

CodeSprint: Apply to multiple startups simultaneously - mikeinterviewst
http://codesprint.interviewstreet.com/recruit/challenges

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josegonzalez
Just a quick suggestion, you might want to make it so a developer cannot apply
to a particular startup by preference. For example, I may have been fired in a
past life from Dropbox and never want to work there again, or I may be
currently working at Kayak. I can only imagine the hilarity that would ensue
should your boss happen to come across your resume.

Also, you have a small html entity encoding issue:
<http://cl.ly/3h2R240m0K2D1z2M1M3k> .

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mikeinterviewst
We're mainly focused on US university students, so we don't anticipate it
being a big problem, but we do have company preferences in the profile (yet to
go live), so students can pick and choose which companies they want. We'll get
the encoding fixed.

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castewart
Why would you want to apply for that many startups, simultaneously? Seems to
me like they would all be working with wildly different technology solving
wildly different problems...

I don't know about you, but I want people excited working with me.

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veritas9
At CodeEval.com you only solve challenges for the companies you're actually
interested in. :)

Here are some cool ones in case you're interested:

<http://codeeval.com/public_sc/48/> => Milo (a eBay company)

<http://codeeval.com/public_sc/55/> => lolapps

<http://codeeval.com/public_sc/47/> => deviantart

<http://codeeval.com/public_sc/37/> => Ampush Social

<http://codeeval.com/public_sc/6/> => Factual

<http://codeeval.com/public_sc/10/> => Asana

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SoftwarePatent
Will participants be evaluated solely on their code? Or will you also consider
what school they attended, years experience, etc.?

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mikeinterviewst
A little bit of both.

There will be a hard cutoff, in which we are only considering score.

With that said, in the profile (which hasn't launched yet), we let you fill
out fields / github accounts to further flesh out who you are. Companies are
given a complete profile of students, and then give us their preferences on
who they'd like to interview.

We liken ourselves to the Common App. Consider the contest portion your SAT
score, and your profile page everything else.

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mikeinterviewst
I considered making the title "Apply to 50+ startups simultaneously", but that
would have been disingenuous. While yes, we have over 50 companies
participating, only the top 1 or 2 scorers would realistically be given the
opportunity to interview all 50+ (if they really wanted to).

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ntkachov
So, realistically, what could the top 10 expect? Top 50? Top 100?

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mikeinterviewst
We're still debating internally about how to match startups with top scorers.
We want to include both applicant and company preferences.

Ultimately, I think we're going to have to wait until we see the distribution
of scores before we make a decision. Secretly, I'm hoping there will be
incredibly obvious cutoffs for bracketing, as opposed to some of the Dutch
Auction ideas being thrown around.

With that said, if you're in the top 10, and want to interview all of the
companies, I'm fairly sure we can arrange that.

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icandoitbetter
>We do not consider code elegance or code length for the score, but do provide
employers with a time-lapse of your coding sessions.

So all coding necessarily must happen in an in-browser editor?

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mikeinterviewst
Time-lapse was a "cool feature" requested by one of our early companies that
we decided to implement on the main InterviewStreet site. If you cut and paste
completed code, it won't affect your score whatsoever, and it's up to the
specific company whether or not they consider being able to see your in-code
thinking process as important.

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karamazov
This is fantastic; it would be great to not have to go through the "what's a
quicksort" question with each job interview.

