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The World's Greatest Competitive Programmer

An anonymous reader writes "Technology Review profiles Petr Mitrichev, who has since 2005 dominated the world of competitive programming, a little known sport where competitors furiously code for five hours in pursuit of glory and cash prizes worth tens of thousands of dollars. Mitrichev now works for Google, and competes only for leisure, but is still ranked number one. Many large tech companies, such as Facebook and Google, now sponsor and pay close attention to competitive coding contests, seeing them as a place to recruit new talent."

202 comments

  1. As a Professional Developer... by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As a Professional Developer, competitions hurt my ego, so I will come up with scores of excuses on how competitive programming isn't a good measure of one skill. I prefer to keep the illusion that I am the best programmer out there, just because I tend to out perform my peers.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Minupla · · Score: 1

      Wow - Mod this one +1 Honest :)

      Min

      --
      On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
    2. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Baloroth · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's a decent measure, but not a great one, since it adds a time-based component. Saying that being the best competitive programmer is a measure of overall skill is like saying the best speed-chess player is the best overall chess player. It simply isn't true (although it could be, it usually isn't), although the speed-chess player is undoubtedly very good.

      --
      "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
    3. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      *someone's* jealous.

    4. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Sure, some of the technically best programmers are slow as hell, but these companies want their products out fast. I'm not surprised they shop there.

    5. Re:As a Professional Developer... by DeTech · · Score: 1

      Exactly. Is it impressive? Yes.

      Is it an effective metric to rank skill? no not really.

    6. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...excuses on how competitive programming isn't a good measure of one skill.

      Oh, I disagree, there is no doubt it is a good measure of one skill.

    7. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Given the right academic task, I wouldn't be surprised if some of your peers can beat you at it.

    8. Re:As a Professional Developer... by LifeIs0x2A · · Score: 1

      Same here.. After being somewhere in the peasant area on Topcoder for years and having been refused a job as software developer at Google in the first interview round, I wonder how I can still make a living more or less programming all day long. Wait, maybe that's why it takes all day for me to finish things. The guy in the article would finish all my work in five minutes :-) Well, at least that probably means that software / hardware development is not just about raw coding skills.

    9. Re:As a Professional Developer... by MozeeToby · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Is it an effective metric to rank skill?

      Yes it is maybe not the skills you care about, but it is most assuredly a measure of skill. I could see how having someone on the team that has almost immediate insight into how to solve complex problems would save an entire team time. Doesn't mean the same person is the best choice to sit down and write the enterprise level code to actually implement their insight though.

    10. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      Alternatively, "There's a worls of competitive programming?"

      My ego won't be hurt. Have at thee!

      Hmmm...gonna need a ready-made framework for I/O so I don't waste precious seconds redoing it each time...

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    11. Re:As a Professional Developer... by SolitaryMan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'd say that the biggest problem here is that being good at these competitions does not necessarily mean that one would provide great value for the company and it does not even have much to do with technical skills. In the real world the problems are never well defined, the "scoring" rules are non-existent. Then, there are "people" skills.

      I don't want to diminish this guy's achievement, I know for sure he is a great developer in all other respects, but these competitions measure only one projection of a skill on a specific axis.

      --
      May Peace Prevail On Earth
    12. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I am not the best programmer out there.

      I don't think I'm even "one of the best".

      But I am fairly sure that this sort of competition does not measure anything relevant to most workplaces or to academia.

      Just like a SAT or an IQ test or any other number of things which may be statistically indicative of potential but don't actually measure useful output, this sort of thing is interesting but no substitute for actually examining someone's experience in the real world.

      In fact, I'm probably better at short, sharp speed tests than the slog engineering of the real world, so I'm putting myself down by putting this guy down. But it's like arguing that being good at recreational mathematics means you're going to be a good mathematics researcher - yeah, someone who is exceptional at the former will probably be better at the latter and vice versa, but we don't actually need to do anything with that information. We acknowledge it and let people get on with their work rather than pigeonholing them earlier than necessary.

    13. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As a Professional Developer, competitions hurt my ego, so I will come up with scores of excuses on how competitive programming isn't a good measure of one skill. I prefer to keep the illusion that I am the best programmer out there, just because I tend to out perform my peers.

      As a former competitive programmer (ACM/ICPC, TopCoder, UVA, IPSC, you name it) and a long time professional programmer (going on 13 years now) I have to say that I have never seen such a rate of improvement in my programming abilities as the couple of years that I took competitions seriously.

      These improvements included not only coding speed, but also high accuracy under time constraints, the ability to predict and analyze edge cases and weird scenarios, thinking about efficiency in terms of Big-O and implementation specific constants, and a lot more. Not to mention a good working knowledge of a lot of data structures and algorithms most programmers never even hear about, which is a given for any competitive competitive programmer. These traits, I think you agree, are what every good programmer could use.

    14. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      But in this case, the tests revolve around algorithmic processing. The irony is that one possible question is to code a bot to play chess.

      Where this guy seems to shine is in his ability to come up with the best algoroithm quickly given his "quick starts". He doesn't have to figure things out on paper. He can determine the proper algorithm quickly. Somethign that transaltes into cost effectiveness due to less up front time costs in the real world.

    15. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course, overall, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page are the best programmers.

    16. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Regular chess still has a time component.

    17. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Does nobody remember an article on Slashdot a few years back?

      1. The top programmers are 4x as productive as the average one.
      2. There are some problems the top programmers can do the average ones cannot no matter how much time they were given.

      If you don't fall into that category, and you probably know if you do, don't bother.

      Actually the fastest guy would probably benefit from a small audience of programmers pointing out he missed a semicolon or that array is wrong-sized somewhere. This would be obvious to you as such a top programmer.

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    18. Re:As a Professional Developer... by vlm · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You forgot the most important part from an economic standpoint, maintainability.

      I can squirt out multi line regexes that are not troubleshootable by anyone, not even myself. Very quickly too. Doesn't mean its a good long term idea.

      You know you're in trouble when the fastest way to debug a big mass of regex is to rewrite it from scratch.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    19. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 4, Funny

      I used to read the alumni magazine USC sends me. About 10 years ago I started an article about some woman who was upholding USC standards yada yada, and she had three patents, fed starving children in Africa, brought ponies to the poor kids in Australia, helped fight an Ebola outbreak in, wherever, Canada or something, and was now starting a tech business, and on and on...

      Turn the page to her photo and details. She's... 26 years old. That was the turning point for me. Well, one of them.I realized I was shit and started hating the world. Some people just have what I call the life force, and I know I don't have it, and no, it's not intended as a SW reference.

      I built an awesome mountain temple this week in Minecraft, though... has an indoor forest... yeah, I suck. :(

    20. Re:As a Professional Developer... by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      I was an early Beta Tester for TopCoder... That turned me off to the competitive programming thing. (even though I won... Only because I was the only one who submitted code... It didn't even compile, they didn't bother telling us what was needed to compile the code. I tried uploading my Jar file, I tried just uploading my source... It compiles fine on my computer but just not on the TopCoder. I was tremendously frustrated with it.
      They probably have fixed it sense the early Beta Days. But sense then the idea of competitive programming just turned me off.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    21. Re:As a Professional Developer... by oakgrove · · Score: 5, Interesting

      After writing this, I got on a little bit of a tangent so it isn't all necessarily directed at you, LifeIs0x2A so don't be offended if it seems slightly condescending or obnoxious.

      If you're proficient in practically any language, find a small under 10 person company to work for and it almost doesn't matter what you do they'll think you walk on water. Of course, do a good job out of professional pride if nothing else but in small businesses the IT guy that "makes shit happen" gets a ton of respect. Early in my career I started out at a sports wholesale distributor that wanted to insource their IT stuff. A friend of a friend heard about it and got me the interview. As a hobbyist I was already proficient in Python, Java, and web technology in addition to odds and ends like AutoIt and the ilk. I aced the "interview" which was basically, "Can you do computer stuff?" and got started. There was so much slop that could easily be automated I was like a kid in a candy store. One minute I was writing a custom database front-end that shortened the 20 minutes it took to enter products into the website to about 2 minutes and the next moment I was working on the sales/CMS application the salespeople (when it was finished) started running around with. It was great. It got to the point that the bosses daughter was bringing me home cooked meals to my desk everyday already heated up and ready to go. I'll stop there.

