
Facebook Recruiting III - Keyword Extraction - antgoldbloom
https://www.kaggle.com/c/facebook-recruiting-iii-keyword-extraction
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roycoding
_The winners, the people who provide the best set of predictions based on an
analysis of a database of millions of text questions, will get jobs at
Facebook._

Actually, it looks like the winners will just get interviews at Facebook.

I think Kaggle is a very interesting site and company, but I think it's a
stretch say they hold "data science" competitions. Most of their contest are
extremely limited in scope to applying machine learning to pre-sanitized data
sets. This really covers only a small part of what practicing data scientists
do.

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svasan
Kaggle is an interesting site. But the cynic in me says these
contests/competitions are just a cheap way of effort harvesting. For a
pittance, the companies sponsoring these contests are getting tremendous value
in return. If you are a statistician/analytics person, there is no reason to
let your value and skills get commoditized in this manner.

~~~
jacques_chester
Last I heard, Kaggle charges $10,000/month for a competition.

~~~
svasan
The dollar equivalent of the value the companies get in return would be an
order of magnitude more than what Kaggle charges the companies/clients that
sponsor the contests.

~~~
jacques_chester
That doesn't mean it's "cheap", for the same reason Oracle isn't cheap or a
private plane charter isn't cheap.

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14113
How will this "baffle normal people"? If by normal people you mean people who
aren't data scientists, then sure, it will. It'll baffle them in the same way
the bar exam will baffle "normal" people, those who aren't trying to practice
law.

Anyway, this sounds like a great way of candidate hunting, and a refreshing
solution to all of the "interviews are broken" posts that have been around
lately.

~~~
lingben
businessinsider articles are written for those with the attention span and IQ
of goldfish

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kmfrk
Why don't the moderators of this forum at least write a notification of the
changed title and link? Some of the comments here don't make sense as a
result.

~~~
dlisboa
Not only that, the whole purpose of this submission makes no sense as a
result. It used to be a businessinsider.com article with proper context,
explaining what Kaggle is, why Facebook was using it, and what StackExchange
is. It was a journalism piece, maybe a bad one, but it fit the criteria of why
we read articles.

Now it links to Kaggle directly with a title that makes no sense whatsoever
and provides absolutely no context. So instead of getting contextual
information intended for mass consumption (an article), we got nothing of
value. Great job.

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denzil_correa
Did past competition winners end up with a position at Facebook?

~~~
jboggan
I don't know for sure, but I think it was only good for an interview. There
wasn't any kind of legally binding language in the contest rules, and the fact
that I received a ping from Facebook recruiters despite finishing past 50th
place in the competition makes me feel like it was a fishing expedition. It's
money well spent for Facebook when you consider that they probably aren't
paying more than 50k to Kaggle to host the competition and probably get at
least two hires out of each one.

~~~
denzil_correa
I understand that it was only good for an interview and does not guarantee a
job. I would still like to know if Facebook did indeed hire someone (and not
just "call for interview") via the Kaggle gate. Basically, I am looking for an
all and out success story.

