Google Code Jam

» see codingcompetitions.withgoogle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The entry requirement was a compiler and a connection. That is not a small thing to say about anything run by an American company in 2003, when almost every other door into that industry had a visa or a campus or an introduction attached to it. Code Jam had a start time in UTC and a judge that did not know where the submission came from.

It began in 2003 as a recruiting exercise and ran on TopCoder's platform for its first five years. Google built its own infrastructure for it in 2008 and kept adding to it. A qualification round fed a ladder of online rounds, and the survivors were flown to whichever office was hosting the final that year. The grand prize settled at fifteen thousand dollars, which was never the point, because the people at the top of that scoreboard could earn that in a fortnight.

The numbers kept climbing right to the end. Ninety-six thousand people registered in 2020 and ninety-three thousand in 2021, which are the two largest years in its history and both of them in the last four. There were spinoffs as well. Distributed Code Jam ran from 2015 to 2018 with problems written for clusters rather than single machines, and a separate track ran for women alongside the I/O conference.

I did not compete in it. I was a computer engineering student through the years when this was the thing serious people did on a Saturday morning, and I knew what it was without ever registering, which I suspect describes most of the field it drew from. The interesting part from a distance was never who won. It was that the qualification round was open, and that a scoreboard existed where the entry was a solution and nothing else.

~ the record ~

~ small input, large input ~

The format was its own invention and it is the reason people who competed still describe it fondly. Each problem came with two datasets. You downloaded the small one, solved it, and submitted an answer file, and the judge told you immediately whether you were right. Then you downloaded the large one, and a timer started, usually eight minutes, in which you had to run your program and upload the output. The judge said nothing about the large input until the round was over.

That structure made the contest about confidence as much as speed. The small input told you your idea was correct; nothing told you your implementation would survive the real numbers. People lost whole rounds to a solution that was right and too slow, and found out an hour later along with everybody else. It also meant you competed against the problem rather than against a live scoreboard tick, which is a different sport from what most judges reward.

~ the name at the top ~

Gennady Korotkevich from Belarus won it five separate times between 2014 and 2020. There is no equivalent in most competitive fields, where the sample is large enough that one person cannot own a decade of it. That he could says something about how narrow the top of this discipline actually is, and about how thoroughly the format rewarded a specific kind of preparation.

Underneath him the field was global in a way that Google's own hiring never managed to be. Eastern Europe and East Asia carried the leaderboards year after year, and the qualification rounds pulled tens of thousands of people who were never going to be flown anywhere. The contest kept working as an open door long after it had stopped functioning as a recruiting funnel, which is probably the real reason it survived twenty years.

~ four rounds with nothing on them ~

The announcement came on 22 February 2023 and took Hash Code and Kick Start down with it. Google had laid off twelve thousand people the month before, and the competitions team went into the same accounting. Nobody was told the contest had stopped being useful, only that it was ending.

What they did next was better than the usual shutdown. On 15 April 2023 they ran four farewell rounds simultaneously, labeled A through D in rising difficulty, over four hours, with no prizes attached to any of them. Logins were disabled on 1 June and the platform went off on 1 July. All twenty years of problems were pushed to a public archive first, so the thing that actually mattered survived the servers.

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