HackerRank Partners with Zip Code Wilmington to Bring Unprecedented Federal Aid to Bootcamp Students

Today marks an unprecedented event for higher education nationwide. The US Department of Education is giving up to $17 million in loans and grants to select, proven nontraditional education programs to offer student federal aid.

Until now, the government only allowed federal financial aid at traditional community colleges, universities and trade schools.

In partnership with nonprofit coding bootcamp Zip Code Wilmington, and Wilmington University, is proud to be one of fewer than 10 groups selected to pilot the new Educational Quality through Innovative Partnerships (EQUIP) program. Our job will be to assess Zip Code Wilmington’s coding curriculum.

See ED.gov’s official press release here.

EQUIP will Test the Validity of Bootcamps

 This pilot initiative is one indication that the perception of bootcamps, and other non-traditional means of education, is changing.

Still, can you really trust coding bootcamps?

This question has been hotly debated in recent years. The number of bootcamp grads rose from 10,000 in 2015 to a projected 18,000 this year, yet the perception of some coding bootcamps as a means for proper training has been mixed. Skeptics are wary of for-profit unaudited bootcamps with claims of high success rates that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Still, some top employers like Google have reportedly hired bootcamp grads as of late.

“Unfortunately, traditional education is not always accessible to everyone who needs it,” said HackerRank CEO and Cofounder Vivek Ravisankar. “We’re excited to help change that through this partnership, which empowers low-income students with a new education model to improve their lives. This program helps to create opportunities for developers regardless of their backgrounds.”

The goal of this EQUIP initiative is test the fed’s hypothesis that—when paired with an independent auditor and accredited university—training bootcamps can prepare Americans with the skills they need for in-demand jobs affordably. If this pilot goes well, this could mean qualifying bootcamps nationwide could be adopted into the federal student aid system.

On Assessing Coding Bootcamp Students

Most bootcamps offer a certificate of completion.

Coding challenges, on the other hand, offer a tangible result that bootcamp grads can show to prospective employers.

 HackerRank has been the technology powering Zip Code Wilmington’s coding assessments for over a year now. Students solve HackerRank coding challenges both as part of their application to the highly selective program, and to benchmark their skills during the program.

“As these innovative programs continue to develop, it will be increasingly important to understand what an outcomes-based quality assurance system looks like for such programs,” says Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell. “I am encouraged to see that these colleges, providers, and quality assurance entities have stepped forward to provide models for doing so.”

How did ED choose which bootcamps get federal aid?

 According to the ED press release last year, the criteria for selected non-accredited training programs was: 

• Innovative approach to helping students achieve positive outcomes
• Equity and access, particularly for students from low-income backgrounds
• Rigorous proposed quality assurance process
• Affordability of the programs
• Strong proposed student and taxpayer protections
• Partnership with a Quality Assurance Entity (QAE) and an accredited university

Zip Code Wilmington is really unlike most coding bootcamps. First of all, it’s nonprofit. Second of all, its cost is very reasonable. The total tuition is $12,000. However, students pay $2,000 up front, and employers subsidize $10,000 upon hiring a graduate.

More on Zip Code’s selection and results:

• In its last graduating class, Zip Code Wilmington had 250 applicants and only 25 students got in.
• To date, Zip Code has graduated 66 students, with 60 grads in paid, full-time positions, earning over $62,000 per year
• In fact, 16 students who were earning less than $10,000 before entering Zip Code Wilmington. Zip Code students earn, on average, less than $30,000 per year before Zip Code, and 3 months later, they’re placed in jobs earning an average over $60,000 per year.

“During our 3-month program, our students quit their jobs and work 80 to 100-hours per week,”says Melanie Augustin, Head of School at Zip Code Wilmington. “The EQUIP program will help our students focus on their studies with less financial stress, so they can increase their earning potential and make a better future for themselves and their families.”

Coders, practice coding skills here.

Managers, learn more about screening candidates accurately here.

HackerRank Partners with Bing to Help You Find Solutions Faster

This post was co-authored by Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager at Bing & Vivek Ravisankar, CEO and cofounder of HackerRank

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It’s a typical night. You’re in the zone with a half-full Red Bull by your side. You’ve come a long way in learning a brand new programming language when—bam—you run into problem you’re not quite sure about. So, you do what any programmer would do in your situation: You search for the solution.

