By Diane Lewis, Boston Globe Staff, 5/6/2002   

Here are some novel high-tech recruiting tools guaranteed to bring out
the serious coding geeks: weekly online contests for college
programmers; programming tournaments for students and professionals
seeking a ranking; up to $100,000 in cash, and a chance to be on
employers' wish lists.

Last month, 16 student semifinalists squared off at a collegiate
tournament held at the University Park Hotel at MIT in Cambridge. The
event was the last leg of a programming competition that began online
in February with 512 competitors.

Sponsored by California-based Sun Microsystems Inc., the tournament
was the brainchild of TopCoder, a Glastonbury, Conn., employment
service and organizer of programming competitions. TopCoder, now 18
months old, held its first weekly match and student tournament last
year.

The winner of April's collegiate tournament was Daniel Wright, a 21-
year-old junior at Stanford University who will graduate next year
with a bachelor's and a master's degree in computer science. He walked
away with a $100,000 grand prize, and a TopCoder ranking as number one
college programmer in the country.

"I've always enjoyed programming contests, but this one gives you a
quantitative measure of programming or coding ability," Wright said.
"It's a very attractive idea to be able to put something on my resume
that says, `I'm rated thus and so, or I won this contest.' It means
more than just saying that you've taken the right classes. Employers
can't really judge how someone programs just from an interview."

A random survey of Boston area recruiters suggests that the use of
contest rankings to locate and screen programming talent just might be
new.

"Companies have, for some time, asked applicants to solve problems,"
said Sally Silver, founder and chief executive of Sally Silver Cos. in
Waltham. "But this is the first I've heard of that."

Chris Moody, chief operating officer and chief information officer at
Aquent Inc., which tests programmers before placing them, said using
contest ratings to locate and select talent focuses primarily on
technical ability. That's OK if the employer wants the very best
coder, he said. It might not be enough if the company is searching for
a cultural fit.

"Testing ability before hiring is not new, but doing it in a
competition as a way of hiring, I have not specifically heard of,"
said Moody. "The interesting thing is that it serves an extremely
narrow niche, the niche where you are absolutely focused on finding
the most analytical or brightest person.  Rarely are companies looking
for that. Many also want cultural fit and experience fit. ... A person
could be brilliant and not be right for the job."

TopCoder competitions work like this: Student programmers sign up for
free membership on the TopCoder Web site. Once enrolled, they can
compete in weekly matches to build up a ranking that might lead to an
international tournament, said George Herchenroether, vice president
of marketing at TopCoder.

Students who join become part of the company's database of 13,000
professional and collegiate programmers. Of those, 3,000 have competed
in contests thus far. An automated ranking system gathers details
about the programming codes they've created and the algorithmic
problems they've solved, and ranks the results. Rankings can go up and
down, depending on the individual's performance on a given match.

"Once you get a large base of competitors, you can actually look at
how they solve problems," said Robert Hughes, president and cofounder
of TopCoder. "It gives companies a much quicker path to identifying
the best people to hire."

Reggie Hutcherson, manager of technology evangelism and adoption at
Sun Microsystems Inc., a corporate backer of TopCoder, said
competitions can also serve as a quasi-training ground for young
programmers seeking to hone and test their skills against
professionals in the field.

Mark Lewis, an assistant professor of computer science at Trinity
University in Texas, said many of his students began "dabbling in the
games," and he has encouraged them.

"Even simple problems can teach students," he said. "By the time they
get up to the higher levels [of competition], they are doing very
complex algorithms. It gets them thinking about material that might be
useful outside the normal class."

Is this a new trend? "I would say, yes, in the sense of a commercial
company doing it," Lewis said. "For a long time there were programming
competitions held by the Association of Computing Machinery, the
academic computing association. Companies have sponsored these, at
least partially, in the hope of finding people who do well and then
hiring them. But the ACM competitions are limited to college students,
and each university only gets two teams of three people in a
competition."

Typically, employers are charged a percentage of the total
compensation for new hires selected from TopCoder's database. They are
not charged a location fee. Companies can also sponsor a series or
package of five weekly contests or matches for $25,000 to $30,000. The
charge for tournament sponsorships depend on the size of the event and
the location.

For students, the competitions offer the chance to pit their skills
against the best in the firm's database and offers the possibility of
a cash prize and a good ranking.

That's what drew Jonathan Falz, a graduate student in computer science
at MIT, who competed in an earlier tournament and won $10,000. Falz,
who graduates this year, says competing hasn't led to a job offer yet,
but he's not worried. "If you can prove that you are the best coder in
the world, it will make an employer at least listen to you," Falz
said.