[nostrademons]

It's there to find the non-networked developer - the kid in their mom's basement who is not in Silicon Valley or possibly not even in the U.S. and doesn't know anyone who works at Google, but learned to program on their own. Ironically this is the sort of developer that HN says can't get FAANG jobs because they lack the credentials and connections.

[thaumasiotes]

> Ironically this is the sort of developer that HN says can't get FAANG jobs because they lack the credentials and connections.

That's correct. As the reddit post noted, there is no benefit to coming to Google's attention via Code Jam. They'll give you an interview that way, but they'll also give an interview to anyone else who wants one.

And the approach you take to Code Jam is actually harmful to your performance in Google's hiring interviews, to the degree that the recruiter who contacts you based on your Code Jam record gives you a specific warning that Code Jam people tend to have a common set of problems (in terms of how their interviews are rated) and you shouldn't treat the interview as being similar to participating in Code Jam.

[nostrademons]

They don't give interviews to just anyone who applies. IIRC the first time I joined (2009, interviewed in late 2008) the stat was that ~2.3 million people had applied to Google, ~1000 had been hired that year, and your odds of getting in were like 2000:1. There were pretty well-known tricks for getting past the initial resume screen, like getting a referral, having an Ivy League degree, having a hot tech company on your resume, or coming through a recruiting avenue (eg. GSoC or TopCoder) that Google sponsored.

Maybe the interview:applicant ratio is better now that there's ~100K engineers rather than ~8K engineers, but a quick back of the envelope calculation indicates it's still likely not everyone that applies. On my team last year (before the hiring freeze) maybe ~20% of engineers do interviews regularly (a bit better than it was in ~2010), and we'd usually limit it to 1/week. That's ~20K interviewers * 50 interviews = 1M interviews/year, which is definitely better odds than in 2008, but still nowhere near enough to interview everyone who applies even if the number of applicants hasn't grown at all since 2008.

[thaumasiotes]

> the initial resume screen

At least as things stood last year, Google does the resume screen after the interview, not before.