On April Fools’ Day, a new website spread like wildfire among computer science majors at the University: UIUC Ranked. The site aims to determine who is “cracked” or highly skilled. Given a choice between two anonymized LinkedIn profiles, users select the better profile or if the profiles are equivalent. The identities of the profiles are then revealed.
Each profile is given an Elo number, a method used to calculate player skill levels in zero-sum games such as chess. A player’s Elo number is determined by the outcome of the game and the rank of their opponent, and UIUC Ranked has a leaderboard of the top 100 profiles.
UIUC Ranked was created by junior statistics & CS majors Yash Guddanti and Salar Cheema, echoing similar websites at other schools such as Stanford. In a LinkedIn post from Tuesday, Cheema said UIUC Ranked is a platform dedicated to highlighting the engineering talent at the University.
“Honestly, me and Yash kind of just wanted to make something that was viral,” Cheema said. “We saw the same concept at other schools, but we wanted to make a similar concept and bring it to U of I.”
While Guddanti and Cheema sought virality, what happened next was something they did not expect. Their LinkedIn post received upwards of 200,000 impressions, and their website was posted in the r/csMajors subreddit, skyrocketing the site’s popularity.
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“We obviously wanted to go viral, but we didn’t realize the extent to which it would,” Cheema said. “It was a lot of hate comments, but I feel like this stuff happens when you have anything that’s viral. I’m not evil, we’re not evil, we didn’t have any bad intentions, so I feel like there’s a lot of unnecessary hate.”
Ultimately, Cheema says that his goal was to “showcase the incredible talent” the University’s engineering community has to offer.
The University is ranked 5th for computer science in the U.S. World and News Report. According to 2024 admissions data, the admission rate for CS in the engineering school was 7.2%, and per self-reported data on the Grainger website, the average starting salary of a CS graduate is $131,427.
But, while UIUC Ranked aims to celebrate achievement, some students expressed their discomfort in being pitted against their classmates.
“I do think that it’s honestly immature and just weird to rank your classmates against each other, even if it is anonymous,” said Deeya Bodas, graduate student studying CS, who was ranked 44th on the leaderboard at one point in time.
Internet commentators drew parallels between UIUC Ranked and Mark Zuckerberg’s 2003 prank website Facemash, which compared the attractiveness of women at Harvard. But as opposed to using the pictures of women, UIUC Ranked uses the resumes of CS majors. And rather than scraping Harvard’s Student Directory, Cheema and Guddanti scraped LinkedIn profiles.
However, Bodas said she did not appreciate her LinkedIn data being used without her knowledge.
“They scraped (the data) from LinkedIn, which is publicly available, but I didn’t consent to my data being on LinkedIn for this use, so it doesn’t feel great that someone’s using it to compare me with my classmates,” Bodas said.
While Cheema sympathized, he said what they were doing was legal.
“We just scraped all the profiles that we saw for CS students at U of I,” Cheema said. “All this information is publicly accessible data that people are allowed to scrape from LinkedIn.”
In hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, the United States Ninth Circuit court eventually found that web scraping publically available data is legal in 2022.
Bodas also shared concerns over the voting mechanism and the leaderboard, which were easily manipulated by bots. She said her ranking on the leaderboard might not accurately reflect public opinion.
“It’s pretty easy to build a robot that continuously spams the API to basically submit certain ranking inputs, so you’re misrepresenting who is actually the top-voted person,” Bodas said. “You can essentially just keep choosing people who are your friends, for example.”
The creators of the site said they were aware of the issue and implemented security measures to prevent future instances of manipulation.
“When we saw people at an Elo score of like 2,000 plus, it was pretty obvious that they were bypassing the system,” Guddanti said. “All day yesterday, we were working around the clock trying to fix stuff, reacting to what the hackers were doing, putting security measures. It was crazy.”
Cheema and Guddanti said because of the “botting,” the Elo numbers on the site are irrelevant.
“The amount of botting and stuff messed up those numbers so much; it really doesn’t matter,” Guddanti said. “It’s not accurate. It’s not a reflection of who you are as a person. The number doesn’t define you at all.”
“Honestly, if anything, my number on the site is the lowest,” Cheema said.
Others in the LinkedIn comment section expressed their opinions. One user commented: “I’ve had my fun being botted to the top, but could you please remove me from the rankings now? It’s a well-made app, but I can’t support the comparison of people who are on so many unique and important paths in life,” whilst another wrote, “Hahaha is this another Facemash.”
The creators do offer the opportunity for students to opt out — as well as opt in — with Cheema writing in his post, “This was made in a lighthearted fashion, please DM me if you would like to be removed.”
Aarul Dhawan, junior in statistics & CS, admitted to spending “quite a bit of time on” the website and said he might request his profile to be removed.
“I admittedly was playing into the website’s shenanigans … and I inherently was comparing myself to others,” Dhawan said. “I might end up (removing myself) because, yeah, I don’t think this is good.”
Websites such as UIUC Ranked are indicative of a larger culture of competitiveness in CS, which Bodas attributed partially to the economy.
“I feel like (career focus) is contributing towards this weird toxicity cycle where everyone wants to have a good job and job security,” Bodas said. “It’s also likely due to the state of the economy and the job market right now, but there’s a weird sense of pride that seems to be attached to what jobs you have.”
Indeed, the tech industry has taken hits due to market downturns and the increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence to perform programming tasks.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the projected change in employment of computer programmer jobs was expected to drop 10% over the 2023-2033 period. Coupled with an ever-increasing number of computer science students, more graduates are hunting for fewer jobs.
Dhawan noted that CS is “extremely oversaturated,” making internships more competitive and harder to secure.
“I see people applying to hundreds and hundreds of internships and only getting maybe one or two interviews,” Dhawan said. “Last year, when I was applying for an internship in the summer, I applied to 200 and only got one offer.”
This year, Dhawan said he’s gotten “luckier” in securing an internship at Amazon — one of the five coveted-after FAANG companies: Facebook (now Meta), Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google.
Nonetheless, Dhawan said internships have served as a measuring stick of the perceived success of a CS student and websites like UIUC Ranked are but a symptom of a tightening market.
“There’s a bunch of people who make getting internships their whole personality,” Dhawan said. “I see a lot more people going to FAANG and acting a little bit entitled because of their job prospects, and therefore those who don’t get the internship say they compare themselves to the people who got really good internships.”
Guddanti agreed, referring to the University as having a big internship culture.
“Internships are glorified over having real technical ability, and I definitely think that’s maybe why this went extra viral,” Guddanti said.
Cheema chimed in and pointed out the positive impact of creating UIUC Ranked: inspiring others in the community to build projects rather than just focusing on internships.
“I want to get our school to (the) same reputation as Stanford or Berkeley with a ton of people making their own businesses and dropping out,” Cheema said. “So I’m glad to have received so many DMs from people saying that they’re inspired to build stuff.”
