Pavel Durov

A coding contest where everybody who wants to join your company as an engineer or just wants to get some prize money or validation

can demonstrate their skills and then we just select the best or if we are not certain

because there's not enough data to hire somebody.

We just repeat the contest with another task, get more data, get more winners, then repeat it again.

And at some point you realize, oh, actually, this guy has competed in 10 of our contests since he was 16 years old or 14 years old.

Now he's 20 or 21.

He won in eight of these competitions.

He seems to be really good in JavaScript, on Android, Java, and also C++.

Why not hire this person?

There's some consistency there.

And a lot of these people, they have never worked in a big company before, which is priceless because in a big company,

people tend to shift responsibility.

They have this shared responsibility when nobody fully understands who can take credit for a project, who can take blame for a project.

Inside Telegram, it's pretty clear.

And these competitions are the closest experience to

what people will have when working at Telegram.

So for example, we want to implement certain very tricky animation and redesign to the profile page of the Telegram as Android version.

And the Android app

It's an open source app.

Anybody can take its code and play with it.