from Hacker News

Google stopping coding competitions

by navinag on 2/22/23, 6:34 PM with 318 comments

• by gkoberger on 2/22/23, 6:54 PM

  We 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.

• by Jun8 on 2/22/23, 6:48 PM

  Is 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.

• by antondd on 2/22/23, 7:54 PM

  It'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".

• by naillo on 2/22/23, 6:57 PM

  Interesting 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.htm... Interesting contrast and I guess a sign of the changing tides.

• by hn_throwaway_99 on 2/22/23, 7:30 PM

  Before 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.

• by amaranth1 on 2/22/23, 7:05 PM

  As 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.

• by w10-1 on 2/22/23, 9:23 PM

  Google, 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.

• by kuboble on 2/22/23, 9:20 PM

  I 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.

• by TimTheTinker on 2/22/23, 7:12 PM

  It 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.

• by npretto on 2/22/23, 6:42 PM

  is this a sign that finding developers is not that hard anymore, and they don't need to organize these competitions with the hiring budget?

• by bla3 on 2/23/23, 3:07 AM

  Looks like Cat Allman was let go in the big layoffs: 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.

• by dooglius on 2/22/23, 8:16 PM

  It'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.

• by shp0ngle on 2/22/23, 7:35 PM

  So after 20 years - who won? Who is the Best Coder?

• by shadowtree on 2/22/23, 9:54 PM

  The Elves are leaving Middle-Earth.

• by dredmorbius on 2/23/23, 8:23 AM

  I 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/>) and discussed here (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558576>) about a month ago .

  Chris made a brief comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34563641>.

• by Eumenes on 2/22/23, 7:22 PM

  Code 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.

• by xealgo on 2/22/23, 11:53 PM

  It 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.

• by proudfoot on 2/22/23, 7:36 PM

  I can't imagine this costs much to keep running.

• by SquareWheel on 2/22/23, 6:58 PM

  Quite sad to see. It seems like they're still doing Summer of Code and CTF events, at least?

• by sam1r on 2/22/23, 8:37 PM

  In other words..

  “We have enough coders, thank you!”

  ( pssst … actually we have too many )

• by cmckn on 2/22/23, 6:57 PM

  I 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.

• by rpigab on 2/23/23, 10:47 AM

  I 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.

• by dtc2302 on 2/22/23, 8:06 PM

  Have 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

• by blindriver on 2/22/23, 6:59 PM

  Thank 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.

• by pdhborges on 2/22/23, 8:22 PM

  Is there a backup for all the problems and solutions?

• by thenightcrawler on 2/22/23, 6:41 PM

  But why

• by tomr75 on 2/22/23, 7:32 PM

  is this because people will just use chatGPT to cheat?

• by barbariangrunge on 2/23/23, 12:26 AM

  They 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

• by neilv on 2/22/23, 9:12 PM

  Maybe 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.

• by proudfoot on 2/22/23, 7:36 PM

  I can't imagine this cost very much to keep running.

• by njb311 on 2/22/23, 9:42 PM

  I read that as Google ‘Stopping Coding’ Competitions, which would hint at the process by which they kill all those projects.

• by fooker on 2/23/23, 3:31 AM

  I wonder if Google Summer of Code is next.

• by nostrademons on 2/23/23, 3:14 AM

  Coding 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.

• by ghostface12 on 2/24/23, 7:53 PM

  Yo

• by rvz on 2/22/23, 7:30 PM

  Another product of the near-zero interest rate phenomenon that needed to go.