This is one of the most common productivity pitfalls for programmers today. If you want to improve on or learn a new algorithm, you search in engines and figure out which blue link to click. Then, you have to transfer all of this into your editor. You trial and error until you find the right solution.

If only there was a way to search a function and immediately see the solution in one step.

Starting today, you can.

A New Way to Learn Programming Languages and Play with Code

Microsoft’s Bing and HackerRank are teaming up to provide millions of programmers an easy way to find useful search results. The best part is that the code runs on a live code editor within Bing’s search engine.

Typically, engineers go to search engines to get answers on various sites like, Stackoverflow, Stackexchange and other blogs. Now, you have a streamlined alternative that will not only spit out the code solution you need but also edit the code and play with it in real-time. No IDE installation required. This will save you endless time you used to spend going back and forth from search to your code editor.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say you wanted to concatenate a string in C#, but you have no idea how. All you would have to do is search the query and hit enter. You’ll immediately get the accurate solution, as well as the opportunity to edit the code right in your search results.

“In addition to learning how a certain algorithm/code is written in a given language, users will also be able to check how the same solution is constructed in a range of other programming languages too –providing a Rosetta-stone model for programming languages,” says Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager for the UX Features and Shared Tools at Bing.

What are you waiting for?

Start playing with code on Bing now!

 

 

 

Honored to Partner with the White House on TechHire Initiative

About one year ago, President Barack Obama launched the White House TechHire Initiative to push employers to start thinking differently about the way they hire programmers. Today, HackerRank is announcing a partnership with the White House to help programmers prove their skills and get connected with companies in all 50 TechHire communities.

From the White House press release on March 9, 2016:

HackerRank, a platform that creates opportunities for programmers based on coding skills, will host a free online 24 hour TechHire Hackathon for bootcamp students and companies in all 50 TechHire communities. This hackathon will give student coders the chance to prove their skills and connect with employers.  

We’re committing to hosting a free online hackathon exclusively for bootcamp students and companies in all TechHire communities. This online hackathon, also known as the TechHire Hackathon, will be a 24-hour online coding competition that will allow student coders a chance to prove their skills to employers who have made a commitment to the White House TechHire initiative.  

The TechHire Hackathon is a chance for companies to assess the skills of thousands of coders from non-traditional backgrounds in a short amount of time. Rather than relying on resumes, pedigree and universities as a proxy for talent, the TechHire Hackathon will empower companies to find strong talent from a pool of nontraditional programmers.

It’s an honor to help the White House TechHire Initiative because it perfectly aligns with its own mission of creating opportunities for coders based purely on their skill, not school or pedigree.

Stay tuned on details of the TechHire Hackathon!

 

See the full press release here.

Welcome Inaugural CFO Mike Asher

We’re excited to welcome our very first CFO Mike Asher to the HackerRank family. For the last 20 years, he’s steered high-growth rocket ship startups like Platfora, Appcelerator, GreenPlum and NewScale.

Ordinarily, CFOs are financial gatekeepers, but Asher’s no ordinary CFO. In a market where 90% of startups fail, Asher’s killer strategic instincts and proven track record make him one of the most sought-after financiers in Silicon Valley. He’s the quintessential new “startup CFO” who will roll up his sleeves, dive into every facet of the company and help model the business for long-term, sustainable growth. Asher’s placing a well-educated bet on HackerRank. In his own words:

There are a few things that I look for in a company, and HackerRank fits the profile:

 

• Big Market Opportunity. What I’ve found doing this for a while is that it’s not any harder to be successful in a big market versus a small market. If I’m going to work hard, I might as well go after a big market.

• Good core foundation. I look for a product that’s differentiated and that really works.

• High sales traction. I need to see a real market presence. Are people actually buying the product?

 

HackerRank’s existing enterprise product suite has already been dominating the mainstream market with customers across industries, like Time, Walmart and Capital One. With the launch of HackerRank Jobs, which bridges a thriving community of programmers and companies that need engineers, this is actually just the beginning.

CEO Vivek Ravisankar says Asher has one of the most strategic minds he’s ever seen. “We’re on a mission to change the way every single company builds their engineering teams, and Mike’s deep experience will ensure that we grow and scale really fast this year,” he says.