      The point is if Google won't hire you then fuck them. If you have some skills then alpha the fuck up and network. There are plenty of opportunities for the taking.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    22. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Really? A buggy BETA version of a web site was all it took to turn you off of programming competitions?

      There's nothing wrong with just saying you don't like the competitions, but to blame a BETA version of a site years and years ago for why you don't compete is just sad, really.

    23. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is it an effective metric to rank skill? no not really.

      I wonder if hiring managers understand that?

      Maybe they do, or maybe it just helps dumb their job down a great deal so they don't care.

      You know, the part where you sit a candidate down, make them solve problems on the spot, while others in the room hover silently for an hour or so and then make a decision on the spot without ever asking them about real-world experiences and results?

      In fact, I wonder if we understand that?

      It's a strange and ironic industry we live in where we tout the ability to stack, rank and analyze anything given the right data, the right algorithm, the right computation and one day we turn around and see we can no longer compete with the flawed metrics we have created. HR and resume "screening" are now so fucking broken as to be entirely useless. We automate the process, save the business money in the short term and then, only later realize we can no longer find candidates because of the system we've built.

      But, if we want to push this competition, etc. aspect, then let's do so for other industries:
      * Heart Surgery Arena: Two surgeons battle it out to come in under the clock and fix Timmy's heart.
      * Lawyer Smackdown: Two lawyers compete to earn points from a jury by trying to free/convict a suspected murderer.
      * The Great Ambulance Race: Teams compete to deliver a heart attack victim to the nearest ER. Teams may hit unexpected detours caused by invalid insurance.

      Oh, wait, those people are too fucking smart to let that ever happen....

    24. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't say that. You're awesome. You know what I did this week? I watched someone else play a video game on twitch.tv. At least you're producing.

      From there, it's just a matter of perspective and motivation to get yourself out there making the differences you want to make in the world.

    25. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Amen to this. A mega-corp turned me down because my MA is in anthropology despite the fact that my BS is in computer science. Working in a small shop where my tasks for the day may include programming in: C, Python, PHP (ugh), or Perl, doing network troubleshooting, or administering our Linux servers is a lot more fun than 8+ hours of pure programming every day. As always, your mileage may vary. I certainly know a lot of people who are doing just fine working at the same task day in and day out.

      --
      "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
    26. Re:As a Professional Developer... by LifeIs0x2A · · Score: 2

      If you're proficient in practically any language, find a small under 10 person company to work for and it almost doesn't matter what you do they'll think you walk on water.

      No offence taken. Why do you think I founded my own company? :-) Like that I can witness myself walking on water every single day!

      It got to the point that the bosses daughter was bringing me home cooked meals to my desk everyday already heated up and ready to go. I'll stop there.

      I have to admit, that sounds tempting..

      The point is if Google won't hire you then fuck them. If you have some skills then alpha the fuck up and network. There are plenty of opportunities for the taking.

      Right, actually it was a good thing they didn't take me. I think what I'm doing now is the right way.

    27. Re:As a Professional Developer... by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      First Impressions, are always the biggest ones.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    28. Re:As a Professional Developer... by AwesomeMcgee · · Score: 1

      My thoughts precisely. I can wish upon a star that I had that talent, but instead I'll just wish upon my biweekly paychecks that I can continue to outpace my peers and make my bills.

    29. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I hope that you're kidding here.

    30. Re:As a Professional Developer... by hackula · · Score: 1

      ...Because there is no time component to real world projects? IDK what planet you work on, but for every hour I am late my client gets to go at my limbs with a machete for 10 minutes.

    31. Re:As a Professional Developer... by PhamTrinli · · Score: 1

      "life force" is something you can develop its not just something you are born with, although I also think people are born different. Also bear in mind that our society rewards people who fit a certain mold, and from your summary this woman ticks all the boxes.

    32. Re:As a Professional Developer... by hackula · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Never hire a programmer without sitting them down to write some code. The problems should not be very difficult or specialized. You would not believe how many people I have spent an hour interviewing, was totally sold on, then when they had to write out FizzBuzz it turned out they had absolutely no clue what they were doing. People will flat out lie to you about there experience and many are quite believable due to their memorizing talking points about some language or framework. Testing sucks, but hiring someone woefully unprepared for a position is worse for everyone involved.

    33. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As a Professional Developer - source code or it didn't happen!

    34. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 1

      Oh, I'm not a strict nature or nurture type by any stretch, but I can't escape the sense that there is some inadequately defined factor involved. It could be one or the other or a function of both. People call it drive or ambition but what I'm trying to describe seems to be an unconscious source that leads to those other things.

      All I really know is that I don't have it. My head is full of neat projects, but I no longer have the ability to see the point to doing any of them, and even when I did it seemed more like a chore than a fun hobby.

      Or I'm just farting in the breeze. As ever.

    35. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 1

      Well... I was thinking of building a suspension bridge from the temple to the neighboring mountain.

      Maybe I should finally start a Facebook account. The XBox Minecraft can automatically post screenshots to your Facebook. I'd use it just for that.

      I'll go the extra mile and make the bridge purple. Man, that's a lot of dye and a lot of sheep.

    36. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm far from the best programmer in the world. Closer to the bottom. But if you can stomach old crappy code and make it less crappy, you'll find there's plenty of work that the super coders will probably be not interested in.

      In this sort of thing what I find helpful is logging, exception handling, and paranoia (some hacker is out to pwn your stuff). Data structure design is often more important than algorithms.

      For most crappy business apps Intel has done such a good job that usually I/O and bandwidth is the bottleneck and swamps whatever algo you use. That said, badly written SQL (or DB weirdness) often causes slowness.

    37. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Every single "developer" here, including the web monkeys, will tell you they are the best in the business, and that everyone else is rubbish. Just like in a dev shop or IT debt.

    38. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To paraphrase Bruce Schneier, everyone can write regexes that they themselves cannot break. I personally think that regexes (or other formal languages) are really fun to troubleshoot :)

    39. Re:As a Professional Developer... by timeOday · · Score: 2
      True, but still...

      Drag racing probably started out as two guys competing to see whether the Ford or Chevy could haul a bale of hay uphill faster.

      Fast-forward a couple decades, and the only competitive drag racers are cars that can't burn normal gasoline or haul even 2 people and can literally barely turn at all.

      Weird stuff happens when you optimize along one or two dimensions only.

    40. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Well, competitive programming with a time limit seems to be vastly different from real world programming. In the length it takes to do the competition I may only have come up with a few lines of code and am still waiting for a build to finish or I spent that time just trying to figure out what a bug might be. My guess is that they do a lot of incredibly high level code, slapping together pre-built components, etc. Then presumably you have to be highly knowledgeable in one particular area and hope that's what the competition is about (ie, you know all about smart phone applets but then are asked to write assembler to do 48 bit floating point divides).

      On the other hand, I remember the guys who made Amiga AForth (?) discussing a contest they were in where you competed in teams to solve a task. In this case displaying a message on a row of LEDs on a strip of metal that vibrated back and forth in response to an electromagnet. They had said they had a huge advantage over other teams using assemblers or compilers as they could just fiddle with timings interactively in Forth.

    41. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You know, I really like how you chose regexes to illustrate your point. I want to add a little something, from my perspective.

      I have been participating in programming competitions for a few years, and one of the things I remember from the old days (before I started participating) is that I used to think I was such a great programmer because I "knew" C and Java reasonably well, and I even "knew" cool things such as regexes. I also used to think that programming competitions would be a walk in the park.

