Each step was oh so reasonable. But the end result? Wrong!

A group at the London School of Economics recently published a study on What Do CEOs Do as part of their Executive Time Use Project. The study was focused on internal vs. external meetings. It also categorized time spent into a couple of other categories. Just another survey among the hundreds of thousands looking at business activity.

The Wall St. Journal wrote an article about the study, “Where’s the Boss? Trapped in a Meeting” listing out the results as well as interviewing several CEOs to get some on topic quotes. Again, totally normal. And in the article they included a very catchy donut chart (charts are great because they attract attention and take up space.

Julie Kmec picked up on one part of the graph and wrote a blog titled “Where’s the Boss? And What Counts as “Work”? And from that she delivers this giant criticism of CEOs.

I’m more interested in the task that occupies the greatest amount of a CEO’s time in a typical week—the 20 hours of “miscellaneous” activities. The fine print indicates that the “miscellaneous” activities include time spent travelling, in personal activity including exercise or lunch with a spouse, or in short activities like quick, unscheduled phone calls.

…

Without this personal time, a CEO’s average work week—35 hours—looks closer or shorter than other workers.

If this is true it’s a giant indictment of CEOs, where they get paid significantly more than those who work for them – and yet put in less hours. If…

This is counter to what I have seen at every company I’ve worked at. My initial reaction was that it might be the industry or company size. Sure enough if you read the study, the survey sample is:

Participants to the survey were drawn from a population of 349 CEOs set to take part in an executive education course at the Harvard Business School in January 2010.[6] Prior to the program, each participant received an email invitation from the leaders of the executive education program, providing a link to a password protected website which allowed participants to fill in their time diaries online.

…

Out of the initial population of 349 individuals, 107 responded positively to the invitation. Of these, 42 observations had to be dropped as the records were incomplete (i.e. less than 4 days were recorded), inaccurate (i.e. the activities description was incomplete), or the respondent was not a CEO. The estimating sample thus consists of 65 CEOs observed for at least 4 complete days.

[6] The program typically attracts smaller, privately-held firms that are headquartered in locations around the world.

The survey was of 65 self-selected individuals who took a single course at HBS. To say this is not a random sample is an understatement. It’s CEOs who have enough spare time to spend a week in a class (i.e., none will be from the start-up world). Ok, so this says nothing about most CEOs but at least it tells us that CEOs who spend a week at a HBS class have a really relaxed work schedule – right? No. Let’s dive into that miscellaneous category.

The study never uses the words miscellaneous, exercise (in the meaning of the graph), or personal appointments. And the use of travel could well mean business travel only:

The survey also asks to record the total time the CEO spends in activities that last 15 minutes or less or in travel.

That 20 hours of miscellaneous is very likely 100% work time. The survey was focused on measuring activity and attendees in meetings so they threw most other activities, including shorter meetings, into the miscellaneous category. Reasonable thing to do for the study.

But the Wall St. Journal then described that “Travel, exercise, personal appointments and other activities.” This totally mis-construes the study results. Keep in mind that this time is any activity in this category takes under 15 minutes. While I would love an under 15 minute work-out, there’s no way that makes sense. This is total bull-shit.

Julie Kmec follows the example of the WSJ and turns this category into:

travelling, in personal activity including exercise or lunch with a spouse. … Do we count travel time to and from a job as “work”

Really? Lunch with a spouse was one of the listed activities? Travel to/from work was listed as part of the travel category? No. Ms. Kmec is a professor and yet clearly only looked at the WSJ article, didn’t both to make one further link to the original research, and then added in additional activities. In her case, based on her areas of research, I’m guessing she was thrilled to find data that met her pre-conceptions and doubled down on the descriptions.

