Our public challenges are part of outreach, not qualification. We are very worried about drawing conclusions from them in our hiring process, because those challenges are public and people often work together on them.

Don't stop, thanks to the two public programs you've run so far I've:

* Got into Ruby and Go (trying to get a feel for what language felt most comfortable for bit manip.)

* Got into assembly (for fun so far)

* Got a good appreciation for bit-level operations

* A bazillion more little facts and insights that help in daily work life

I bet if you polled how it's helped other people there'd be all kinds of great examples. For work, I'd say the best impact has been a personal drive to pentest our own product, resulting in a lot of bugs found and fixed. That included managing to root our servers via a product flaw, which was scary and amazingly fun.

So yeah, thumbs up, don't stop now (please).

As for the above catering to newcomers, sure but it ramps up incredibly and pushes some boundaries if you've never touched that stuff before.

The public challenges seem to embrace newcomers. Assuming someone does well on their own - should that person expect to do well in the hiring process? Or is there a significant difference in skill set / level between the public an private tests?