      However, once you actually start solving algorithm problems (I prefer that term to "competition problems"), very quickly you realise how ignorant and naive you have to be to think that just knowing tools (like programming languages or DSLs) is all you need to solve really complex problems ---the kind of problems that *do* require attention from someone who knows what they're doing in a software company.

      Things like regexes are tools, like duct tape, and they can be very good for many purposes. However, if you see someone trying to use duct tape for *everything*, beware. Duct tape is extremely useful and versatile, and although you don't usually see bridges, or cars or boats being built using duct tape, it is not always *impossible* to build them using any material you want (Mythbusters have done an excellent job proving this for duct tape). Actually, if you don't know much about bridges but for some reason need to build one, using duct tape to play around and test things seems like a good idea.

      However, what actually matters to build a good bridge is that you know how bridges work (which gives you better elements to judge what tools are appropriate). Something similar happens in software. You might know SQL and Java and Hibernate (or whatever is cool) very well, but unless you, or someone on your team, knows graph theory, complexity analysis and understands how algorithms like Dijkstra's SSSP work, it might be possible that your software product, the one that is starting to run very slowly since your latest database insertions, is never going to get "fixed", no matter how much money you throw at it. (I chose this example because I've actually witnessed it).

      The good news is that learning algorithms is not really "difficult*, in the sense that it's not something that only a handful of gifted individuals in the planet can do. In reality, just about *anyone* could do it; it just requires dedication.

      Finally, I just wanted to add that I have a lot of respect for coworkers and friends in general who have particpated in programming competitions, even if they weren't very successful at it. They give me a lot more confidence than someone who says "No, I don't participate in programming competitions because those things measure the wrong skills".

    42. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Coming from you, a person who hasn't been noted in anything programming-wise, I don't feel your advice is worth taking. We don't have any way to know if you're a pro or not either. I can say I am Bill Gates you know.

    43. Re:As a Professional Developer... by MaWeiTao · · Score: 1

      Some people just happen to be in the right place at the right time. They're not necessarily the best at what they're doing, but they were able to capitalize on the opportunities when they arose. Many people wouldn't even notice the opportunity if it presented itself others cripple themselves with self doubt or stubbornness.

      In my experience, having a pool of dependable contacts is the best path to success. If you weren't lucky enough to grow up in the right neighborhood or didn't attend one of the top universities that inevitable means you've got to leave a strong impression, in terms of work quality and personality, with whoever you interact with. Luck can be a factor, but I tend to find it works far more in the negative, health issues or downsizing, than in the positive. If you're going to take the self-made route you'd better be dedicated and prepared to work your ass off.

      The thing that's always irked me about the entrepreneurial label is that people talk about these guys like they're innovators and risk takers. When they're starting from nothing that may be true. But someone who's already successful isn't necessarily any more creative than anyone else. The difference is they've got the money and connections to execute and promote their ideas. Floating a vague idea is enough for these guys to get backing. Your average person will dismiss most of their ideas because they don't have the time or resources to do anything with it, they get trained to tune out flights of fancy.

      When that individual does hit upon something they're convinced will work they're put into a position where their whole lives are invested in it. The consequences of failure is far, far greater than it is for your average "entrepreneur". So they either have to commit to fruition or give up early. There's no implicit trust, which means that unlike an "entrepreneur" they have to prove that the idea works before anyone will back them.

    44. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Stop writing code for the Russian Mafia.

    45. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can rest reassured that programming competitions do not measure quite the same skill as it takes to develop a large system. These competitions focus on something you can do in a few hours which means that the programs are small which again means that you can get away with any kind of crap design that you want - indeed it is a necessary skill in these competitions to be very good at foregoing nice design in favor of saving a few minutes of initial implementation time. Someone coding at the office like people do in competitions is a recipe for utter and complete disaster!

      However, maybe you can't rest so reassured, because those people who do well in these competitions definitely have got the algorithms and data structure side of things down and they are highly intelligent and focused on programming. If these people have been coding anything other than competitions, which most likely they have, they already completely understand that the kind of coding you do there doesn't translate directly to real coding, so there's no reason to think that they would code like that on a real project. If they have a good amount of experience on real projects too, probably these people WILL out-code you even on a real project.

    46. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Whether nature or nurture the biggest difference between you and her is that she believes she can do it and you can't. You ask "why" and she asks "why not?" It took me longer in life than the woman you're writing about to realize it.. but at some point I realized the difference between me and "those people" is.. nothing. Some of them came from affluent families so they had a shorter ride but the truth is it's not that hard. Incorporate, call companies and ask how to get on their preferred vendor list. Do those things. Once you're on the list when they want to get something done they will come to you with an RFP/RFQ. Do the work, get paid. Maybe hire people. 2 years ago I was one of the highest paid employees at my job. I quit to form my own company and now I'm making almost 2x as much... and I haven't even hired another employee. Know what happens if my company flops? The same thing that happens if my previous employer flopped.. I'd go get another job.

    47. Re:As a Professional Developer... by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      I can say I am Bill Gates you know.

      Most advice Bill Gates could ever give you would likely be worthless. There can be only one Bill Gates and trying to emulate him would only lead you to disappointment. That goes for any hyper-achieving multi-billionaire vis-Ã-vis you. You will never be the man Steve Jobs was or any other titan in the tech industry. If you had that in you we wouldn't be having this conversation. The reason I shared a little bit of my story is that anybody on this site that lives in a free society can do what I did. There are burger flipping closet programmers right now that could hang up their apron by next month and be doing something they actually enjoy if they would just get off their asses and knock on a few doors. You don't have to care who I am but what I did was attainable and I've read a lot worse advice on here.

      I don't feel your advice is worth taking.

      Then it isn't. That's the beauty of it.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    48. Re:As a Professional Developer... by _Shad0w_ · · Score: 1

      I'm not the best, I'm just competent. I know I'm better than some people I've worked with, I also know I'm nowhere near as good as other people I've worked with. I do what my employers want: they feed me a requirement, I churn out working code.

      --

      Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.

    49. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're not Mr. Bill Gates nor his peer. You cutting him down's laughable. He codes too http://www.zdnet.com/blog/murphy/bill-gates-programmer/640 and created the first BASIC for PC's "After dropping out of Harvard Gates created the first basic operating language for the computer." So there's actual proof of it.

      Do you really code professionally? You say you do iirc, but I see nothing from you substantiating that.

      So I must say as your answer, it's no.

      That's my point.

      Until you've shown you've done it, you haven't. Remember, this is slashdot (the show me state, that demands 'citation').

      Yes, I've actually achieved some decent notoriety in the software programming arena over time a few times. Have you?

      However, I will agree with you on 1 point you've made (or how I perceived it at least):

      Life's what you make it with a dose of luck and hard work. Being at the right place and right time plus having talent, it's not enough. See the film "The Natural" on that account (for an analogy from film, it's a great one by Robert Redford).

    50. Re:As a Professional Developer... by stevenfuzz · · Score: 1

      All your code belong to me. Repeat. Beat.

    51. Re:As a Professional Developer... by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      You're not Mr. Bill Gates nor his peer. You cutting him down's laughable.

      You're misunderstanding me, AC. I gather English isn't your first language so you might have difficulty picking up on the subtleties. My point was that what worked for Bill Gates would never work for regular people as Bill Gates functions on such a level that getting advice from him would be like trying to get advice from Brad Pitt on how to be stunningly handsome. So anything he would like say that you could use would be so general as to be practically worthless. Now if you were the head of some multi-billion dollar conglomerate then Bill Gate's advice might be priceless to you as you would actually be able to act on the specifics.

      Yes, I've actually achieved some decent notoriety in the software programming arena over time a few times. Have you?

      If you're already in the field then my suggestion doesn't apply to you. It was directed at "hobbyists" that are good enough to get a job doing what they love (programming) yet are intimidated by the actual process of doing what it takes to get that job. I don't know how to be any more plain so if you don't get it at this point then somebody else will have to chime in and help you.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    52. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > But if you can stomach old crappy code and make it less crappy, you'll find there's plenty of work that the super coders will probably be not interested in.