It might seem counterintuitive. Why would a successful CFO choose to dive headfirst into another startup when there are hints of an economic slowdown—not to mention the perpetually rumored tech bubble.

“There are enough programmers and technical talent in the world that there’ll always be hiring. There’s always going to be a need for it,” Asher says.

Why There Will Always be a Need for Programmers

If you look back to the 2008 recession in the US. Although layoffs spread like wildfire across organizations, an archived InfoWorld article reported that execs actually increased their development budgets, and the market for programming jobs grew by 7.4% in 2009.

So, why are programmers a bright spot in both good and bad economic times?

Mario Daniele Amore of Bocconni University analyzed how much US companies invested in innovations during the downturns between 1976 – 2006, which included 3 major recessions (in the 1980s, 1990s and 2001). Results show that companies that invest more in research and development during hard times end up having a positive impact long-term.

“The best companies are adding to their engineering talent even in the down economy,” Asher says. Plus, more and more companies are starting to use HackerRank not only for assessing potential candidates but also to benchmark their existing engineering team.

“This means we’re not only helping companies get new engineers in the door but also rounding out the skills necessary,” he says. “Even in a down economy, that’s what you need.”

Asher also has a background in computer science, and was a COBOL programmer before switching over the finance. He’s always had an affinity to software technology. There’s also an emotional element in his decision of choosing HackerRank. Despite being approached by multiple companies, he said:

“There’s something about this company that’s really cool and it’s where I want to go. I really like the people here and our mission of creating a more meritocratic world.”

Asher joins recent hires COO Grady Burnett and VP of Product & Growth David Park to help lead HackerRank into its next phase of high-growth. With a high flying executive team, and a next-generation product, this is just the beginning for HackerRank.

 

 

Introducing the Next-Generation Job Matching App for Engineers

What are the chances of you never hearing back from a company after applying to a job online? Roughly 90%. There are plenty of studies to back this up (here, here and here), but you don’t need a study to prove that submitting job applications online feels like tossing darts into a black hole.

It’s discouraging. It makes for a terrible experience. Everyone knows it’s about who you know, what degree you have and what prestigious schools or companies are listed in your resume.

Today, that changes.

Introducing HackerRank Jobs, the first job search app that’s completely reinventing the way candidates apply for developer jobs, and the way companies source candidates.

Instead of applying with a resume, you request a code challenge from a company with just one tap, and solve it at your leisure. HackerRank Jobs makes the decades-long “resume black hole” problem obsolete. You’re not only guaranteed a response from companies within 5 business days, but you can also see the average time it takes for a company to respond to applications before you apply.

This is the first time in history that you can apply to a job and not wonder why you never got a call. You simply apply to a job by showing your coding skills on your own time. No resumes or cover letters required.

Fixing the Source

Just as Uber unlocked more cars and Airbnb unlocked more places to rent, HackerRank Jobs is unlocking more developers and job opportunities for developers. The app unleashes the power of skilled programmers all over the world, no matter what credentials are next to your name. By going beyond resumes and eliminating the “resume black hole,” HackerRank Jobs is the new bridge between companies and developers.

If a tech executive tells you that it’s really hard to find great engineers, it’s because they’re still using traditional means of hiring, like resumes, degrees and referrals. They’re overlooking highly-skilled candidates who may not have attended a great school, may have dropped out or simply took an alternate path to programming. The unlock these engineers, you have to be able to is test their skills at scale. With traditional recruiting methods, it can take more than 30 days to find the right candidate.

Almost 40 companies, including Uber, VMware and Box, are already using HackerRank Jobs and have trimmed down their time-to-hire from months to just days.

These companies can get a list of candidates’ code challenge scores on either web or mobile, and they have the opportunity to call engineers immediately. What’s more, recruiters will never have to deal with the endless back-and-forth emails when scheduling interviews with candidates. Scheduling conflicts alone unnecessarily extend recruiting time. The HackerRank Jobs ecosystem offers a built-in scheduler that automatically prompts applicants to choose 3 open time slots for potential interviews.

Of the nearly 40 companies who have used HackerRank Jobs, all of them have wondered why this hiring system didn’t exist before. With HackerRank Jobs, we’re fixing every pain point that comes with building a strong engineering team.

Behind the Guaranteed Response

Many of you might be understandably skeptical—how can we guarantee a response from companies?

There are a few ways we make this happen.

