On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 7:45 AM, Dave Long <[email protected]> wrote:
People who actually managed to do anything at all are already at the 88th > percentile of the hackerrank general leaderboard; and if I understand the > scoring system properly, doing a gimme exercise in each of the domains > would suffice to put one at the 95th percentile (40th percentile of > actives). There's a short tail at the high end (6% of actives, <1% > overall, with 200-100 points), about half the actives are between 100-50 > points, and a long tail dribbling off towards the great sea of 0's. > > Dave, that's reasonably accurate data. May I ask you where you got it from? "Fixing" these figures in some way is why we have hired dedicated product managers on the community side. I manage the enterprise side of the business. I totally agree with your point that it is important to understand objectives of the users. At HackerRank we have our roots in the competitive programming world of IOI and ACM ICPC and the like. The demographic and retention characteristics are very different for that base. But the real volume opportunity is elsewhere - in the self learning crowd. Even there we have noticed there is a huge cohort of "re-skill" users - programmers with even 12+ years of quality experience who want to check out what this whole web dev paradigm is all about. The world has more high quality telecoms engineers than it needs. There are fewer quality full stack devs that can put together a system as web scale. There doesn't seem to be enough rebalancing going on yet, surprisingly. The novice cohort is the most challenging and perhaps an even more lucrative opportunity. Goals for this group can be as prosaic as "pick up a skill that will lead to a well paying job in computing". Suffice to say we (or any one else in the space) have barely gotten started in putting together an engaging product for this crowd.