      If we just select the best coders (e.g. top 5 from 100), 25% of them tend to make code more crappy when they try to improve it. Nearly all of them also miss the places for big improvements (e.g. splitting a class or writing a test that actually tests something).

      Improving code is very difficult, because most people are not skilled enough to judge when it is better and when it is not and they don't even realize it. I try to evaluate code using my intuition, experience, different books on the subject and consulting colleagues and still it is often very hard to tell which way is the best.

    53. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It got to the point that the bosses daughter was bringing me home cooked meals to my desk everyday already heated up and ready to go.

      What was heated up and ready to go? The home cooked meals or the boss's daughter?

    54. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      TopCoder is definitely better (way better) than you say. They are now quite a good option as an outsourcing company.. And produce better code than many big name outsourcing companies.

    55. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You would not believe how many people I have spent an hour interviewing, was totally sold on, then when they had to write out FizzBuzz it turned out they had absolutely no clue what they were doing. People will flat out lie to you about there experience and many are quite believable due to their memorizing talking points about some language or framework.

      If you were sold, then, I'm sorry, but your interviewing skills suck. If all you are asking about are "taking points" related to a language or a framework, you're asking the wrong damn questions.

      The point is not to not evaluate them. The point is that too many people think the "test" is the only thing.

      Ask them about what they have worked on. Ask them about problems they have solved. Get into the details. Get them up to a whiteboard to sketch out what they did, have them explain how and why. You'll get 100% better results than some test.

      The person you're interviewing may be pretty damn smart, but if all you're evaluating them on is some small test you define, you may never be able to find that out.

      The biggest "miss" is that the majority of the interviewers I've seen don't even ask about or investigate the results of the candidates work. If I, say develop a system that garners several patents, saved an organization millions and gets written up in trade magazines and evaluated by NIST as a standard, why the hell would you want to spend 99% of the interview time talking about FizzBuzz, language trivia, et al?

      As I said before, hiring is screwed up. People used to hire on gut instinct and ask important questions. We no longer have time and have replaced that with arbitrary metrics and "tests" which end up being no better than gut instinct.

      Whine about risks all you want, but ask yourself this:
      How is a doctor hired and what the questions asked? Suprisingly, you'll find 99% of the questions relate to soft skills, stress management, interaction with others, etc. No "tests". Now ask yourself what the risk for hiring a doctor is vs. hiring a bad programmer? Board certifications aside, what does it tell you about the way we hire?

    56. Re:As a Professional Developer... by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      Heh. Could'a would'a should'a. She just got married a couple of weeks ago. Oh well.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    57. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't hate yourself. While there are a plenty of people achieve quite a bit in their 20s, not everything is so wonderful as alumni magazines want to portray. Most of the submissions are done by alumni themselves.

      A lot of people graduate from the college with no marketable skills/job and decide to volunteer for some "save the world" non profit or explore the world on parents' money. After a while the money run out and they can't find job so they are "entrepreneurs". A lot of people are starting a tech business, but not every tech business is a future Google or Facebook.

    58. Re:As a Professional Developer... by JMZero · · Score: 1

      To be clear, it's not like (at the highest level) they are doing something in 1 hour that would take the average guy 4 or something. The top level problems are often difficult enough that an average programmer would never complete them (or at least not without significant outside assistance and/or further education). Between equally matched competitors it can sometimes be a race, but in general these competitions are better thought of as tests: can you solve this problem?

      Comparing top competitors to regular programmers, their speed is certainly impressive - but the more important differentiator is their knowledge, experience, and creative problem-solving ability.

      There's been times I've outperformed Petr (the guy mentioned here) on individual problems (though obviously he's usually faster than me usually, and I haven't competed in years). The key difference between us is not speed - it's that he's able to solve a whole bunch of problems I just plain can't.

      --
      Let's not stir that bag of worms...
    59. Re:As a Professional Developer... by roman_mir · · Score: 0

      People will flat out lie to you about there experience

      - where experience? See, you've been asking the wrong questions from these people all the time, they didn't know you wanted THEIR experience, they thought you were talking about some other place.

    60. Re:As a Professional Developer... by badatnicknames · · Score: 0

      Many companies will choose immediate profits over maintainability. Sure maintainability is nice to have but if you have to choose you pick the money you can earn sooner over the potential savings later. Your customers don't pay you more because you have more maintainable code.

    61. Re:As a Professional Developer... by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

      Many managers don't understand that paying 1.5 times a good programmer (compared to a "regular" one) is not only immediately profitable (codes 1.5+ times faster), but in the longer term, the good programmer writes code that requires little adjustment or maintenance and more importantly - this one is even harder for managers to get - writes optimized code based on strong and efficient algorithms.

      This being said, I had the chance to participe to some Topcoder SRM with Petr (even in the same "room"), and based on chats and comments, Petr is not only a top programmer, he is also humble, nice and generous in explaining / helping others. I'm glad he joined the Google team as this is probably the best that could happen to him.

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    62. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I was discussing a similar thought the other day. A rich person can have a half-assed idea and say "put someone on that" and delegate the work of making the idea a reality. Someone without those kinds of resources has to do it all themselves.

    63. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Gorobei · · Score: 1

      Actually the fastest guy would probably benefit from a small audience of programmers pointing out he missed a semicolon or that array is wrong-sized somewhere. This would be obvious to you as such a top programmer.

      Where I work, we inflict this on all our "top" programmers. You want that code in, you get a review. A star programmer produces more and better code when four or five junior developers are critiquing his code for missed edge cases, confusing function names, ugly control flow, lack of unittests, etc.

    64. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Gorobei · · Score: 1

      Syntax errors, are the biggest ones.

    65. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Buddy, I'd wager more than 50% of the readers on slashdot have a head full of home projects and get rich quick schemes they're working on, the vast bulk of which will never be finished. I know I do.
      Don't be so down on yourself! Life is about enjoying the ride. I have fun poking around in my shed, playing with my half finished robots and my half finished computer games. Who gives a shit if you never finish your projects, as long as you have fun while you're working on them.
      Take pride in your Minecraft creations! At least you're being creative.

    66. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You understood me. That's what matters. No hiding saying you didn't.

    67. Re:As a Professional Developer... by evil_aaronm · · Score: 1

      Amen. In my book, specialization is for insects. I left a good paying job with See-mans because, for reasons I won't get into, I transitioned to a job where I did one thing, and it wasn't something I enjoyed, found interesting, or could even hack for the one year it would require to transition to a different job. I had much more fun when I was a sys-admin, responsible for everything: never a dull moment.

    68. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 1

      Thanks, anonymous entity. :)

    69. Re:As a Professional Developer... by ShakaUVM · · Score: 1

      Yeah, and given how tough a lot of the programming challenge questions are (I did a few in college, and did reasonably well), being able to win a competition means the person was able to solve most or all of the problems, correctly, and *with all the edge cases considered*, in a very short period of time. So while I wouldn't care if a guy was #1 in the world or #10 in his college, I would see someone doing well in it as a very good recommendation for their programming skills.

      Thinking of all the edge cases is often the hardest part, as the judges don't tell you why your code was rejected, only that it failed on one of the test cases. I quit competing after having one of my programs rejected for an absurd edge case that wasn't in the specification (basically, they wanted to add distance to a zero-length graph edge, which made no sense outside of the textual context of the problem)... and I was the only person in the room that had solved it. Or I guess I might not have been, and everyone had their programs rejected for that bullshit reason. So yeah, someone who can think of all the edge cases without them being explicitly specified is going to be a good programmer in my book.

      This doesn't mean he'll have good social skills, or coding practices, or whatever, but in terms of being able to know how to program? Hell yes, I'd hire a competitor on the spot.

