are a lot of possible mechanisms by which the correlation might've been produced, if it's valid. One is that winning programming competitions is anti-predictive of job performance (the interpretation this summary takes). But another is that Google puts (or previously put) too much positive weight on winning programming competitions in their hiring vs. other factors. If Google were, for example, more willing to overlook other weaknesses in people who had won programming competitions, or treated them more leniently in interviews, that would be another mechanism for producing a population of hires where those who won programming competitions were worse at their jobs.

fsk 12y ago
I see what you're saying. The programming contest winner will do better on the algorithm brainteaser questions, so is more likely to get hired, even if he's lacking the ability to do better after he's hired. A 30 minute interview question is more like a programming contest question than a serious project. It sounds his conclusion is measuring a defect in their hiring process more than "programming contest winners tend to make worse employees".

colechristensen 12y ago

If you watch the video linked in the post it makes more sense. Contest winners are pretty good employees, but the best employees usually aren't contest winners. Cranking out solutions fast is good for winning contests but not as good for writing great code. If you can win a contest, writing code quickly is probably a pretty big part of your skillset which you'll probably use in your job too, and that skill is negatively correlated with writing excellent code. Still _good_ employees, just not the best. In a similar vein, students graduating with 4.0 GPAs are often not the best employees because quite often dedication to grades means neglecting the social growth and other non-graded activities, learning, and experience available at universities.

nulltype 12y ago

Well imagine comparing person A who worked on a serious project and won 10 programming competitions vs person B who worked on 11 serious projects.

icebraining 12y ago
Supposedly, to draw a correlation you should try to hold everything else constant, otherwise you don't know what's actually correlating.
- fsk 12y ago
  That actually was the best point in the whole thread. "Won programming contest and was hired by Google" is not the same sample set as "won a programming contest". Once you add "and was hired by Google", all sorts of sampling bias is added. To make it a really valid comparison, you'd need to track "won a programming contest and was not hired by Google" and "won a programming contest and never applied to Google".