The bar is lower than you think!

A story about how 200 students turned down earning $250 an hour.

Annually, we host a student recruitment seminar, attracting a diverse audience ranging from 100 to 300 attendees. While most focus on web development, we also welcome participants with design, economics, and business development backgrounds.

Before the event, students can tackle an optional coding challenge. During the seminar, we award the top-performing solution with the latest iPhone.

An example of the coding challenges we’ve given out:

• consume a specific API and show the data in a helpful way (i.e., filtering, searching)
• Solve sudoku programmatically

We’ve always encouraged candidates to approach the tasks in their own way, allowing them to leverage the technologies they feel most comfortable with and showcasing their skills.

One year, we stopped giving out the assignment. Why?
Only 3% of the attendees provided a solution.

Consider this: If they invested around 10 hours crafting an impressive assignment, they could earn $100 per hour — five times more than a typical part-time job. Yet, only 6 out of 200 graduate students looking for a job embraced this chance.

The potential downside? Even if they didn’t win, they set themselves apart as part of the 3% who took the initiative in the job application process.

The bar is lower than you think!