Uber Hid a Game in Its App to Scout Potential Employees
Nevertheless, charming as Code on the Road is, there may still be reason to be skeptical of it. Some advocates for diversity in tech have worried that the very wordhackermaydissuade minority candidates from applyingto positions in the first place, thanks to its connotations of bro-y masculinity. If thats true, then the name Hacker Challenge may still be predisposing Uber to the standard pool of potential employees.
Uber Hid a Game in Its App to Scout Potential Employees
This statement, which was also sent toBusiness Insider, further explains that Uber deploys the option to play primarily in places where a lot of people work in tech, like the Boston area.Some on Twitterhave suggested that it shows up during events linked to the tech world, such as SXSW, too. (The game also appears to have been deployed in Denver and Portland, Oregon, among other cities.)
More troubling in this respect is the companys selective deployment of the game. Since its only appeared thus far in locations and contexts with established tech cultures (at least, as far as I can tell), its more likely to help reaffirm existing hiring norms than to challenge them. While CodeFight has a broader potential reach, Code on the Road seems more likely to put Uber in touch with its competitors employees than it does to net them truly nontraditional candidates.
Uber Hid a Game in Its App to Scout Potential Employees
Uber gave me a HACKER CHALLENGE while in the car today. Apparently HACKER means can implement /zZVkfkNub4
During a recent Uber trip that took him close to MIT, aSlateemployee received an unusual notification from the app. Under the heading Code on the Road, Uber offered him the opportunity to Flex [his] hacker skills for a chance to chat with the Uber team.
Jacob Brogan writes for Slateabout technology and culture.Follow him on Twitter.
Uber isnt the first company to slyly gameify the hiring process. Google, for example,famously seeks out candidatesthrough a semisecret coding game known as foo.bar. It shows up to those who search for certain coding-specific terms, such thatlike Code on the Roadits embedded within the companys services. Uber alsouses the site CodeFights, which lets visitors compete to solve programming challenges, as a recruitment tool, inviting players to grapple with the sort of problems they might encounter while working for the company.
In the end, its possible that none of this will matter: Theres no evidence yet that Uber has actually hired anyone through its in-app initiative.
In what followed, he was confronted with a series of timed puzzles, all of which were part of a Hacker Challenge designed to test basic coding skills over the course of a ride. The first question asked him to decide Which data structure he would use to dispatch the driver with the shortest ETA. A second had him evaluating an algorithm meant to compute all the possible routes a driver might use to pick up every rider. As users haveshown on Twitter, if you succeed at answering these questions, the challenge concludes with an opportunity to receive more information on what its like working for Uber.
Learn more about Future Tense
Even in this larger context, however, Code on the Road stands out for its geolocational qualities. Beyond reaching out to users in certain locations, the company doesnt appear to have done any additional targeting. You dont have to have expressed any interest in coding to come across it; you just have to be in the right place at the right time. That means its potentially making contact with those who might not consider themselves qualified to apply for a job with the company otherwise or even know that its hiring.
In an email sent Friday afternoon, an Uber representative confirmed the existence of the Code on the Road initiative and suggested that it was a way of reaching out to talented coders from nontraditional backgrounds. The option to play gives interested riders the opportunity to show us their skills in a fun and different waywhether they code on the side or are pursuing a career as a developer, the representative wrote.
Ubers Hacker Challenge for passengers at
Future Tenseis a partnership ofSlate,New America, andArizona State University.
This approach squares with the hiring model that Uber has publicly embraced in the past. Discussing his companys collaboration with CodeFights, Ubers head of growth recruiting, Bob Cowherd,claimedthat it moves the raw-talent test piece up to the very first step in the process, allowing the company to connect with candidates we probably wouldnt have found through traditional recruiting. As the tech worldcontinues to expand its approachto diversity hiring and its understanding of what diversity entails, efforts like this one may well become increasingly normative.