Facebook seeks world champion hacker

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Think your programming skills are world class? Facebook wants you to prove it at its second annual Hacker Cup challenge.
"Hacking is core to how we build at Facebook," the company said in a blog post announcing this year's competition. "Whether we're building a prototype for a major product like Timeline at a Hackathon, creating a smarter search algorithm, or tearing down walls at our new headquarters, we're always hacking to find better ways to solve problems."

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Open to coders anywhere in the world, Facebook's competition pits participants against each other in five rounds of programming challenges. The first kicks off January 20 with a 72-hour qualification round. Three more online rounds will thin the field down to the final 25 competitors, who will be flown out to Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters for a final competition in March.
The winner will receive a $5,000 cash prize. Last year, nearly 12,000 programmers participated in the Hacker's Cup. Petr Mitrichev, a Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) employee from Russia, took home the top prize. (In a nicely ironic twist, Mitrichev wore his Google employee badge during the competition.)

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