The secret to boost productivity in your company - competitive programming

Employee retention is just as important as recruiting new tech talents, especially in a candidate-driven market. Providing your current and new workers with opportunities for self-development is crucial in today’s world. How can competitive programming help boost productivity in your company?

What is competitive programming?

This category can cover online and onsite hackathons, code challenges, and anything in between. To find out more you can read our previous article. In a nutshell, competitive programming can be described as a competition for software developers, coding in a limited time frame with a specific end goal in mind.

Why should your company implement competitive programming?

Self-development is an extremely important part of being employed, and you as the employer need to ensure this aspect is fulfilled in order to retain the best talents in your company. Periodic webinars, lectures, and additional training is essential, but putting the newly acquired knowledge to practice is just as important.

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Events of competitive programming are a perfect opportunity to build relationships within teams. Just like with any social event in a company, this is a chance to exchange ideas, interact with one another outside of the scope of regular work-related responsibilities, and for your employees to get to know each other. A healthy work environment is a crucial factor in increasing productivity of a company.

On the other end of the spectrum is the direct result of programming competitions. Those force the developers to bring out their best ideas and put them to the test. Coding in that environment is very likely to result in broadened experience and skill set, maybe even new solutions that will benefit your company as a whole.

Employees that feel accomplishment connected to their work are far more inclined to remain in the same company. Tried, experienced workers are extremely beneficial for businesses and improve the workflow of their teams owing to their expertise.

Who uses competitive programming for their benefit?

One of the most notable examples of a company that found this approach valuable is Facebook. They hold internal hackathons very often, and that appears to be the right thing to do. What differentiates their approach to coding challenges from others is the freedom in terms of projects. As said by Pedram Keyani in their 2012 blog post, there are just two rules concerning their hackathons: “You have to work on something outside your day job, and if it's your first hackathon, you have to hack.” Letting the creativity flow resulted in things like the globally recognized “like” button.

Source: Unsplash

Employees that can express themselves in any way they see fit improve not only their own perception of the company, but also strengthen it from the inside out. If one of the biggest companies in the world deems competitive programming beneficial, it’s certainly worth considering.

There are tangible gains to be made owing to internal hackathons and other forms of competitive coding in your company. ChallengeRocket.com can help you organize those today! Read our case studies to find out about the global tech giants we’ve worked with. Let’s get in touch and start the journey to improved productivity in your business!