    70. Re:As a Professional Developer... by gymell · · Score: 1

      I'm an experienced developer and I've interviewed a lot of people myself. As a consultant, I've also frequently been the interviewee. It's easy to weed out the BS types by engaging them in discussions not just about what they've done, but get into the why and how, the pros and cons of various technologies, methodologies, etc. Give them hypothetical scenarios to find out what approach they would take. If they throw out buzzwords and can't explain how/when/why they used something, alternatives they have considered, etc, then things become obvious. That also goes a long way toward showing the candidate's potential, how much of a proactive learner they are, and so on, unlike interview gimmicks. I think coding tests are poor substitute for an effective interview.

      Be aware that for an experienced developer, the interview goes both ways. I may want to see some examples of your code to see if your team is up to my standards, and I will certainly be asking many questions myself. If I'm expected to jump through lame interview hoops as part of the process, then it's likely not something I will be interested in - I tend to turn down those interviews.

  2. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    We're talking about coding competitions here, not posting-to-slashdot competitions.

  3. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Heh. Speak for yourself. A friend of mine lost his virginity in Phoenix, at ACM conference, and we were there for the college programming contest. It must have been '94/'95 or something. The organizers were generous, and we ended up at a fancy bar after the closing dinner. We were happy with how we had done, and success + cash is VERY attractive to some women.

    Actually, I think that the whole 'computer nerds have no girlfriends' is a obsolete tropes. The losers in their parents' basement, maybe. But nowadays computer interests translate in employment, responsibility and ultimately financial security... My colleagues have better marriages than my neighbors.

  4. Heard of the slow food movement? by presidenteloco · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They appreciate quality food that takes time to prepare.

    So do I. I don't give a rat's tail what you can come up with in 2 hours. What are you wise enough to come up with in two years?

    --

    Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
    1. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by vlm · · Score: 1

      If you absolutely must do a food analogy you would do better to compare McDonalds "food" with a fancy gourmet restaurant. Certainly for a given number of employees in a limited amount of time, serving up Big Macs will always win any unit production or economic profit contest, but...

      Or if you're willing to permit inter species competition you've got the whole flies on dog poop thing and "a trillion flies can't all be wrong" etc etc.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    2. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by oakgrove · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Has anyone ever compiled a report on the longer term noteworthy projects of these competitive programmers? I'd be interested in seeing if there is anything I use regularly or admire would be on the list. If they aren't cut out for that I'd bet they'd make hulluva sys-admins though.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    3. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by Rev+Saxon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Its actually a lot hard to be a sysadmin than most developers thing...

      --
      I am that much more enlightened and proportionally disillusioned
    4. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      I agree completely. To be really good requires a vast knowledge that spans much more than the couple of programming languages the typical programmer knows. I didn't mean to disparage sys-admins at all. As a matter of fact, I meant it complimentarily as a large part of being a great sys-admin is being able to figure out the problem and act now! Sometimes with furious finger slapping in shell script or SQL cli. Much respect for those guys.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    5. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Similar to an AC below, I was also a competitor in similar competitions (ACM ICPC, CS Games (Canadian)). It takes a certain skillset and dedication to be any good at them. I was one of the top in a small CS program at a small university, which let me compete in that uni's team. We would constantly get clobbered by the neighbouring university. They had a huge CS program compared to ours, which means a much larger selection pool, and the competitors lived and breathed algorithms and competitions. I bet if you woke them up in the middle of the night, they'd recite the Longest Common Subsequence algorithm flawlessly. My impression, however, was that it was all they did, and not much else. To contrast, I've always pushed myself to have broad CS and software dev knowledge, and I never really had the motivation or ability to rise to their level.

      If I were hiring, would I take someone who is the top at these competitions? Well, I bet if they were working on something like an accounting package or e-commerce, their code might turn out to be full of hacks, or they'd get bored and quit. If I were in charge of optimizing image processing or protein folding? These guys would probably churn out miracles on demand.

    6. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Before I respond to your dumb statement, let me make a statement that is true, that you probably won't believe. I was a sys admin for almost 6 years. I have been a developer for almost 3.

      Being a sys admin is a joke compared to being a developer (unless maybe you are a code monkey churning junk). Yes, you need to know lots of random information, but it's all "trivia" style information, e.g., Google knows it all. Being a developer often involves knowing a lot more than language syntax (the "trivia" portion of knowledge here). It quite often involves knowing things from higher level mathematics to what the byte code generated by your higher level code will look like and how the computer actually executes it.

      It's like saying being a spelling bee winner is more difficult than being a astro physicist because there are more words than formulas.

    7. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by dodobh · · Score: 1

      A sysadmin for a trivial network, maybe. For a non trivial system, being a sysadmin may be harder than being a developer.

      You have to ensure that developers can deliver product, ensure uptime, debug production performance problems...

      Production performance problems includes finding the easy things like missing indexes on database tables, or optimising SQL to figuring out the appropriate data structures in code. In the past year, I have written, debugged and tuned code in C++, Java, Python, Perl, SQL, Ruby and C.

      Just because you don't see it does not mean that operations is not a complex field, or that it's easy as compared to programming. It's a hard challenge to solve a scaling problem (distributed programming is fun).

      --
      I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
    8. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by JMZero · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Mark Zuckerberg competed on TopCoder (though he wasn't terribly committed, and didn't do terribly well) before he was famous. If you follow Slashdot, you'll remember the final Rubik's cube proof - that was done largely by high ranked TopCoders. One of the early developers for Writely was also one of TopCoder's first dominant competitors (snewman). Google is filled with current and former TopCoder competitors - they're doing heavy lifting all over the company, and Google spends tons of time and effort to get more (as do many other companies). I still get calls from companies (particularly high-frequency-trader type companies, but tech in general) fairly often based on my mediocre (and now semi-ancient) TopCoder participation.

      Naturally, though, most programmers (of any sort) are going to be fairly anonymous contributors on larger projects.

      --
      Let's not stir that bag of worms...
    9. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by Lando · · Score: 1

      Comparing apples to oranges I think. Not saying one is more important than the other, though I suppose you could compare a programmer with a janitor if you really wanted to. System admins have some programming skills, but there is also integration and working on a timeline that you seldom get being a programmer. When the active system has a limited amount of scheduled downtime or when an unexpected failure happens, being able to run through thousands or more lines of code to identify the problem and fix it without having a complete understanding of the codebase is certainly a skill many admins are known for. Is that more important than writing the code in the first place? Not really, but at the same time, do you as a coder expect to be called at any time day or night or on vacation to fix a problem?

      Are developers better coders than system admins, probably in most cases. Are system admins more experienced in handling real time issues, probably in most cases.

      As far as developers being a joke compared to developers, well in general system admins, I mean real system admins, make more on average than developers. It seems to me that there are both advantages and disadvantages to each position, but they are both important to proper infrastructure.

      --
      /* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
    10. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

      Being a sys admin is a joke compared to being a developer (unless maybe you are a code monkey churning junk). Yes, you need to know lots of random information, but it's all "trivia" style information, e.g., Google knows it all. Being a developer often involves knowing a lot more than language syntax (the "trivia" portion of knowledge here).

      How do switches work, and how does that impact how you will lay out your storage networks? Do you need a separate switch for each path between SAN and server-- what sort of impact will that make? How do VLANs work, and what path is traffic likely to travel if you use VLANs and trunk ports going through a layer-3 firewall? What will adding STP do to your network setup? How will it react when a single link is lost, and why?

      You may be right that it is a different sort of problem solving, but I think you are minimizing how hard sys-adminning can be. Like programming, you need a wide knowledge of protocols, standards, etc; like programming, your skill will be directly related to your depth of knowledge on those topics. Dont understand how ARPs go out, are stored, and how traffic finds its way to its destination? Youll likely architect a bad network.

      FWIW I do sysadmin work, though I dabble in "programming" (technically scripting with AutoIt, though much deeper than simple "mouse here click here" stuff), and I think each is difficult in a different way. With each, I have encountered situations where I can see several possible ways to proceed, each with its merits, and all requiring careful thought to implement a solution that is simple, maintainable, and elegant.