First, a chief reason why companies are slow to respond is simply because of the sheer amount of time it traditionally takes to evaluate programmers. Scheduling manual phone interviews or whiteboard interviews can take months. By using code challenges, recruiters can automatically gauge a high volume of programmers’ skills in minutes.

Second, we calculate the average time it takes for a company to respond to an application through HackerRank Jobs, and publicize the average time within the app. Companies have the opportunity to create a better experience for their candidates by benchmarking their response time against other companies in the area.

Finally, after a company gets a list of code challenge scores, recruiters have a maximum of 5 days to respond to the best performers. Otherwise, they lose talent. The speed of automated challenges, transparency and limited time incentivizes companies to act faster.

We’re excited to unveil this revolutionary way of applying to jobs and finding candidates.
Are you ready to try HackerRank Jobs?

HackerRank Jobs is now available to all engineers on both iOS and Android. We’re starting with jobs openings in the Bay Area, New York and Bangalore. But we’re gearing up to launch in many more regions in the next few months.

 

Solving Engineering Hiring: ‘Why I Joined HackerRank’

Throughout my career, I have witnessed firsthand how difficult it is for companies to find talented developers. It is a problem of nearly epidemic proportion. But it can be solved.

That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve joined HackerRank as Vice President of Products and Growth. In my new role, I will oversee product development and help drive the company’s growth as we continue our mission to democratize hiring and flatten the developer world.

Many of my teams have gone to great lengths to hire developers, often traveling internationally to hackathons and coding challenges, to discover and recruit qualified candidates. I come to HackerRank after 16 years of building online communities. From my first company, Coolboard, to Intuit, Nextdoor, and most recently Facebook, where I lead the Notifications team which was one of the single biggest drivers of daily active users, hiring was always on my mind and took up a great deal of my time.

Clearly, travel to hackathons and coding challenges isn’t the most efficient or effective model for hiring. Most businesses don’t have the same budgets that a company like Facebook has. The truth is that the real problem is not a talent shortage. I would argue that there is no skills gap, but rather a fundamental breakdown in the way we hire that’s separating engineers from the companies looking to hire them. What’s more, relying on the status quo for recruiting — which relies for traditional indicators like university GPA and years of experience — means that companies are overlooking a huge subset of qualified, committed and passionate candidates, many of whom are self-taught.

But HackerRank is changing all of that. I see HackerRank becoming the place where every single programmer in the world will come to hone their coding skills, compete in challenges, get ranked, and, crucially, find a job.

That’s why I’ve joined HackerRank. I want to be a part of the solution, bringing meritocracy to hiring and helping engineers who may not have the pedigree traditionally required to get in the door at good companies. In the process, we’ll help companies become better because their engineering teams will become more diverse and better qualified. I strongly believe in HackerRank’s mission to make the world flat in tech recruiting. And I have complete confidence in this incredible team, under Vivek’s leadership, to realize that vision.

There are millions of highly skilled software engineers out there, and yet companies are not finding them. HackerRank has the leadership, vision, and team in place to truly resolve the alleged engineering skills gap, and I can’t wait to be part of that story.

 

Building Meritocracy in Tech

I’m happy to announce that I recently joined HackerRank as the President & Chief Operating Officer (COO) to help drive the disruptive credentialing system in its next phase of high-growth.

I’ve spent most of my career scaling companies that are solving important problems in the world, like access to information and connecting the world. I’ve spent the majority of my time working with customers, partners and teams to develop solutions that help them grow faster. In every case, the most invaluable asset to any company is—by far—their people.

I’ve also grown teams to thousands of talented people globally over the years at my time at DoubleClick, Google, Facebook and—most recently—Flurry. Having conducted dozens of interviews a week while simultaneously running the sales and ops teams at my previous companies, I strongly believe there’s immense opportunity in optimizing how companies build their teams.

By filtering out resumes using traditional credentials, like GPA or university, we missed out on a massive pool of qualified, committed and passionate candidates. Whether it’s because of family circumstances, unforeseen situations or discovering their passion later in life, great people are all too often passed over when we focus too heavily on these traditional filters over skills.

When companies repeatedly look for people of the same pedigree, they not only miss out on great candidates but also create less opportunity for diversity. Countless tech leaders have recently recognized the lack of diversity generally rampant in tech, and they’ve publicly expressed a commitment to change. But companies generally don’t have the right tools to promote a truly meritocratic culture yet.

