Forbes reports on the accelerating trend of using programming contests to smoke out the best talent even when it is not looking for a job:
A few years ago such out-of-the-way stars were invisible to U.S. recruiters. Today it’s much easier to spot them. Thanks to a flurry of online programming contests that attract entrants worldwide, it’s possible to identify coders who do Caltech-quality work, even if they live halfway around the world and earned their degrees at Ural State University…
InterviewStreet was the ticket out of Siberia for Yakunin, the programmer from Ekaterinburg. He wowed the hiring engineers at Quora, a knowledge-sharing website in Mountain View, Calif., by being the only person out of more than 700 respondents to win a perfect score on a CodeSprint challenge it sponsored. Often the best coders aren’t eager to apply for a job. They just want to prove their mettle against all comers. Mindful of this dynamic, InterviewStreet moved the bulk of its contests to a website called HackerRank, where most entrants log in with pseudonymous user names. Job hunters authorize the site to reveal their real names to potential employers.
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