      Being a sysadmin may be more difficult in practice simply because there are a lot of folks who DONT approach it with the care of a carefully maintained program-- but then I guess the same may be true of many programming projects. But the comparison you make would be as if I said "yea, Ive been a batch script programmer for 10 years, and honestly managing a 1000 server ESX environment is much more difficult".

    11. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by mcgrew · · Score: 1

      An excellent restaraunt doesn't have to be any more expensive than MacDonald's. D'Arcy's Pint here in Springfield (my favorite eatery) has food so good I once took a fat woman there, and walking back to the car she said "I had a food orgasm!" It's only slightly more expensive than McD. You do have to wait quite a while for a table, though, the place is always packed.

      George Ranks used to have excellent food when Dave Irvin owned it (he's been to chef school and had recipes published in gourmet cooking magazines), and food there was downright cheap. Lunch was usually about five or ten bucks if you refrained from alcohol; Dave got the people in there with great, cheap food and made tons of money selling drinks, which were priced about the same as other bars in the area. It's under new ownership now, food is crappy and expensive and the drinks are cheap. I expect them to go out of business within a year.

      Good food doesn't have to be expensive. Good programming and fast programming are usually exclusive. I'd call these folks good hackers rather than good programmers, since they're writing quick and dirty code with no time for refinement or craftsmanship.

      That said, I've written my share of quick and dirty code. I always hated doing it, though.

    12. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As a programmer I just had to debug my own code. As a sysadmin I have to debug everyone else's. ;)

    13. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      There isn't a whole lot I can add to the rebukes my sibling posters gave you but if competence at your sysadmin job could be faked between Google and random trivia then you aren't what I was talking about.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    14. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by rivaldufus · · Score: 1

      I see this a lot. systems/network administrators are not developers and developers are not systems/network admins. Just because you've read some RFCs doesn't mean you understand how the multitude of vendors have implemented them. Developers usually do a bad job of managing systems... mainly from inexperience. Likewise, sysadmins don't usually write great code.

    15. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by JonySuede · · Score: 1

      That said, I've written my share of quick and dirty code. I always hated doing it, though.

      This is what I prefer, and thankfully, it is now a big part of my job.

      That being said, I have the chance to never have this code see production without being enterprisified by the professional developers under my command. The two frequent use case I encounter for that type of coding is when a showstopping bug happen or when a proof of concept is required before allocating resources to a project.

      --
      Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
    16. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by _Shad0w_ · · Score: 2

      Debugging production problems is the development team's problem where I work, ditto for anything related to databases used by our software.

      --

      Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.

    17. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by JonySuede · · Score: 1

      You have to ensure that developers can deliver product, ensure uptime, debug production performance problems...

      Here I do that for the application expressed by the code under my jurisdiction, the web team lead architect does that for theirs and so does the one in IT. We have hardware-network team that keep the machines and networks running, all under the supervision of the info-sec team.

      --
      Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
    18. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by JonySuede · · Score: 1
      --
      Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
    19. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      So you have a team for your team so you can work together while you work together?

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    20. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by vlm · · Score: 1

      That said, I've written my share of quick and dirty code. I always hated doing it, though.

      ... The agonizing experience of "Ah, its an icky hack, but I'll just run it this one time, you know for cleanup" and next thing you know to your horror it somehow winds its way into production. Oh the pain it burns.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    21. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    22. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by JonySuede · · Score: 1

      yeah this is the result of successive change of management in a bureaucracy ruled by a committee of committees.

      --
      Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
    23. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Its actually a lot hard to be a sysadmin than most developers thing...

      Totally agree with that. Just because you developed the car doesn't mean you're the best driver out there.

    24. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To tell the truth, I think it's more about the experience and abilities necessary to achieve senior levels of each respective profession. Once upon a time, I competed in city-wide programming competitions, went to college, majored in CS, and joined the programming team. One year we reached the ACM international finals. We didn't win. ;)

      In any case, of the four of us on that team, 2 now write code for Google, and I'm a sysadmin. It's not about "harder than" or "better than". It's about whether we can structure our thoughts to solve the complex problems that we face. And over the years, we get more experience recognizing "already solved problems" and can make judgement calls on how to most quickly and efficiently address them.

      That's more the measure of a person than a profession, IMHO.

    25. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by Gorobei · · Score: 1

      Has anyone ever compiled a report on the longer term noteworthy projects of these competitive programmers? I'd be interested in seeing if there is anything I use regularly or admire would be on the list. If they aren't cut out for that I'd bet they'd make hulluva sys-admins though.

      I've interviewed many and hired some of these guys. They tend to be much better than average in the right environment. Watch a few of PM's screencasts, you'll see a) things are named well and consistently, b) he doesn't run the code until he thinks the algorithm is right, c) a lot of it works first time, d) if it doesn't run first time, he thinks and the problem and then fixes it.

      The ability to accurately write 20 lines of production quality code and have it run first time is a pretty good basic skill to have. He could probably do 100 lines just as well.

      This type of skill doesn't ensure you'll create great longer term projects, but the ability to bash out four or five solid tests of your ideas is a pretty good start. All my group's software architects have this skill down pat: a five-page, production quality POC is often the only reasonable basis to discuss a complex idea.

    26. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They appreciate quality food that takes time to prepare.

      So do I. I don't give a rat's tail what you can come up with in 2 hours. What are you wise enough to come up with in two years?

      And is what you come up with understandable and maintainable by the next person?

    27. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Remember that article about Petr Mitrichev that told us about how he has been working for years on google's search engine algorithms? I think I might have read about it on Slashdot or something.

    28. Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by Lando · · Score: 1

      Not sure what you are saying here. When I worked in system administration, I didn't do much programming. But I can remember having to scan code quickly when problems arose at times. Other times it was about setting up automation, ensuring packages worked well together, knowing the right people to call if I couldn't fix the problem quickly, documenting the systems, interviewing vendors, etc, etc, etc.

      I'm just saying that the skills involved as a system admin are different than those of a developer and that there is no direct comparison between the jobs. Developer work is a much slower pace and you get to know the systems you are working with well, whereas I was responsible for a couple of hundred machines running different applications, pretty hard to know every system in depth.

      --
      /* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
  5. Re:LOL by CanHasDIY · · Score: 1

    Might as well have a world's greatest virgin competition...

    ...

    Which makes me ponder, by what metric would we measure the "world's greatest virgin?" Ability to remain abstinent in the face of constant temptation?


    Damn you, AC, you just stole my afternoon...

    --
    An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
  6. Street Corner Of Programming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    A place where you can programmers that can give you quick, dirty code that gets the job done but ultimately leaves you with a disease.

  7. Does the fastest code handle all cases? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    While there is a huge difference between a good coder and an average one, I always preferred one who thought out all the possible data cases and programmed not just for the norm but for the exception. Not to mention one who spent more time on creating test cases than actual coding. And doing speed tests of the code. The life cycle costs of the great programmer's code is so superior to the average that it is worth while paying the price to get it right the first time it goes in a customer visible release.

    I've seen bug fixes cost more than the original functionality cost to create.

    Said from a perspective of one who mucked around with OSs for 37 years.

  8. Fast != Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This competition produce the fastest programmer.

    I was under the impression that a good programmer had a clear and easy style, was writing comments etc.
    Do you really think that's what's mesured in these competitions ? I'm sure their code is horrible.

    1. Re:Fast != Good by tomhath · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's like saying it's silly to swim the butterfly because it's more efficient to swim the front crawl, or saying it's silly to not use your hands while playing soccer. It's a competition, you can argue whether it's measuring the right thing or not, but this guy seems to be the best. Why don't you enter one and see how you do?

    2. Re:Fast != Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Good point. Moreover, I find it somewhat amusing how some people seem to suggest that good "competitive programmers" write "horrible" code. Not surprisingly, it's only people who have no experience in competitive programming who could hold this belief.

      For those unfamiliar with this, I suggest you replace terms like "Competitive Programmer" and similar with "Algorithm Problem Solver" or something similar. This begins to give you an idea why it's actually quite natural that good "competitive programmers" write very good code.

