Hacker.org: the whole office competing — and an interview by puzzle

A saga of its own was the challenges on Hacker.org. The whole office competed with each other to see who would get furthest.

Each challenge is an answer you have to find and type in, and then the way to the next ones opens. The challenges themselves were all kinds: walk a maze, assemble a puzzle from some huge pieces, break a cipher, decode an encoding, pull out information hidden in a picture — steganography.

Level 110 of the Mortal Coil puzzle from Hacker.org, 41×40 cells, from my archive of solutions. Dark cells are walls; all the light ones must be covered by a single snake.

You can judge the amount of work from the archive: about fifty folders of solutions from September–October 2010, plus September 2011. I solved them in whatever fit: PHP, Java, C#, C++, Python. My account has since been reset, though, and nothing is left of the good progress I had.

An interview by puzzle. It got to the point where we gave people we interviewed something from Hacker.org to solve. Once the interview was going so-so, but the candidate solved a challenge better than any of us. Fine, we said, let’s hire him. His code, though, was dreadful, and in the end we had to let him go.

What I took from it: solving puzzles and writing code that can be maintained are different skills. A puzzle shows the first, and the job needs the second.