This is where HackerRank comes in.

HackerRank creates a meritocratic filter to empower companies by automatically ranking programmers purely based on coding skills. That’s what drew me in. Very few companies are actually changing the paradigm of an entire industry, and HackerRank is one of them.

Today every company is a software company, and engineers’ power to transform a company or even industry is more accessible than it’s ever been. When companies like Chipotle are hosting hackathons to innovate and Goldman Sachs has more engineers than Google, hiring the right engineers can define the trajectory of any company. Helping to efficiently match people to these opportunities at a diverse group of companies will accelerate this process, resulting in happier people and more effective companies.

In addition to strong opportunity, there are three core factors that I was looking for when selecting the next stage of my career:

1. A noble mission in which I deeply believe.
2. A strong team.
3. A growing early-stage startup to help scale.
   

HackerRank offers all three and more. HackerRank’s mission to make the world flat aligns with my personal passion to push for meritocracy in job opportunities. The platform opens up opportunities to anyone who can do the job well–no matter what’s listed on their resume.

The entire team is driven with passion, diverse experiences and humility. HackerRank is poised to be the default tech recruiting company. Over time, we can branch out into recruiting other teams as well. 

I’m really excited about partnering with CEO & Co-founder Vivek Ravisankar and the whole team. Together, we’ll drive HackerRank’s growth and its mission to democratize hiring and put people on a path where they are more empowered.

Why Renowned Googler Ahmed Aly Chose HackerRank

He’s been recognized as the top 2% best coders in the world. He’s ranked #1 – #3 in prestigious competitions 4 years in a row in the Arab region before evolving to the judge level.

Ahmed Aly consistently has LinkedIn InMail from all of the best tech companies in Silicon Valley as attempts to poach him away from the almighty Google.

“HackerRank’s Vivek [Ravisankar] was the only message I replied to because I really like what HackerRank’s doing. And I think this is the field where I can do my best. I can do what I love doing,” he says.

After running Google Jam, an online coding competition with over 56,000 registrants for several years, he wants to help HackerRank take the coding community to another level.

Answering a Calling for Competitive Programming

When Aly serendipitously discovered the rip-roaring world of competitive coding at 20-years-old, all bets were off. With each new challenge under his belt, a dose of passion for the competitive sport pumped into his veins. A lifelong tunnel formed around Aly’s mind with a singular goal: Dominate coding competitions.

He started skipping classes for competitions. Grades started falling. He was supposed to graduate from Cairo University a year early, but he lost that head start. Even after graduation, he quit his software engineering job to focus on his last ACM regional contest training.

Nothing could stop him from pursuing this newfound passion for enduring new challenges. And it never would have happened if it weren’t for a college friend who happened to back out of an ACM challenge last minute.

“You need 3 people to enter, so my two friends just needed a body–anybody–to be able to enter, so I just joined,” he says.

It’s funny what happens when you’re open to new experiences. This small favor to a friend turned into a lifelong passion.

Those of you involved in competitive coding know that starting at the age of 20 is actually considered ancient. We occassionally receive fan mail from 10-year-old aspiring programmers who love solving challenges. Since most coders start in grade school, Aly was pretty late to the game.

But that only made Aly more determined. Back in 2007, there weren’t too many resources for folks trying to learn competitive coding strategies–fast. So, Aly built his own.

Aly is most famously known for creating A2 Online Judge, a website that aggregates ample coding challenges from 14 different coding contest websites. It offers the opportunity for passionate coders to create problems, use valuable resources for practicing, a community of people to chat with and much more.

He single handedly built this community as a hobby while holding down school and then full-time job upon graduating. He blasted through a million lines of code for his baby, A2OJ, with its servers still maintained in his garage. The community’s grown to over 30,000 registered users and 600,000 page views per month.

He might have been relatively behind compared to some of the other coders who started while he was playing video games, but he raced ahead and dominated the industry as becoming a judge for numerous prestigious competitions, including ACM and Google Jam. 

Goodbye Google, Hello HackerRank!

For the last 3.5 years, Aly has been working on Google’s coveted search algorithm for 80% of his time. In the other 20%, Aly ran the entire Google Code Jam operation.

