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Google Code Jam Winner Announced

Posted by simoniker on from the very-clever dept.

Wild-eyed Visionary writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, Jimmy Mardell, 25, of Stockholm, Sweden, beat out more than 5,000 coders to win $10,000 in Google's second annual Code Jam programming contest. Second place: Christopher Hendrie (Canada), third place: Eugene Vasilchenko (Russia), fourth place: Tomasz Czajka (Poland). Tom Rokicki, of dvips/Radical Eye Software fame, was the oldest finalist at age 40."

8 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. What did they write? by penguinboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So what exactly did the winners' programs do, exactly? I saw no mention in the article.

  2. Google - Champion of the Common Man by Pavan_Gupta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't comment very often, but I always get a little tingly feeling thinking about how Google is one of the very few companies I see in the wide expanse of capitalism that seems to actually enjoy making their customers feel good about the fact that they are giving a little out of their own pocket/time. I would pay to use google, just becase google is not an angry behemoth like Microsoft, Walmart, or Big Bro.

    Congrats to the guys who won, and a special congratulation to Google for being my favorite company on planet earth.

    1. Re:Google - Champion of the Common Man by XorNand · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Your two aforementioned companies are both publicly owned. They are legally bound to do what is in the best financial interests of their shareholders. The actual owners of the company are not involved in the daily management and have only one, single-minded reason for owning stock: profit.

      When Google finally bites the bullet and has a billion dollars in other people's money, a old-school board of directors, along with the need to please the SEC and Wall Street analysts, things will change drastically. You'll suddenly see Google become much more conservative because they have so many interests to look out for and competing voices to listen to.

      Then some other upstart, agile company will usurp the crown and be the geek's new flavor-of-the-week. It's just how capitalism works. The moral: Don't get to blindly attacted to Google or you're going to feel deeply betrayed--they *are* only a business after all.

      --
      Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
    2. Re:Google - Champion of the Common Man by MisterFancypants · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Google is smart, not "Good". If you think they are really the champions of the common man, consider the fact that they actively help the Chinese government censor most of the net for its citizens.

      I use google all the time, because they know what I want, not because they are some sort of do-gooders... Because they aren't.

  3. Re:Anyone notice that the winners are... by XorNand · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why is this a warning sign? Looking at it from a purely statistical point of view, the odds were not very good that an American would be among the winners. Stop being so narrow-minded, there are bright people from all over the world--America and abroad.

    --
    Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
  4. Yay Jimmy! by YodaToad · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I just want to take the time to congratulate Jimmy on a job well done. I knew someone from the "TI Community" would make it big some day.

    I'm sure everyone who's ever owned a recent TI graphing calculator (TI-83 and up) will remember zTetris, among other puzzle games, that Jimmy wrote.

    Jimmy Mardell

  5. Re:Bullshit by monkeyfinger · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Last time I checked, Google was an AMERICAN company. You think that they would have the decency or the patriotism to give at least one award to an AMERICAN. Sorry Google but you are no longer my search engine of choice. Altavista here I come.

    Decency? This was a competion and the best men won, what's indecent about that?

    Patriotism? If google ran a crooked competition where an american got a prize they didn't earn would that make you proud? Wouldn't it be better to keep trying until you win fair and square and then take pride in that?

  6. The problem with TopCoder by spectecjr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The problem with TopCoder is that it emphasizes hacky brute force solutions over elegant / high performance ones.

    Which is all well and good if you need to hack something out real quick, but if you need to get something stable, robust, high performance and high quality, you're talking about a whole different set of skills.

    --
    Coming soon - pyrogyra