Advent of Code at Oscar
By Josh Vallon
This holiday season, Oscar Engineering decided to host a light competition around the ever popular engineering event Advent of Code. We wanted to bring our distributed engineering community together and hoped that participation would expose engineers to folks outside their team and encourage cross-team collaboration.
Advent of Code is a themed coding adventure where you inevitably have to save Christmas by solving coding problems. New problems open up each day, like an advent calendar, and get progressively harder as you go. There’s a bit of flair and a story around the whole thing which makes it more interesting than doing interview problems or other algorithm challenges.
We were very impressed with how many engineers joined in the fun. December is one of the busiest times of the year for Oscar due to Open Enrollment (the period when people can enroll for health insurance plans for the following year), and yet we had 49 participants across our engineering and data teams. That’s around 20% of our entire engineering staff dedicating their personal time to this event! Overall, our 49 participants completed 24 challenges on average, and nine people completed all 50 challenges. Two of our engineers even made the global leaderboard (in the top 100) for the last day.
“…and now I can totally get why my [children] like their advent calendar so much.”
The atmosphere during the event was lively. We created a Slack channel to share our accomplishments and frustrations with difficult challenges, and we received several personal messages about how much fun participants had during the competition. Several people even took the opportunity to use a new language, practice test driven development, or try using a functional style. During a post-event review meeting we discussed the difficult problems where we started seeing a lot of attrition (looking at you day 19) and the tricky ones (day 8) that sparked a lot of conversation in Slack. People also shared the excitement when they recognized an algorithm to use or finally solved a really hard problem.
“Reading today’s challenge I feel like maybe I should have paid more attention in linear algebra.”
“I think day 19 might be the day that breaks me…”
As engineers, we’re always refactoring our work and our cultural events are no exception. We discovered some areas for improvement for future engineering-wide competitions based on feedback from participants. Next year, we want to find a way to support teams or pairs, and this will require us to review how we define winners, whether team or individual, but still keep the competitive aspect alive. Prizes were a good motivator this year, and we’re re-thinking the way we provide them to drive increased engagement next year. Lastly, the Christmas Eve crunch was voiced as a concern by many people where the choice was often between spending time with friends and family or competing. Finding a way to alleviate the crunch for people and enabling them to prioritize friend and family time is a good goal for next year’s event.
“…a very tense Christmas eve.”
The event was a great way to promote some fun company culture during a very busy time of year. Maybe it was the prizes, maybe it was just a good way to decompress from a busy day, but Oscar’s Advent of Code definitely brought people together. There’s no silver bullet to company culture, especially when your teams are mostly remote, but promoting fun activities like this and rewarding participation goes a long way.
“[It] was fun to trade off throughout the days! and +1 for hosting the competition, definitely appreciate it.”
“This is so great already, I am having so much fun.”
We had great fun and look forward to hosting this event next season.
P.S. Here’s the sticker we made for participants. What kind of tech company would we be if we didn’t give out stickers to slap all over our laptops?
“My first impression on reading the advent of code description: must code for sticker.”
Josh Vallon is a Senior Software Engineer for Oscar’s engineering enablement programs and initiatives.
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