Y Combinator-backed Interview Street is accelerating the pace of its CodeSprints, where programmers prove their worth to potential employers by completing coding problems in a limited period of time.
The startup held its second big CodeSprint last month. The event seems like a success — 5,221 people participated, 665 of them actually applied to companies, and co-founder Vivek Ravisankar tells me that more than 100 of those applicants are now in the final round of interviews. More than 86 companies participated — and judging from the applications, Facebook was the most desirable employer, followed by Microsoft and Quora.
(By the way, if you agree with the CodeSprint participants and are dying to work for Facebook, you don’t have to wait for another event — just complete the Facebook Programming Challenge right now, which is of course powered by Interview Street.)
Interview Street’s next CodeSprint is tentatively scheduled for sometime in May. If that seems like a long time away, the company is also planning smaller sprints. Instead of holding a 48-hour event for nearly 100 employers, these CodeSprints only last for four or five hours, and normally focus on one organization, or a specific skillset. The next one, on February 25, is all about backend programming, and there are 19 participating companies.
After that, it looks like there will be one or two CodeSprints every week, at least through mid-March. There will be a mobile-focused CodeSprint on March 17 for Quora, Stripe, and other companies.