I had a bad experience with Lyft's previous self driving challenge - https://www.udacity.com/lyft-challenge

I unofficially got first place after finding a bug in their test set (allowing me to blow the competition away). I reported the problem directly - they decided not to fix it and asked me to take my submission down. They said they'd still offer an interview.

However - this interview wasn't even for their DL team. They offered an interview with the web tools support team because they felt I didn't have enough experience...

Reference - https://github.com/bearpelican/lyft-perception-challenge

> they decided not to fix it and asked me to take my submission down.

Imagine if it was a bug in their app leaking millions of users data and they go "We do not fix it. You can only use Uber now" "Also, come for an interview if you want to fix our web tools instead"

>> allowing the winners to interview with our team

This was pretentious AF. People who win such competitions _allow companies_ to interview them sometimes, not the other way around. It's not like working at Lyft is some amazing privilege.

I agree that the wording of "allow you to interview" is pretentious, but the end result is commonplace. Successful Kaggle competitors score job interviews all the time because of their performance. Getting an interview is a two-way street. The company needs to give you an invite and you need to accept. Doing well in the competition will get you an invite.

You might not think that working at Lyft is an amazing privilege, but it could be a good gig for someone that needs a paycheck and is looking for a job in the self-driving field.

I suspect the winners will already be well established in the field.

Right, and 25k is their bi weekly paycheck.