Are You The World’s Best Programmer? Compete In Facebook’s 2012 Hacker Cup

Facebook has announced its 2012

Hacker Cup, a global computer

programming competition. The event

will serve as an important recruiting

tool to attract great coders to the

company, which is constantly battling

for fresh engineering talent with other

tech giants. In each round,

competitors will try to solve complex

algorithmic problems as quickly and

accurately as possible. Finalists are

flown to Facebook HQ, with the

winner named the world’s best

hacker. Hopefully, the event will go

smoother than last year, where

instructions were vague and scattered,

leading to confusion and frustration.

Programmers looking to claim the

bragging rights and token $5 ,000

grand prize can register here. The

competition’s 3 preliminary rounds

and the finals will be held throughout

January. Here’s some sample

questions from last year’s competition,

and a review of the finals.

With Silicon Valley a talent crunch, techcompanies are doing whatever it takes

to instill the idea that they are serious

engineering companies. Facebook has

been especially aggressive in trying to

portray itself as a place where

independent thinkers can build highly

visible and influential products without

the bureaucracy that plagues bigger

companies like Google. Last month it

began listing the address of its new

headquarters as “1 Hacker Way”, and

brought young teams from 14 colleges

to compete in a hackathon.

Though procedures were smoothed

out for the finals, the 2011 Hackathon

may have done more to hurt

Facebook’s image than help. A Quora

thread by Andrew Brown detailsl how

competitors weren’t sure of answer

submission time limits or format. The

Hacker Cup system also buckled under

the massive traffic, causing

competitors to miss submission

deadlines.

Expect Facebook to be better prepared

this year, and use the competition to

sift out engineering talent from

beyond the elite  submission time limits or format. The

Hacker Cup system also buckled under

the massive traffic, causing

competitors to miss submission

deadlines.

Expect Facebook to be better prepared

this year, and use the competition to

sift out engineering talent from

beyond the elite universities where it

recruits directly.

Rudz