Hey all,
We are excited to invite everyone to the Quora Programming Challenge 2021, a free programming competition open to participants from around the world*! The competition will take place from Saturday, February 6th, 2021 to Sunday, February 7th, 2021, in two divisions of 4 hours each, to accommodate different timezones.
Quora is a platform to ask questions, get useful answers, and share what you know with the world. On this contest, we include some problems inspired by real-world challenges that Quora engineers faced in building and growing the product. In addition to competitive programming-style questions, there will also be some machine learning problems. We hope that this contest will be fun for everyone!
The top contestants in each division will be able to win the following prizes:
- 1st place: $2000
- 2nd place: $1000
- 3rd place: $500
- 4th — 10th: $200
- Top 50 finishers: Quora Challenge T-Shirt
Our recruiting team will also be reaching out to top participants for their interest in interviewing for roles at Quora. We recently became a remote-first company, so you don’t have to relocate to work with us.
Register for the competition here by 2/5/2021: https://www.quora.com/careers/challenge.
Hope to see you at the contest!
- Except for excluded countries. Full details, including the dates and rules of the competition, can be found here: https://www.quora.com/careers/challenge
Auto comment: topic has been updated by vlchen888 (previous revision, new revision, compare).
Deja vu.
Why is LinkedIn profile a required field?
If it is so much required, why does it accept
https://linked.in/noneas answer?Mind that the answer is accurate and truthful to the extent possible, as required in the rules.
It's not really surprising that the form doesn't validate that the URL is a real profile URL, they did some rough validation and that's enough; do you expect forms to also automatically check that your City is a "real city" against some magical database before allowing your submission? No one ever does that.
LinkedIn profile is required because, clearly, Quora is running this (for free, with real prize money!) as a tool to recruit people to work there.
For important stuff, there's a way to validate an address: "We sent you a mail / message / etc. with a code, please input it in the next form to complete the registration process".
This one looks mandatory (required field in the form) but not enforced (no validation and no specific mention of LinkedIn profile in the rules, only "fill the form accurately and truthfully"). Hence the question, which is more about the company's intent: if it is really required, it can be clearer in the rules or via validation, if not, the required status can be dropped.
Validation only ever really happens during actual account creation; no one ever validates things like that in registration forms.
I guess the real question is whether they'll disqualify you if you don't have a LinkedIn? I'm not sure if they will, but from the rules about "accurately and truthfully", it sounds like they can, so I'd just make a LinkedIn and leave it mostly empty.
The problems in the 2014 version of this challenge has a not-strictly-algorithmic challenge, in particular Sorted Set where you have to parallelize a task, which is not common in CP. Are these types of questions fair game under your description of "competitive programming-style questions"?
This is basically to recruit people, so I think most probably they will ask problems similar to that they find in their daily workflow instead of totally focusing on "competitive programming-style questions".
Hi, thanks for the question! This iteration of the challenge will contain problems that fall into two categories.
I think many people are familiar with type 1, but for type 2, do you think you could provide a simple example problem ahead of time?
+1. Will any machine learning background be required to solve those problems?
Hi Anand, you can take a look at this problem from our 2014 contest for an example of what we’re considering an ML problem: https://www.quora.com/q/quorahaqathon/Quora-Haqathon-Labeler. These problems will not have perfect solutions, and you’ll find knowledge of machine learning useful for solving them. Resources are constrained though, so you won’t be training a SOTA model, and heuristic based approaches may be sufficient or superior for some problems.
Have you considered splitting the challenge into two contests? Also it's been my experience that it's quite hard to give a meaningful solution to a ML problem in 5 hours :(.
Will it be clear on which problems you can guarantee a full score?
Since I don't really like Quora as a platform (I believe in the idea, but not the current implementation), is there any way for me to register for the contest without logging into a Quora account? I try to minimize my social media accounts, especially those based around ads and data monetization (which is all of them nowadays, except Microsoft Circles).
Additionally, what's the approximate value of a Quora Challenge T-Shirt? I'm trying to decide whether it's worth attending based on the expected value.
I think a shirt like that mainly has value to you, so no one else can answer that question. Unless you mean the monetary value of a shirt which can't be over 15 dollars (and could be a lot less)