Ok, so maybe there was additional documentation listed that is not in the published results. Maybe all these personal activities are in the raw data. So I reached out to the researchers and the WSJ reporter to see if there was additional information. My email and the two responses are below. Raffaella does list additional areas for the miscellaneous category but uses the phrase “may include” which, back when I went to College, wasn’t how one described data. (Yes, the Large Hadron Collider “may have” seen some particles travelling faster than light.) And provides no specifics from the data to back that up.

And Rachael provides no specifics which leads me to believe that the wording in the chart was made up and the easiest out is her vague reply.

As to how much time does the average CEO spend working? Got me (although in the software community I’ve found 55 hours/week to be well under what almost every senior executive works). But we’re not going to find an answer from research, news articles, and blogs like these.

From: David Thielen
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2012 7:12 AM
To:
A.Prat@lse.ac.uk

Cc:
rachel.silverman@wsj.com; rsadun@hbs.edu; O.Bandiera@lse.ac.uk

Subject: RE: Where is the breakout of misc?

Hi;

Thank you for the links. I read both of those and did a keyword search. The phrases miscellaneous & “personal appointments” do not appear in the documents and the phrase exercise exists only as a different context. I understand the 20 hours miscellaneous having the description of “Travel and other activities.” But where did the addition of exercise and personal appointments come from? Is this from the research or was this added by the person making the graph?

And is “other appointments” accurate? From reading the documents the description is “activities that last 15 minutes or less.” So wouldn’t a more accurate description be “short activities.” The “other” gives the impression that it is for activities other than meetings, phone calls, etc. when a lot of that may be very short phone calls, meetings, etc.

I am asking about this because that 20 hours is being used as an argument that it is all personal time and CEOs only work 35 hours/week. That argument to a large degree revolves around the “exercise, personal appointments” description.

??? – thanks – dave

From:
Rachel.Silverman@wsj.com
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2012 9:49 AM
To: David Thielen
Subject: RE: Where is the breakout of misc?

Hi David, this is what the researchers told me. Cheers, Rachel

From:
rsadun@hbs.edu

Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2012 6:53 AM
To: David Thielen
Cc:
A.Prat@lse.ac.uk; O.Bandiera@lse.ac.uk; Rachel.Silverman@wsj.com
Subject: Re: Where is the breakout of misc?

Hi David,

Thanks a lot for your interest in the paper.

Our survey measures the beginning and the end of the CEO work day, as reported by the Personal Assistants (PA), plus detailed information of all activities lasting more than 15 minutes excluding travel and personal activities occurring in this timeframe.

Therefore, the 20 hours classified as miscellaneous may include different categories of time use:

a) Work related activities lasting less than 15 minutes

b) Travel (to and from the office or to meetings)

c) Personal activities

Unfortunately, in the specifics of the data reported in the WSJ, we are not able to know the relative importance of a vs. b and c (we have since improved the methodology, which has allowed us to measure with better precision the miscellaneous category).

I have not seen the blogs you refer to, but in principle using this data to conclude that CEOs only work 35 hours is likely to be incorrect. First, as I mentioned above, some CEOs might run several short meetings (i.e. shorter than 15 minutes), or they might work while traveling. Second, they might work in hours when the PAs are not on duty – e.g. early in the morning or very late at night.

I hope this helps. Do not hesitate to get in touch should you need additional clarifications.

Raffaella

I was recently asked to present here at work a list of the unique functions Windward has. It’s an interesting question because there’s a lot of things we do that are really good, but other programs do them too (usually not as well). But it turns out we have quite a bit that I don’t think any other reporting or docgen system offers.

1. Not restricted to banded report design.
2. Totally free-form layout. This is major for docgen as well as reporting.
3. Custom functions.
4. Carry Excel references, appropriately expanded, over to Excel output.
5. Update PODs (Word only).
6. The Tag tree.
7. SQL and XPath wizards that are so simple, non developers can easily create selects.
8. Tags in imported templates are processed (others import templates but only as static documents).
9. It’s all in the template – no code to test when something changes.
10. Chart tags are charts, Image tags are bitmaps – WYSIWYG. And rendered with live data.
11. Auto-joins for SQL selects.
12. Formatting far beyond anything else out there, including themes and styles.
13. Change tracking.
14. Conditional formatting.

