Programmers Competition

Recently I partook in organization duties in All-Ukrainian Software Programmer Competition called Programmania.



This event pretend to be ultimate for all kinds of developers in this country. Spectrum of tasks indeed very wide: from high low level languages to logical tasks, from very specific languages like 1C (development environment for accounting management in CIS countries) to generic questions about project management. We were lucky to have good sponsors and adequate anchors (thank you so much, Leviza :)) and that was impressive that competition was conducted in 3 different location. But by the same causes we had troubles:

There were too many "bugs" in tasks, as I was watcher during competition(not only preventing cheating was my duty, but also suggesting what we were intending to mean by very confusing statements in task bulletin. The bulletin itself was also very wide: there was no chance to finish up it all before time is over.

The most annoying for me was one candidate, that was pretended to be keen in project management and I was often asked by him to interpret what was written. Oh, no this time it was not failure of our authors and experts, that created bulletin, but there reason was quite complicated language that was used in PM tasks to knock out potential cheaters ...

How do we assess participants and their work?
Sum of all chapters (say all programming languages and tasks)
Average scores for all touched topics?
The most successful chapters?

In any case test doesn't reflect skills of participants in being team members. In fact, it was rather the fest of egoism ...

Although competition is used to attract potential candidates to our job offers, it's very naive to think that competition would estimate people in proper way ...