      A fairly good competitive programmer can recognise the core of the problem very quickly and knows which algorithms to use for the solution, and how to combine them effectively. On the other hand, you can very frequently recognise who is a beginner in these competitions: it's the people who try "clever" tricks like writing "y = x << 1" instead of "y = x*2" (which is actually useless). Those are the people who don't really understand that the complexity and the beauty of a problem is in the algorithms. And those are the people who write "horrible" code.

      Another example to illustrate this: think about Quick Sort. You could write a quicksort routine in one line in languages like Haskell or Lisp, or you could write it in 20 lines in C++. Still, it's a quicksort, and any good programmer would recognise it and be able to maintain that code easily.

      One final point: the world's top programmers (the really *really* good ones) eat books like "The Art of Computer Programming" for breakfast. Do you really expect to see "ugly" code from them? :).

    3. Re:Fast != Good by sydneyfong · · Score: 1

      In those competitions, reducing the amount of typing actually goes towards your benefit. I know, because I've sort of played with those things some years ago (until I realized I'm at most mediocre at that stuff). So the code *does* look ugly (or at least incomprehensible). I'd be surprised if they use variable names more than two characters.

      I know a guy who's been in the IOI and ACM World Finals, and he's famous for not doing any indentation :-p

      Of course, the vast majority of them know the difference between "competition code style" and "normal code style", but still it's more than using longer variable names and doing proper indentation and those stuff. But then, to be honest, learning how to write "good" code is much much much easier than learning to solve those algorithmic problems within 30 minutes.

      --
      Don't quote me on this.
  9. The Fast and the Furious... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 1

    ...a little known sport where competitors furiously code for five hours in pursuit of glory and cash prizes...

    That was the original story line for a movie, but I hear Vin Diesel preferred cars over code.

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    1. Re:The Fast and the Furious... by turbidostato · · Score: 1

      "That was the original story line for aÂmovie
      , but I hear Vin Diesel preferred cars over code."

      Yes. The one about coding was starred by Emacsn Gasoline instead.

    2. Re:The Fast and the Furious... by Surt · · Score: 1

      Why isn't this +5 funny yet?

      --
      "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
    3. Re:The Fast and the Furious... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Vim Gasoline

  10. So if programming now is a REAL sport . . . by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 1

    . . . which drugs are we supposed to take, to improve our performance? Will they institute doping controls?

    All REAL sports have drugs. If your sport does not involve drug enhanced performance, it isn't a REAL sport.

    --
    Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    1. Re:So if programming now is a REAL sport . . . by AugstWest · · Score: 1

      Ritalin, Adderal, the list goes on.

    2. Re:So if programming now is a REAL sport . . . by Ichoran · · Score: 1

      Caffeine?

    3. Re:So if programming now is a REAL sport . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    4. Re:So if programming now is a REAL sport . . . by Githaron · · Score: 1

      Red Bull and Mountain Dew?

    5. Re:So if programming now is a REAL sport . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Modanafil, dextroamphetamine

    6. Re:So if programming now is a REAL sport . . . by mkkohls · · Score: 1

      . . . which drugs are we supposed to take, to improve our performance? Will they institute doping controls?

      All REAL sports have drugs. If your sport does not involve drug enhanced performance, it isn't a REAL sport.

      As you should all know it's alcohol .

    7. Re:So if programming now is a REAL sport . . . by Surt · · Score: 1

      Sadly, drug abuse is actually quite prevalent in the sport.

      --
      "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
  11. Name your price! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'd say that the biggest problem here is that being good at these competitions does not necessarily mean that one would provide great value for the company and it does not even have much to do with technical skills.

    Speed programmer in interview, "I win competitions where I write code fast and it works."

    Employer, seeing a proven productive programmer that will reduce development costs, "You're hired!"

    But go ahead, all of you tell yourself how you plan more, design better, think about the problem and come up with an optimal solution - while your meter is running. Go ahead and try, just try, to convince a company that your way is better than the speed programming champion.

    ROI talks, bullshit walks.

    Yeah, yeah, yeah ... talk to the hand!

    1. Re:Name your price! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I'd say that the biggest problem here is that being good at these competitions does not necessarily mean that one would provide great value for the company and it does not even have much to do with technical skills.

      Speed programmer in interview, "I win competitions where I write code fast and it works."

      Employer, seeing a proven productive programmer that will reduce development costs, "You're hired!"

      But go ahead, all of you tell yourself how you plan more, design better, think about the problem and come up with an optimal solution - while your meter is running. Go ahead and try, just try, to convince a company that your way is better than the speed programming champion.

      ROI talks, bullshit walks.

      Yeah, yeah, yeah ... talk to the hand!

      And yet, Google, Apple, Facebook, et al are constantly forced to keep buying out companies made of people they evidently didn't hire and aren't cutthroat speed freak coders so they can get a jump start on solving problems their speed freaks DIDN'T solve.

      No, no, that's wise business sense. Hiring the slick competition coder for $200k/year and then having to buy out another company that did the job right for $50M two years later is economical.

    2. Re:Name your price! by Surt · · Score: 1

      And yet .... Google is the one with the 50 mil to do the buying.

      --
      "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
    3. Re:Name your price! by RabidReindeer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ROI talks, bullshit walks.

      True ROI includes a lot more than just how fast the code got written. It includes how easy it is to maintain, how reliable it is, and these days, almost invariably how secure it is.

      Beware of bean-counters. Anything that doesn't look like a bean, they ignore.

    4. Re:Name your price! by VGPowerlord · · Score: 1

      And yet .... Google is the one with the 50 mil to do the buying.

      ...by having a near monopoly in the online advertising business, not because of their software business.

      --
      GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
    5. Re:Name your price! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      I can write code a lot faster if I don't care about maintaining it in a few years' time than if I do. There are times when getting something finished quickly is the most important goal, because you need to use it right now, but you'll throw it away soon after. There are also times when getting something structurally correct is far more important, because you (or, ideally, someone else), will be working on that same codebase 10-20 years down the road. And there are also a lot of situations somewhere in the middle, where you need something with well-defined modularity, but it's okay to put ugly hacks inside the modules for later refactoring because, while you hope you'll be working on it in 10 years time, you won't if the company goes bust in six months because it has no product to ship. A lot of developers are much better at one extreme of this spectrum than the other and it's a mistake to hire someone who excels at one to do the opposite.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    6. Re:Name your price! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'd say that the biggest problem here is that being good at these competitions does not necessarily mean that one would provide great value for the company and it does not even have much to do with technical skills.

      Speed programmer in interview, "I win competitions where I write code fast and it works."

      Employer, seeing a proven productive programmer that will reduce development costs, "You're hired!"

      But go ahead, all of you tell yourself how you plan more, design better, think about the problem and come up with an optimal solution - while your meter is running. Go ahead and try, just try, to convince a company that your way is better than the speed programming champion.

      ROI talks, bullshit walks.

      Yeah, yeah, yeah ... talk to the hand!

      If these competitions are anything like the ACM competitions I competed in in college, the problems are well defined and have detailed specifications on the input and output expected. Real world problems are usually closer to a paragraph of semi-coherent rambling from a barely literate manager/marketing exec.

      It doesn't matter how fast you can solve the problem if you're solving the wrong problem, and programming competitions don't generally test the skills involved in parsing "customer-speak" into requirements that can be built towards.

      If I were trying to convince someone to hire me over a competition programmer I'd say something like:
      "Fast only wins the race if you're going in the right direction. I write code that works, and solves the problem you wanted solved."

    7. Re:Name your price! by BronsCon · · Score: 1

      Yes, ok, version 1 gets out the door that much faster. Great.

      Version 2? Well, since the speed coding champ banged out code that did one thing, one specific way, under a specific set of conditions, it's gonna take a ibt longer.

      Had the project been properly engineered, version 2, 3, and 4 could all be released much more quickly than the speed coder initially banged out version 1. You could be working on version 5 by the time your speed coder wraps up version 2.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    8. Re:Name your price! by Surt · · Score: 1

      One could argue that their monopoly on that business exists only because of their software. But that would be crazy because their dominance of that industry clearly predates their software development phase.