I had a really good conversation with Tim Korb at Purdue who had some really good feedback about the code war we did this year and how to improve it next year. I also received some good feedback from student participants. And from that we already have a number of improvements for next year. So first, the improvements we will definitely have:

1. I had our entire tech support team working that Saturday to answer any questions. Yet several teams struggled to get the provided code running and never asked for help. The two that did ask for help we did a screenshare with and got them running in a couple of minutes. Next year we’ll make point number 1 that if you can’t get it running – call us!
2. Running the game, server & client, will require a single command. And we will have a command for every common start (initialize and pause before the first turn, run normally, run at fastest speed).
3. A game debugger where you can quickly and easily set the location, properties, and move for any/all units. Then step through that turn to see what your player does in that situation.
4. Make it easier and more thrilling to watch the game play. (We had pretty icons for each robot but they were hard to follow and didn’t show their damage level.)
5. The sample A.I. we provide will be very stupid – it will make totally random decisions. (The sample A.I. we provided ended up pointing most teams in the same direction.)
6. A much simpler game. A lot of teams struggled with understanding the rules as much as crafting an A.I. When there are 8 hours to code up an A.I., the rules have to be very simple to understand so the teams can focus on implementing their A.I.
7. A wider spread in game scores based on the quality of the A.I. (In the previous game the scores all tended to be 300 – 600. The better AIs were always 50 – 80 points above the others but that’s not a giant difference.)

And now the questions about possible changes:

1. (I really like this idea.) We have the competitions within the schools and through the semi-finals be by grade level. For teams with mixed grades it’s the grade level of the most advanced student. We take it to final games each at freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, and graduate students. The grade level final will list the top teams at each grade level. We then have a playoff between the top 4 teams from each grade level for the final championship. Especially for freshmen, where many have had just 1 computer class, it lets them know they’re competing on a level playing field all the way to top freshman team.
2. (I think this could make the contest a lot more compelling.) Make the focus one of school vs. school, not team vs. team. This is like the Tour de France where some team members go up front for much letting the star riders draft for much of the race. If we do this then each school will run the game with all student AIs over the day of the contest, with all teams seeing what each AI did and how it reacted to the others. All teams would still run in the school competition to determine who went forward. But this way they would have all improved their code based on what the others had done. This could even include teams telling each other what they had done on each pass.
3. Tell the students 24 hours beforehand the rules of the game. For example, we could have said the previous time that we would be using the RoboRally game. If we didn’t say what modifications we were making on the gameplay and what events would accrue points, then the students would have a chance to learn the game rules but writing any code beforehand would not have been useful to them.
4. I like the 8 hours because it keeps the time commitment reasonable. However, we are open to alternatives.

Oh, and the game we’re thinking of doing next January is not a shoot em up. And it will work well with any number of players at once up to 36 (and maybe more, we’ll have to play it once we get it working). It’s an interesting idea that has all players interacting with numerous other players at once so you’re not left dependent on if another unit happens to move in front of you.

So, what do you think? Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Comment here, email me, or call me (303-499-2544 x1185).

We have several interns starting this summer and this is from my notes on what we’re going to provide in the way of guidance. I don’t expect all of this to be applied immediately. And I don’t expect any of it to be followed blindly. But it is what I think will most help them be successful.

First there are the goals in the software we create. Get the part right and the rest is details. Get this wrong and the rest is irrelevant:

1. There are no questions using the software (like the iPhone). This is an elusive goal as even the iPhone requires some help and the software we create is much more complex than read my email. But figuring out how to make use as simple and straightforward as possible – for non-technical users, is critical.
2. No broken windows. Any bug. Any unnecessary step. Anything the user sees as poorly crafted. Anything that unnecessarily gets in the way of the user. A single one of these gives the user the impression that the software was poorly crafted.
3. Make it beautiful. People give great value to beautiful objects and that includes software.

