The Summer of Code will spend the autumn and early winter in China, where Google will offer valuable prizes to Chinese participants who win the competition.
Google Jamming For Code In China
The Google China Code Jam isn’t the name of a house band in Mountain View, but a contest to find great programmers in China. Infoworld.nl wrote how Google’s Beijing R&D office will benefit from finding talented coders in China:
The winner of the competition will take home a pile of high-end electronics worth US$5,000, Google said, noting that prizes worth a total of US$30,000 are up for grabs.
The Google China Code Jam is an offshoot of the company’s annual Google Code Jam competition.
Fifty finalists will travel to an as-yet-undetermined location to compete in the final round of the coding competition on January 20th. Early rounds of the contest will whittle the field down to 500 programmers, then 200, before the round of fifty.
Prizes include lots of new computer equipment, and an iPod Nano, instead of cash. Presumably, those who do well in the contest will get a chance to meet Dr. Kai-Fu Lee in his official capacity as talent recruiter.
It looks like a clever tactic by Google to find programmers. They will need initiative to enter the contest, and the skills to code quickly and effectively enough ahead of a crowd to win the contest. Google probably plans to make job offers to the best contenders, and they’ll likely be accepted readily.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
