do video game companies hire hackers

Introduction：

1、Facebook Hacker Cup

2、How to prepare for Facebook Hacker Cup？

Facebook Hacker Cup ♂

　　Facebook founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students is an American online social network service that is a part of the company Meta Platforms. . Facebook claimed 2.8 billion monthly active users and ranked seventh in global internet usage in the year 2020. Facebook claims 44,942 full-time employees in its workforce in 82 offices spread across the globe.

　　Hacker Cup is Facebook’s annual open programming competition. It began in 2011 to create a platform to identify top engineering talent for potential employment at Facebook. It provides a platform for participants around the world to apply problem-solving and algorithmic coding skills to advance through each online round, win prizes, and have a chance to make it to the global finals and win the Hacker Cup and the grand prize.

　　Eligibility: Anyone who qualifies in the qualification round is eligible to participate in this competition. Although for getting interview calls from Facebook your age should be 18 years or more.

　　How to apply: To apply you can directly go to Facebook’s official hacker cup link and register there. After registration, you can participate in the qualification round.

　　Structure: There is one Qualification round, 3 subsequent rounds of contests, followed by the final round.

　　Qualification round: This is one of the easiest rounds of the contest and solving one problem will take you to the next round of the competition. This round lasts for 72 hours.

　　1st round: This round lasts for about 24 hours and a certain number of points has to be earned to qualify for the next round. The points are disclosed before the start of the round. This round is more difficult than the qualification round.

　　2nd round: This is a three hours contest and its top 200 performers qualify for the next round and the top 500 win a Facebook hacker cup t-shirt.

　　3rd round: This is also a three hours contest and its top 25 qualify for the final round competition. Problems get tougher from here on.

　　Final Onsite round: The Top 25 participants from around the world compete for the Facebook Hacker Cup title in this final one of the toughest contests.

　　Rewards:

　　A Facebook Hacker Cup t-shirt will be given to the top 2000 competitors who solve at least one problem in Round 2. The top 200 competitors from Round 3 will have a “Top 200” badge on their shirts.

How to prepare for Facebook Hacker Cup？ ♂

　　Facebook hacker cup is an annual algorithmic programming contest organized by Facebook. Be it, students, professionals, or experts it attracts numerous programming enthusiasts from all around the globe. Top contenders are eligible for the interview call from Facebook for the Software Developer role.

　　What is the process?

　　Facebook Hacker cup is particularly known for its different environments used for Judging and the variety of problems. It is conducted in many rounds where the difficulty of algorithmic challenges keeps on increasing.

　　What are the prizes? (May vary year to year)

　　The 25 finalists will receive the following prizes (in USD:

　　1st Place: $20,000 USD

　　2nd Place: $10,000 USD

　　3rd Place: $5,000 USD

　　4th Place: $3,000 USD

　　5th Place: $1,000 USD

　　6th-10th Place: $500 USD

　　11th-15th Place: $300 USD

　　16th-25th Place: $200 USD

　　Organized in the month of August Facebook Hacker cup is conducted in 4 series round:

　　Qualification round: This is the easiest round in which at least 1 problem needs to be solved successfully in order to advance to the next round. This round lasts for 72 hours.

　　Round 1: The selected candidates participate in round 1 which lasts for 24 hours and must gain at least a certain number of points ( decided accordingly every year) to qualify for round 2. This round is fairly more difficult than the qualification round.

　　Round 2: Candidates selected from round 1 advance to participate in round 2 and compete in a 3-hour format contest. The top 200 participants advance to Round 3 and the top 500 participants are awarded Hackercup T-shirts.

　　Round 3: Top 200 participants compete in this 3-hour format contest and the top 25 qualify for Onsite Final. From now on the problem set gets tough.

　　Onsite Final: Top 25 participants from all over the globe compete for winning the title and trophy of the Facebook hacker cup at its headquarters. Problems are quite challenging and are good enough to make the contestants sweat head to toe. The time limit for the final round is 4hrs, the winner of the final round will be the Hacker Cup champion.

　　And the 1st person on the leaderboard bags the title and basks in glory.

　　Format and Environment

　　The judging format of the Facebook hacker cup is quite different from other annual programming contests like ACM-ICPC or IOI.

　　When the contest begins users are required to login into the website.

　　After logging in they are presented with the problem set. After you think you have solved a problem and are sure about its correctness, you have to download an input test file.

　　As soon as the input test file is downloaded a timer of 6 minutes commences and in that window of time you are required to run the input test file over your code and form a test file. Within 6 minutes you need to submit both the code and the output text file.

　　You can submit more than once and only the last correct submission will be used for evaluation.

　　Once the timer expires you will be unable to submit the solution for that problem again. A time penalty is the sum of the submission times of a problem.

　　How to prepare?