Second is ownership. People don’t fight and die for someone else’s project. But they will for their own. At Windward we don’t tell you what to do, we tell you what you need to accomplish. It’s up to the intern to figure out how to accomplish their project. This is a giant shift from school where most of the steps on any effort are pretty clearly laid out. One intern will be given the job of write an appropriate level of unit tests for our new B.I. program. They need to figure out what tests where add up to an appropriate level of testing.

The good news is they own that project. They get to decide what and how to implement it. The bad news is they own that project. At the end of the day they’ll be measured by how few bugs slipped through their testing. And as an intern successfully completes a project, they will be given a new one that is harder more challenging.

Third are my suggestions from Want to be a Better Developer? Cheat! These are the day to day suggestions that will help them accomplish their projects.

And one final suggestion – enjoy your summer. We purposely do not allow over 40 hours/week for interns so they have time to go do all those things they’ll tell their children someday to not do.

There are developers who are smarter than me. Ones who can architect better than me. Ones who can code better than me. Ones who can create a better UX than me. (Actually there are kindergarteners who can design a better UX than me – I suck art, color choice, etc.) And you know what – there are developers who are better than you too.

So what to do? Simple, you need to cheat. There are practices that will enable (I hate that word) you to work at your absolute best. And the final measure is what you produce, not what you could produce if you were more focused.

The 4 keys to super-charging your productivity:

1. Eliminate all distractions. All!
2. Focus. Total complete focus.
3. Be lazy. Look for the easiest solution.
4. Think first. Find the elegant approach.

To get specific on the above points, in priority order:

1. Don’t listen to music. There is a study that shows developers given the same task – every one listening to music missed a basic optimization while everyone that worked without music found it. I’ve consistently found that turning off music when trying to do something hard often makes it easy.
   When you’re doing easy or mindless work, by all means listen to music. But when you have to do something even moderately hard – turn it off. (I listen when doing builds, clicking through the program to verify bug fixes, or most management tasks. But it goes off when architecting, designing, coding, or fixing bugs.)
2. Turn off I.M. Facebook, news feeds, email, your browser, or anything else that interrupts you or invites you to do something else. Turn your cell phone to silent and place it where you won’t see the vibrations when something occurs. When your code is building it is much more productive to stare at the wall than to “take a quick look” at email, Facebook, a web page, etc. And often times while staring at the wall something will occur to you about the code you are working on. I also permanently set Outlook to provide no notifications when mail comes in so I check email when I want to.
   I often leave Outlook running but set it to Work Offline. I do this both because my Inbox is my to-do list and because I can write any emails that I create based on the work I am doing.
3. Shut your office door. If you’re in a cubicle go work for a company that values your time put a note up saying “Please Send Email.” (And seriously, go find a company that values your time – offices double productivity over cubicles and open pit areas are horrible.)
4. One thing at a time. People are awful at multi-tasking (those that are “good” at it merely take less of a hit). So don’t work on new code, bugs, etc. in priority order, work on all items in the same part of the code together. Prioritize based on the importance of the groups you have on your plate. If you do have to shift, try to do so weekly – on Mondays you generally don’t remember 80% of what you were doing Friday.
5. Whenever anything occurs to you – write it down instantly. The two things you’re going to do in 30 seconds after you exit the program and are back in the debugger – write them down. The idea you get in the middle of the night that is so incredible that of course you’ll remember it – write it down. Always anywhere have either a smartphone (I send emails to myself) or pen and paper (next to the bed so you don’t have to turn the light on in the middle of the night).
6. K.I.S.S. Less code, simple code. If you figure out how to accomplish a goal with no new code, you’re “brilliant” and yet you did nothing. When you do have to code, if you cannot think of an elegant solution, do something else and leave it in the back of your mind. Often a simple solution will come to you the next morning in the shower.
   For me swimming, working out, or long showers when I’m not thinking of work is when I often come up with elegant solutions. Give your subconscious time to come up with a better approach.
7. Let Google, StackOverflow, MSDN, etc. do your work for you. Ask others for suggestions, for samples, for help. Doing it all yourself is not a sign of strength and independence, it’s a sign of stupidity. After all Isaac Newton himself stood on the shoulders of giants.
8. Walk all code using TRAPs.
9. Write unit tests when you fix a bug (before or after is fine). And don’t overdo it – some bugs aren’t worth the effort of creating a unit test. Others can best be tested as part of some larger test. The TSA tests without limit – do you think that’s the best use of resources?
10. Make notes of the details you are in when you go home at night. You’ll be amazed how often all that is new to you in the morning.