But Aly’s undying passion for competitive programming swelled enough to make him grow restless. He wanted to turn that 20% into 100% of his time.

“When I work on A2OJ or Code Jam, it didn’t feel like work. I never get tired,” he says. “I did this because I want to do what I love. If you do what you love, then you’ll always be good at it.”

The HackerRank team is thrilled to welcome Aly to the team. We’re excited to infuse his expertise into our larger vision of transforming the paradigm of tech recruiting. The melding of his brilliant mind and passion will help HackerRank innovate by turning coding challenges into the default, 21st century resume.

We also sat down with Ahmed to reflect about his achievements thus far. Hear from the master himself:

Ahmed, what advice do you have for people who want to become great programmers like you?

Don’t try to solve harder problems unless you are really good at solving the easier ones. That means solve a lot of really easy problems (that could be hundreds), that will improve your coding skills, which should be the easiest skill to gain. Then go to little bit harder problems, and so on.

Who was pivotal to your success?

The Great Fegla, that’s how we call him, his real name is Mohamed Abdelwahab, he was my coach for the ACM ICPC competitions. He isn’t just my coach, he is my friend and like my brother. I learned a lot from him, and I’m still learning. He changed me from a loser student who fails in many courses to a good student and programer. More details here.

“Practice by solving a lot of problems; then compete against the problem set, not against the other teams,” he often told me.

What’s something most people don’t know about you?

People usually don’t believe me when I say this, but while studying in college, I failed in the following courses (got less than 50% grade): Computer Programming 1, Computer Programming 2 and Data Structures.

 

Want a chance to chat with Ahmed? Sign up for World Cup, the ultimate university CodeSprint. The winner gets to video chat with Ahmed Aly!

EpicCode CodeSprint Lives Up to its Name, Smashes Records

It was truly epic. The EpicCode CodeSprint was one of the biggest online hackathon ever, pulling in about 64,000 submissions from over 12,000 participants on June 20th, 2015. Exceptional software engineers from 86 different countries fought the epic battle for 24 hours.

Fierce dedication and unwavering passion pumped through the fingers of every single developer, both students and professionals, as 6,000 competitors made it to the leaderboard. The contest opened to a flurry of submissions within the first 10 minutes of the contest up until the very last minute. This was by far HackerRank’s largest coding contest of all time.

Transforming the DNA of Your Engineering Team

HackerRank is the destination for the best developers in the world and EpicCode signifies a new era of achievement. This new record of participants illuminates CodeSprints, or online hackathons, as the most innovative way of bringing the best developers to the best companies. It’s exciting to see that our reach is climbing higher and higher.

CodeSprints are the most accurate way to measure the skills of thousands of developers at once. Developers solve the same set of coding challenges in 24 hours and each score is graded automatically. This means that the 16 forward-thinking companies (pictured below) that sponsored the EpicCode instantly sourced thousands of talented developers in just 24 hours. Each company received a Developer ScoreCard that includes each candidate’s score and contact information.

What other opportunity is there to bring thousands upon thousands of smart coders from around the world together to prove their skills by conquering one set of mind-bending challenges? Traditional recruiting techniques typically require at least 15 minutes on the phone with each candidate you painstakingly find on black-hole job sites. In the EpicCode Codesprint, over 4,000 developers explicitly expressed an interest in being contacted for job opportunities.

Companies easily tested the precise skill level for over 4,000 developers, cutting down thousands of hours of sourcing qualified recruiters through phone screenings. You can expect HackerRank to continue to push the limits, trailblazing as the forerunner of online hackathons to surface untapped talent.

Pulsating Passion for Coding Challenges

The contest was made up of 8 exciting challenges increasing in difficulty. Developers who want to learn the most optimal way of solving each challenge can go back to the problem and click on the “Editorials” tab for detailed explanations. The beauty of the 24 hour contest is that it’s anyone’s game. As people come in and out of the battle field, the top leader in hour 15 may not be the ultimate winner as the clock counts down. You can sense the passion for our carefully thought-out problem statements from our community in these Tweets during the event. 

Plus, some amazing prizes sweetened the deal! These will be shipped to winners soon!

