Google lost one of its top employees to a startup that's like Fight Club for programmers

Ahmed Aly, a highly sought-after software engineer who spent three years at Google working on its search algorithim and organizing the Code Jam contest, just jumped ship to work at HackerRank − a startup which hosts programming contests for over one million users.


It wasn't that Aly was unhappy at Google — "I was very happy at Google, and I do recommend it to anyone," he told Business Insider.

But a job with HackerRank gave him the chance to chase his passion: competitive programming.

The appeal of competitive programming comes from the challenge of having to solve a problem that's never been sovled before, Aly says. You can look up the answers to a crossword puzzle, but there are no easy answers in a programming contest. 

"They have to think really hard to solve the hard problems, and they come up with the correct solution, that is the best part," Aly says. 

Coding competitions are serious business

To outsiders, the concept of "competitive programming" may seem as interesting as watching paint dry. But for a lot of programmers, it's serious business.

Contests like Google Code Jam give out $24,800 in prizes, plus the chance to get noticed by recruiters at the search giant and top Silicon Valley startups.
Facebook has its own Hacker Cup, which it explicitly uses to find future talent. 

In fact, a lot of the tech industry's best and brightest, including Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Google employee #1 Craig Silverstein, and Quora founder Adam D'Angelo, were all one-time finalists in the IBM-sponsored ACM International Collgiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC).

That particular contest traces its roots back to 1970, when teams competed to write programs on the IBM System/60 mainframe. 

The 2013 Facebook Hacker Cup programming competition.

In most of these contests, programmers, or teams of programmers, are given a complicated problem to solve and have to write a program to solve it under a strict time limit. Since 2000, these competitions went online and attacted a global audience.

Here's an example CodeJam problem:

These contests are very popular, and only getting moreso as programming becomes such a sought-after career. The 2014 Google Code Jam had over 23,200 participants from around the world, participating at Google's California headquarters and online.

Meanwhile, Livecoding.tv is a site that lets programming live-stream their coding sessions, much like Amazon's Twitch for video games.

 

 Aly has been a fixture on the programming contest scene almost since he started in 2007. In 2013, he placed in the top 2% of participants on TopCoder, an international competition site. He's a one-time finalist in the ACM-ICPC contest. In fact, Aly loves programming contests so much, he's owned and operated his own: A2OJ.com. 

At HackerRank, he's going to work on extending out their programming contest platform, which is already reputed to be the biggest. A HackerRank competition can get 15,000 to 20,000 people, says a company spokesperson. 

A big part of the reason HackerRank was founded was to fix the worst part about tech job interviews: Assessing whether or not a candidate actually knows their stuff. A lot of technical interviews only scratch the surface of a candidate's competency, meaning that an interviewer has to rely either on inconclusive data, or else go with their gut. 

But it's hard to argue with the result of a programming contest. It's a good way for would-be employers to get a handle on a candidate's skill, while also getting confirmation of how they perform under pressure. 

Moreover, HackerRank thinks that these contests have the opportunity to bring a lot more people into technology, providing an avenue for the self-taught or otherwise overlooked into the field. To that end, HackerRank says that it's working on coding competitions exclusively for women, called "Code Like A Girl." 

But for Aly, it's all for the love of the game. He's excited to turn his passion for these contests into his full-time career.

"As long as you do what you love, you will always be good at it," Aly says.