And if you’re a manager, here’s what you can do for your programmers:

1. Put them in individual offices (doubles productivity over cubicles or open pit areas).
2. At a minimum quad core computers with dual 1920×1200 monitors (most studies show that going from 1 to 2 monitors provides a 20% increase in productivity). At Windward we’re going to soon be upgrading everyone to dual quad core (8 cores total) systems, 3 1920×1200 monitors and an SSD drive for the main drive (VMs and other large files go on.
3. Java programmers? Use IntelliJ. C# programmer? Use ReSharper (it’s an add-on to Visual Studio). True story, in one meeting we decided that we needed to do some pretty horrific refactoring. I volunteered to do it and the lead gave me 3 days to get it done. I checked it in 20 minutes later due to ReSharper. I said it was due to ReSharper but I was still the hero.

Are you looking for a product idea that you can implement and build a successful company from. Here’s one. And there is a giant need for it.

The opportunity here is a need for which numerous products exist, but they all suck. This is the same opportunity DropBox had where there were many file synchronization programs, and they all sucked.

What is key here is the same focus DropBox had – you need to create something that is simple, and that works.

The product? A login (username/password) handler. The existing products are both overly complex, and do not provide the needed functionality. (Quite an accomplishment there – shoving in lots of unnecessary features while missing the needed features).

The key market is business users – business will happily pay for this while consumers are a lot more work to sell to. By all means go after consumers too, but focus on businesses. And what do business want?

1. When you enter credentials on a web page, it stores them in a repository.
2. Each credential has access set by Active Directory group(s) and/or user(s).
3. Credentials are synchronized, based on who has access.
4. When you go to a web page, it enters the credentials for you.
5. You can also use it from non-Windows devices (iPad) and computers not on the domain (home).

That’s it. Nothing more. Absolutely nothing more. Get the above working effortlessly and then listen to your customers to see what else most want. And keep the basic use simple.

The existing products blow it two ways. First they make the products much too complex. RoboForm has 15 items on its main menu, most of them bringing up sub menus. It has 3 passwords (minimum) that you have to create and track. And multiple profiles are so complex to set up that their tech support team is uncertain how to do it.

The second is they don’t provide a way to have multiple groups that users access via their membership. At a company we don’t want to, on each login, specify the individuals that have access to it. We don’t want to create a separate set of security groups we have to maintain in parallel with Active Directory. Most every corporation sets up Active Directory groups and has everyone well trained to provide access by group.

This way all logins are available to people in the correct group. Marketing resources to the marketing group, development resources to the development group, payroll resources to the payroll group. And user assignment primarily for an employee’s personal logins.

That’s it. Follow the DropBox approach of making it very very easy to learn and use and you’ll have a major success on your hands.

And when you create it – email me! We need this and our present system has too many people with access to most logins and personal logins getting place in the group logins.

According to a study by the UCS an electric vehicle (EV) emits carbon (indirectly via the coal fired electrical generation plants it recharges from) equivalent to a gas powered car that gets 34 mpg. And if that’s the whole story, then electric vehicles are not the future (and I bought an overpriced golf cart).

But there is more to it than this one measure. A lot more.

