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Comment by carlmcqueen | Hacker News Reader

I do analytics for a huge corporation and have been quite happy however some of my peers who are unhappy with the pay here participate in Kaggle for the opportunity to do well and get a better (higher paying) job.

Some of the inherent value of the work for the small prize pool is more the opportunity of doing well and being recognized for that work.

Data Science, or trendy statistics, is inherently fun which is also what makes kaggle fun. Discovery in data will always be popular among people who love to solve problems.

To your other points, I don't disagree with you-- all the steps just to participate are becoming more work than its worth, at least for me. I do a lot of the same problems asked in kaggle naturally at work.

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>>> participate in Kaggle for the opportunity to do well and get a better (higher paying) job

Obviously it's anecdotal data at best, but still curious, what are the results? Because it sounds very similar to the frequently given advice for software engineers 'push code to github to land a great job'.

I can say anecdotally that my ranking on Kaggle helped me recently land a good data scientist job offer, transitioning from academia. I have spent a lot of time on Kaggle though, probably it would have been more efficient (but less fun) to spend that time spamming job boards and studying machine learning, stats, and computer science.

I've hired many people, and I don't know anyone that's ever looked at either kaggle, or stack overflow, or github commits for anything. I've seen them on resumes before, but only from very junior people, and typically from people outside of the US.

Quite frankly it's a rather bullshit signal, since it's presence only tells you that the person spends all their free time on the computer. Maybe the know something, but a traditional interview will tell you that and more.

I disagree. From junior people, it shows that they can actually do something in practice, and it's not all theory that they don't know how to apply.

A person just outside of university does not have heaps of past jobs to show. So they should just leave it blank and describe their hobbies?!

No one cares about hobbies, and Kaggle is a hobby.

An NCG should write more about class projects. Everyone has class projects.

If an NCG wants to put it down, fine. But don't color me impressed. Why should I select someone that spends their evenings alone tweaking out an extra 0.001% on a AUC curve, when I could conceivably get a more rounded individual with better team skills?

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