　　Facebook Hacker cup is particularly famous for its innovative and mind-tickling algorithmic challenges. Inclined more towards mathematics and a combination of various concepts hacker cups test knowledge, implementation, accuracy, speed, conceptuality, and almost everything by its different rounds. You need to be fast in order to survive further rounds and innovative to survive the initial long-timed rounds. These are the main topics that should be done thoroughly as problems are generally asked from more than 1 topic combined.

　　Number Theory

　　Euclidian and extended Euclidian algorithm

　　Modular Arithmetic and modular inverse

　　Prime generation (Sieve and Segmented Sieve)

　　Fermat`s theorem

　　Euler Totient function

　　Miller Rabin primality test

　　Chinese remainder Theorem

　　Lucas theorem.

　　Greedy Algorithms

　　Activity selection problem

　　Kruskal`s Algorithm

　　Prim`s Algorithm.

　　Binary search

　　TopCoder-Binary Search

　　Binary Search

　　Ubiquitous Binary Search – Get a grasp of discrete and continuous binary search.

　　Data Structures

　　Linked lists

　　Binary search tree

　　Binary Indexed Tree or Fenwick tree

　　Segment Tree (RMQ, Range Sum, and Lazy Propagation)

　　Red-Black trees

　　Hashing

　　An extensive list of Data structures

　　Graph Algorithms

　　Breadth-First Search (BFS)

　　Depth First Search (DFS)

　　Shortest Path from source to all vertices **Dijkstra**

　　Shortest Path from every vertex to every other vertex **Floyd Warshall**

　　Minimum Spanning tree **Prim**

　　Minimum Spanning tree **Kruskal**

　　Topological Sort

　　Johnson’s algorithm

　　Articulation Points (or Cut Vertices) in a Graph

　　Bridges in a graph

　　All Graph Algorithms

　　String Algorithms

　　Learning library functions for String actually proves very helpful (C++: See this and this, String in Java).

　　KMP algorithm

　　Rabin Karp

　　Z’s algorithm

　　Aho Corasick String Matching

　　Suffix Arrays

　　Trie

　　Finite Automata

　　Dynamic programming

　　Dynamic Programming – GeeksforGeeks

　　Dynamic Programming – Codechef

　　Dynamic programming is quite important and can be infused and asked with various other topics. Some different types of DP concepts are: Classic DP

　　Longest Common Subsequence

　　Longest Increasing Subsequence

　　Edit Distance

　　Minimum Partition

　　Ways to Cover a Distance

　　Longest Path In Matrix

　　Subset Sum Problem

　　Optimal Strategy for a Game

　　0-1 Knapsack Problem

　　Assembly Line Scheduling

　　All DP Algorithms

　　Computational geometry

　　Convex hull algorithms

　　Geometric Algorithms

　　All in all Facebook Hacker cup is a very challenging contest and a person needs a gigantic amount of training and perseverance and all the standard topics need to be etched and understood. Practice is the only way to do so! Extra Points:

　　Practice on Codeforces (especially the GYM section) and TopCoder Arena. This will truly help in basic understanding.

　　Facebook Hacker Cup’s problems have a different style than Codeforces and Topcoder, probably the best comparison would be with Google Code Jam which has a similar format.

　　Go through previous Facebook – HackerCup questions and get familiar with the format of the contest.

Related questions

Video game companies do hire individuals with hacking skills, but primarily in ethical, security-focused roles. Here's a breakdown of how and why they engage such talent:

1. Cybersecurity and Anti-Cheat Roles:

   • Security Analysts/Penetration Testers: Companies employ ethical hackers to identify vulnerabilities in their networks, servers, and games. These roles involve penetration testing and vulnerability assessments to protect user data and prevent breaches.
   • Anti-Cheat Developers: Hackers' insights help combat cheating in games. Teams design systems to detect and block exploits, often requiring knowledge of how cheats are developed.

2. Quality Assurance (QA) and Exploit Testing:

   • Testers with hacking skills excel at uncovering bugs, glitches, or exploits during development. Their ability to "think like a hacker" makes them valuable for stress-testing games.

3. Bug Bounty Programs and Collaboration:

   • Some companies run bug bounty programs, rewarding ethical hackers who report vulnerabilities. Exceptional contributors may be offered roles, turning their skills into a career.

4. Modding and Community Talent:

   • Skilled modders or reverse engineers (often with hacking-like skills) are sometimes hired for their creativity and technical prowess, particularly in user-generated content or tool development.

5. Legal and Ethical Considerations:

   • Companies avoid individuals with malicious histories. Roles require clean backgrounds and often certifications like CEH or OSCP. Ethical conduct and professionalism are mandatory.

Key Takeaway: While video game companies don’t hire "hackers" in the traditional (malicious) sense, they actively seek individuals with hacking skills for defensive roles. These positions focus on protecting games, data, and players, emphasizing ethical practices and legal compliance.