The MPG Equivalent is Easily and Centrally Improved

Colorado is in the process of switching from coal to natural gas for electrical generation. As that switch occurs the effective MPG emissions of electrical vehicles will jump to 50 MPG. In the future as the country moves from natural gas to nuclear and renewables the effective MPG will jump to something above 1,000 MPG. Meanwhile a gas powered car that gets 45 MPG, still gets 45 MPG.

This is key to the CO2 win of EVs. If over the next 10 years we shift over to EVs, and during that time electrical generation continues its move away from coal, we reduce the total CO2 footprint from vehicles. To gain this win from improved electrical generation, we need to start the transition to EVs now. Cars stay in use for 10 – 20 years. The cars bought today will be on the road 10 years from now and at that point, if we primarily have EVs, we will be bending the CO2 curve downward.

We Stop Funding Both Sides in the War on Terror

Today we are indirectly funding the terrorists with the enormous sums we pay to the kleptocracies in the Middle East for our oil. As we shift from gas to electrical for cars, these payments drop. Even if the CO2 emissions were identical for EVs, this is a gigantic reason to switch to EVs. The cost in lives and money we expend in Middle East, even when we’re not involved in a war there, is substantial.

And we will see this start to happen if we can drop worldwide oil consumption 10% with a clear trend of continued reductions. That would drop the price significantly. The oil producers would have to spend all of their revenue on their own people with none left over for funding (indirectly) terrorism. It would also mean an improvement for the people living in those kleptocracies as the governments would have to be more responsive to their populace.

$1,000.00/year!

Electrical is cheaper than gas. The average EV owner will save $1,000/year over what they would have paid for gas. That’s real money for most households. And instead that additional money will mostly be spent locally boosting the economy here in the U.S. Imagine if every car owner in the U.S. today had an extra $1,000.00 – that alone could be the final push to get us out of this recession.

One driver in Boulder is saving even more. He parks his car at Walgreens every night and plugs into their free charger. So for him the electrical recharging is free.

A Much Cooler Ride

Electric Vehicles are a much sweeter ride. The difference is akin to the difference between the old cell phones and the new smart phones. Early on few bought the smart phones and most found their plain old phone fine. But as more people saw what you got with all the features in a smart phone, they came to realize that there was a world of difference. The same holds for an EV. It is far superior to what a gas powered car can deliver.

Even if the EV was never going to have a lower CO2 footprint, the superior vehicle you get from an electric powertrain makes it a superior car. And keep in mind the present EVs are the first generation. The next generation, including ones from BMW (and I believe Apple) will be so far superior to anything gas powered that people would switch to them even if they cost more (they don’t).

When It’s Time to Sell Your Car

You’re going to buy a car today and you can fairly say that EVs are a niche market and gas power cars are very popular. In fact, if you’re selling a used car today, it’s easier to sell a gas powered car. But that’s not the correct resell value question.

We’re going to hit a tipping point on EVs. A point where purchases of new cars goes from overwhelmingly gas to overwhelmingly EVs. It’s not going to be a gradual change, just as smart phones did not gradually increase their sales. It’s going to change from say 8% to 25% to 70% over a couple of years. My guess is 3 – 4 years from now as people see the early adopters doing fine with EVs, as they get chargers where they are needed (the present government funded effort is worthless), and as more people learn what a superior experience an EV provides.

If you are going to sell your new car in 3 years – not a problem (probably). But if you’re going to sell it in 6 years? You may find that its resale value is in the toilet because no one wants a gas powered vehicle. When gas hit $5.00/gal it was almost impossible to sell a hummer. We’re going to see the same thing for all gas powered vehicles in 5 – 10 years.

The Future

The answer to the initial question is not that EVs have a future. The answer is that EVs are the future.
And the future looks brighter every day.

For the next couple of years Apple will take large segments of the remaining parts of the computer and consumer electronics market. Yes the TV is next. And following that we’ll see more products that combine the various pieces of these markets in some very interesting ways. But you can only find so many groundbreaking products in any given segment.