• Rank 1 – GoPro Hero4
• Rank 2 – Oculus Rift Developer Kit DK2
• Rank 3 – Xbox One
• Rank 4 – Pebble Smartwatch
• Rank 5 – The Arduino Starter Kit
• Rank 6-20 – Raspberry Pi 2
• Rank 1- 100 – HackerRank T-Shirt
• Participants who solved 1 or more challenge – $100 AWS credits

Still, many of our passionate programmers say it’s not just about the prizes–competing in HackerRank’s contests is also about learning to become a better programmers and pushing yourself to the limit.

@hackerrank Loved the EpicCode Contest.. Awesome problem-set.. Fell in love with HackerRank.. Congrats for a successful event.. — Asim Krishna Prasad (@AsimKPrasad) June 21, 2015

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@hackerrank is spoiling my health :P. Forgot to have dinner. It’s 3:30 am. I’m hungry. Busy with #EpicCodeContest. https://t.co/jdWTDmh3CN

— Srikanth (@sr1k4n7h) June 20, 2015

 

This is what makes @hackerrank fun. #EpicCode #optimization time. pic.twitter.com/7kKnZPu3t6

— Joseph Zhang (@josephz885) June 20, 2015

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Finally, we asked our EpicCode champions to offer a few words of wisdom. Here’s what they had to say:

Stay tuned for our next upcoming CodeSprint! Hiring managers, don’t miss your chance to re-engineer the way you recruit tech candidates. Developers, your next epic battle awaits.

Save your seat at the CounterCode CodeSprint on August 1, 2015!

VMware is the First to Redefine Developer Engagement

How much can a resume or professional social profile tell employers about programming skills? What does 15 endorsements for “data structures” skill really mean? No matter how hard you dig, you won’t definitively know if someone’s a good programmer until you give them a unique programming challenge and see how they think through and solve problems.

Today, the HackerRank team is announcing Company Pages, allowing companies to feature real-world programming challenges and developers to prove their skills by solving them. This new network bridges the gap between the right skills and the right opportunity…on one page. It’s the only professional network that offers a genuine connection between developers and hiring managers centered on what engineers love the most: Coding.

VMware, the leading virtualization provider, is excited to be the first company to redefine what it means to engage with talented engineers with full transparency by leveraging HackerRank’s new Company Pages. Here’s how we’re pioneering technical candidate engagement:

 

 

 

Experience VMware’s Innovative Culture

You’ve seen it a million times: Most companies say they’re cutting-edge, offer free snacks and allow flip flops at work. But if you ask any software engineer: What excites you about a company? Most engineers say it’s contributing to the coolest technology.

Real-Time Interaction

You can connect directly with VMware’s Principal Engineer Ben Pfaff and get a glimpse of the exciting, transformative technology his team is working on. Simply ask any question to the VMware engineering team directly on the company page. Pfaff has been working on VMware’s NSX network virtualization product, and specifically on the Open vSwitch data plane component since its inception in 2009 at Nicira Networks, which VMware acquired in 2012.  Before Nicira, he received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 2007 and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Michigan State University in 2001.

There are two real-time opportunities to explore and experience company culture on June 22nd:

• You can watch Pfaff solve the challenge live on the VMware company page.
• Ask Pfaff any recruiting question on the VMware company page. Pfaff will answer the questions directly on the Company Page, like a recruiting Ask Me Anything (AMA).

Solve Tailored Challenges

As proud trailblazers of virtualization, the VMware team is naturally looking for engineers who are also passionate about building a robust and efficient networking stack. So, its engineers created a unique challenge that implements one of the basic algorithms used in Ethernet networks to ensure that packets arrive at their destinations without wasting network bandwidth or duplicating packets. It is an algorithm that every switch, including Open vSwitch, implements. Its basic idea is simple and beautiful, in our opinion, and it has withstood the test of time. We hope that you will agree once you understand how it works. See if you can solve the VMware challenge here!

No other professional network offers the ability to experience strong innovative culture by demonstrating business-related programming challenges you can solve. With HackerRank’s interactive Company Pages, you can see not only how much companies like VMware value innovation but also the depth of the engineering team’s passion and expertise. Plus, the engineering team can see every challenge submission! Solve the challenge here.

So, what’s next?

Engineers, can you crack our unique challenge? See the challenge on the VMware Company Page and submit your solution directly to the VMware engineering team!

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This blog post was co-written by Rizwan Ansary, Product Manager at HackerRank & Ben Pfaff, Principal Engineer at VMware.