I’ve been wondering about this question:

• On one hand, conventional wisdom has that winning a Kaggle competition is quite a feather in your cap and it will open all sorts of doors for you. You will have to fend off recruiters with bear spray, given the amount of corporate attention you will receive once you win.
• On the other the few Kaggle winners that I follow personally (connecting on LinkedIn, following their blogs, etc…) don’t seem to have their careers impacted by their achievements. You don’t see them switching to Google or FB or something a few months after they win. They all stay in the relatively obscure tier 2 role they worked in. Sometimes not even that, they turn out to be freelancers and they remain that way, or something like that….

Any thoughts on what is the more accurate depiction of Kaggle winners?