Apple is a company with creating new groundbreaking products baked into its DNA. They need to go find another market where the existing products are mediocre. Where the solution is a combination of hardware & software. And where there is a fundamental change occurring in the industry creating an opening for a new company.

In Steve Job’s biography he mentioned the obvious next industry as one of the few that requires a comprehensive product to be successful – automobiles. I think in 7 years we’ll see Apple shipping an electric car. And not just one but a series of models.

The new electric cars (which are the future) have a major software component so they’re a natural for Apple where it requires superb hardware and software. The conversion from gas to electric provides an opening to new companies. And the existing car companies treat the software component of their vehicles as an unimportant afterthought when car owners will see it as central to the vehicle.

Will it definitely happen? Who knows. But I can’t think of any other industry that they are more likely to go after.

This is very easy to do – if you know what to do. (Otherwise it’s a long exercise in frustration.)

1. Install the WCF REST Service Template 40(CS) (requires .NET 4.0).
2. Create a WCF service. This is a New “Project…” not a “Web Site…”. And it is under the general “Visual C#” templates, not “WCF”!

If you want to work at a start-up that is.

Looking to hire the best students? These are the contests that do a good job measuring the skills needed in a start-up. The best contests measure if a student not only can create a successful solution under tight time constraints, but if they so enjoy doing so that they spend their spare time participating.

Looking to work at a top start-up? Start-ups put in an intensive effort determining if an applicant has the skills they need. Participating in relevant code wars is a very useful measure. When you interview be prepared to discuss the approach you took, your design decisions, and how you did. The value in this is not your final score, it’s your discussion of the process and the code you wrote.

The Top Student 2 Startups Code Wars

Facebook Hacker Cup

This contest has some truly evil (and I mean that in a complimentary way) problems to solve. I put this first because the key to winning is not writing code quickly, it’s coming up with a solution. Coming up with innovative solutions to hard problems is central to a start-up. Students who do well in this contest are the ones you can throw the impossible problems at – and know they will get implemented.

Microsoft Imagine Cup

You create an application. Any application. Your application is then judged against those of your competitors. Because you are creating a complete app, it is a superb all-around measure of what a student will bring to a company. The downsides are first of all it requires a lot of time. And second it’s a judgment call by the judges. Key to this is don’t look at where a team ranked, look at the app they created, because “best” is in the eye of the beholder.

The Windward International Collegiate Programming Competition

You are given 8 hours to write an A.I. for a computer game. The submitted AIs then play against each other 8 at a time to see which one can beat the others. The definition of this contest is “not enough time.” Not enough time to fully understand every detail of the game. Not enough time to fully test each approach. Not enough time to implement all their ideas. Not enough time to write clean code. It’s not this bad in the start-up world (most of the time), but this is a great measure of how well individuals will perform in the get it done yesterday world of a start-up.

Google Code Jam

This is a write a simple algorithm as quickly as possible. It allows any programming language because you submit the result of running your code. All it measures is can you write basic algorithms quickly and correctly so by that measure it’s not a good contest. But it’s Google and it has a very large number of contestants world-wide so between the high visibility and the level of competition, it makes the list.

Your School’s Top Contest

Look at the code wars that are offered at your school. Find one that is a good measure of the skills that are needed in a start-up. Not the skills you are best at, but the skills a start-up company needs. And then make a commitment to participate in that contest. Stepping up to the challenge is a large part of success.

Honorable Mention

HP Code Wars

This is a high school level competition where they are given numerous algorithm level problems. It’s a great introductory contest for the High School level.

ACM’s International Programing Contest

Part of the ACM’s problem is it is a victim of its success. China treats it as an Olympic competition and devotes significant resources into creating top teams. But it’s also primarily a measurement of who can write algorithms the quickest. And while that is a useful skill in a start-up, it’s not key.