I enjoy programming puzzles and solved the puzzles for Spotify one weekend. I sent in my resume to see what would happen. I was rejected about 2 hours later. I went in thinking it was cool that Spotify was so meritocratic to use programming puzzles as a hiring filter, but came out thinking the process is just totally arbitrary.

(yeah I know its sad but I think thats what a lot of these places love to chew up and spit out. Its probably a perfect service for the companies to find these types.)

That's true. But think about a smart programmer who is fresh out of school, or maybe dropped out. If you don't have anything on your resume yet, this could be a reasonable way to break into the tech scene.

The hackathon format works well for one-off fun events, but no-one should ever be pulling 48 hour coding stints at work. Being charitable, I guess this tests how well people perform under crunch conditions - but would you want to work for a company which is actively planning to crunch?

I'm probably not your target audience anyway (happily I'm past that stage in my career), but I was also put off by being asked to login in order to see sample questions.

A lot of the focus is on the 48 hour period, in that it's basically way too long to expect you guys to participate. We don't expect people to code all 48 hours; the decision was basically "make it a weekend long", but we are not tied in any way to that time period. Would it be much better if we shortened the time period to 24 hours? (We can't shorten it any more than that; as this is a global competition, everyone needs to have the same amount of daytime) The goal is not to have you guys burn yourselves out. The goal is to assess you all as quickly as possible.

From our perspective, we sort of viewed CodeSprint as a time saver; everyone you apply to nowadays requires some sort of technical proof. Sometimes you can get away with it if you have a github with a lot of open source projects, but not everyone has that.

With CodeSprint, you get to choose among a variety of problems, and companies with those specific problems get to find you. Because they receive the full code solutions, our goal is for CodeSprint to consolidate and replace the "do-a-technical-problem" part of the normal interview process. Except, this time around, this one set of problems is what's used for multiple companies, instead of just one.

The main point is that tech talent is extremely hard to find. Therefore it is valuable for companies to find someone who walks the talk.

For someone who is a good hacker and is just entering the job market, this is the real shit. No BS, no fake answers, no "i-want-to-change-the-world crap" - just being able to solve the problems at hand. And, these are the kind of people who end up changing the world by being part of sexy startups and maybe even starting up on their own later. Heck, if you are real hacker, 48hours of challenges is the best way to spend that time.

  A Database Error Occurred

  Error Number: 1048

  Column 'email' cannot be null

  INSERT INTO `recruit_hackers` (`email`) VALUES (NULL)

  Filename: /var/www/istreet/html/recruit/models/supermodel.php

  Line Number: 335

This is a slight misrepresentation of the original intent. What we meant to say is that we measure code execution speed, not how fast people type.

Programming is a valuable skill. How much does he get for spending 48 hours of his time?

Fuck code sprint and the rest of the guys who think we accept being treated as dirt.