I just won (#7 - foob) and I felt the need to post here to tell people that the person I spoke with from Quixey afterwards was very friendly and that I enjoyed talking to him. I was really just playing for the $100 but after speaking with him I felt like I should inquire about job opportunities. This is pretty much the opposite of what happened after my only other programming challenge experience.
I don't know if people saw this or not but a while back Instagram had a programming challenge inspired by the Darpa Shredder Challenge. They were offering a t-shirt for correct solutions and promised explicitly that every solution would get a personal response. They got more entries than they were expecting and didn't give t-shirts to everyone (which is somewhat understandable). What is much worse is that they didn't even bother to respond to correct solutions. I spent over an hour on it (including the bonus part) and they couldn't even send me a copy and pasted letter of something like "Thanks for playing! We got more attention than we expected and won't be able to give you a t-shirt but we do appreciate you playing." I would never consider working for a company that would respond to an unexpected number of solicited entries by simply ignoring them. I doubt that I'm the only person who was permanently turned off about Instagram by having my email and solution simply deleted without being looked at or responded to.
I don't know if people saw this or not but a while back Instagram had a programming challenge inspired by the Darpa Shredder Challenge. They were offering a t-shirt for correct solutions and promised explicitly that every solution would get a personal response. They got more entries than they were expecting and didn't give t-shirts to everyone (which is somewhat understandable). What is much worse is that they didn't even bother to respond to correct solutions. I spent over an hour on it (including the bonus part) and they couldn't even send me a copy and pasted letter of something like "Thanks for playing! We got more attention than we expected and won't be able to give you a t-shirt but we do appreciate you playing." I would never consider working for a company that would respond to an unexpected number of solicited entries by simply ignoring them. I doubt that I'm the only person who was permanently turned off about Instagram by having my email and solution simply deleted without being looked at or responded to.