      --
      "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
  12. Re:LOL by coldfarnorth · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Woah. I'm surprised you can type with that chip on your shoulder. Ease up there . . .

    --
    Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
  13. Re:LOL by shentino · · Score: 1

    Eunuchs have an unfair advantage.

  14. I'm a machine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that turns coffee into code.

  15. The World's Greatest Competitive Middle Manager by MyLongNickName · · Score: 5, Funny

    As a manager, our tests are a bit more strenuous reflecting the importance of the synergies of many diverse skills. The dynamic test includes email with a certain threshold of cc’s to disinterested parties. We get bonus points for lunches out and extra points on top of that for lunches paid for by vendors. A second part of the exam includes writing unintelligible memos and unfollowable policies. Tests are administered through the cloud, using value-added third-party vendors. Oh yeah, more bonus points for using management speak words.

    I'm world champion, baby.

    --
    See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
    1. Re:The World's Greatest Competitive Middle Manager by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Reading this made me happy. I am a new hire in an oil/gas industry writing code. My understanding is that recently management has shifted significantly.

      Regardless the middle managements seems to be impressively aware of the lower levels they enforce on us. Just this morning I had a very progressive discussion with my boss about removing a broken part of our system and replacing it with something else entirely.

  16. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    not a chip. it's the truth most peoples' egos won't allow them to see.

  17. Re:LOL by AngryDeuce · · Score: 0

    Shit, that ain't nothing. Look at these two ladykillers at the world's fastest typist competition. You know that bearded guy has never seen a vagina before in person.

    That's all gonna change now that he's the world's fastest typist, though. Fame, fortune, and beautiful women await!

  18. Re:LOL by Eponymous+Hero · · Score: 1
    lmao. what do you write, cobol? there are tons of programming jobs out there. i'm finding about 10 good candidate jobs out of every 50 i look at. i get solicited for my skills all the time. maybe you need to move to where the programming jobs are at.

    most of the programmers I've met are also politically correct bitches who do what their wives tell them to, making them perfect pets for their feminist indoctrinated wives

    back the truck up. this is what normal people call a "married man." the wife doesn't have to be feminist and the man doesn't have to be a programmer. i get the feeling you live in a very remote place and never travel more than a 20 mile radius from your home. have you even kissed a girl yet?

    --
    insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
  19. Privacy issues by ccguy · · Score: 1

    Seems interesting that the registration link is not https

    http://www.facebook.com/hackercup/register

    1. Re:Privacy issues by Skapare · · Score: 5, Funny

      Maybe not secure, but they developed the site in 21.3 seconds.

      --
      now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
  20. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A friend of mine lost his virginity in Phoenix, at ACM conference, and we were there for the college programming contest.

    The fact that the 21+ year old guy that didn't lose his virginity until college is being held up as an example of success with the ladies among programmers is fucking hysterical.

  21. Re:LOL by Tuidjy · · Score: 1

    > you and your 'colleagues' just won a lottery

    Sure, it sounds like a lottery. No way the ACM finalists would be able to find jobs on the basis of their skills alone. It has to be luck.

    "I believe in luck. That's how I explain the success of people whom I hate and envy"

    --
    No good deed goes unpunished...
  22. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    i'm finding about 10 good candidate jobs out of every 50 i look at.

    Are you dull? What matters is how many good people are applying for each job.

    i get solicited for my skills all the time.

    Then either your existing clients are asking for more work, which is barely solicitation, or you believe all those e-mails from recruiters.

    The programming market in the US is awful. Unless you're already a senior programmer, in which case you're fine unless you're in an unfashionable field and have just been made redundant, it's extremely hard to get a job. I say this as a business owner who watches excellent candidates scramble for employment.

  23. Detroit Public Schools HS programming teams by logicassasin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I went to high school in Detroit in the late 80's and, believe it or not, there was an official city-wide high school computer programming league much like the high school sports teams. We were given a list of individual tasks and had to write a program in BASIC on IBM XT's and the entire event was timed. Each working program was dropped onto floppy and handed to the judges to execute with their own data sets and we were scored based on time to execute (if it took too long it had to be rewritten) and if it actually worked.

    I led my school's team to 3rd place three years in a row back then. I had often wondered if there were leagues like this in other cities. Not sure if it still exists either but it was great back then.

    --
    Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
    1. Re:Detroit Public Schools HS programming teams by Wordplay · · Score: 1

      I did this sort of thing in high school in the late 80s during individual regional contests, but never in league play. That would have been fun!

    2. Re:Detroit Public Schools HS programming teams by KingMotley · · Score: 1

      There was in Illinois, but it wasn't a team sport. Everyone competed on their own. I took first place in state.

  24. Sprint vs. marathon. You need them both. by sgtrock · · Score: 0

    There are times when you need someone who can come in, find a quick hit solution that works, and moves on. There are also times when you need someone who can sit down, thoroughly analyze the situation, devise a long term plan to resolve it, and stick with it through to completion.

  25. Re:LOL by oakgrove · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think maybe back before the 80s when you had to be really hard-core to be committed enough not only to own a computer but to actually be willing to put in the effort of being proficient with it on a technical basis, many of the people in that category were probably the stereotypical nerd. These days with the easy availability of hardware and the accessibility of tools, a much more representative cross-section of the population is getting into the game. I'd say at least 2/3 of the successful programmers I know are just common ordinary dudes that while not being overtly alpha like a jock are certainly not what you would associate with the live-at-home basement dweller we all joke about. As a matter of fact most of those basement "nerds" are usually just gamers and enthusiasts that can regale you with the minutia of which sata cable is the best and which graphics card is the most value for the money but would be totally lost without a GUI to click on. And you can forget about them being able to program anything as who has time for that when there's a RAID, MAN!?!

    --
    The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
  26. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    lmao. what do you write, cobol? there are tons of programming jobs out there. i'm finding about 10 good candidate jobs out of every 50 i look at. i get solicited for my skills all the time. maybe you need to move to where the programming jobs are at.

    There aren't enough positions to go around, sorry. Most of those opening you see are either already filled, or are open for a reason. A negative one.

    back the truck up. this is what normal people call a "married man." the wife doesn't have to be feminist and the man doesn't have to be a programmer. i get the feeling you live in a very remote place and never travel more than a 20 mile radius from your home. have you even kissed a girl yet?

    So doing what your wife tells you like mom to son is what constitutes a married man today? You know what? You're right! Pathetic, isn't it? Guys like you who revolve their self worth around their success with women are a big part of this problem. Keep flagellating yourself sir. Maybe, if you do it enough, maybe women will like you more! Fire off all the ad hom you want, it doesn't help your case.

  27. Re:LOL by Sir_Sri · · Score: 1

    If you can convert being a computer nerd into a successful component of your career it can certainly help attract women. If your computer nerd behaviour is your life, without anything but personal fulfillment from it (i.e. you happily lounge around in your underwear eating twinkies and can't get a decent job) then you're unlikely to have much success with the ladies.

    The effect of being employed by google or facebook helps a lot too, since non tech people at least know those companies exist. I know a guy who used to work at ATI (when it was still ATI). When women asked where he worked rather than saying "ATI" he said "I design computer parts at a company at the 404 and 407" (404 and 407 are highways that anyone in toronto would know, though technically ATI HQ is one block west of that at Leslie). That made a big difference in his success with the ladies, and took him quite a while of failed attempts to impress saying ATI to find a better strategy. In *any* technical field it's really important to know how to relate to people who aren't in that field and the computer nerd stereotype can very much be overcome if you just assume people you meet know absolutely nothing about the computer industry, and don't act like they should.

  28. Re:LOL by hackula · · Score: 0

    Hm, is it the lottery where everyone wins who buys a ticket? Every programmer I know who is reasonably up to date and has one modicum of social sense (the bar is quite low here. Pretty much "don't creep out the HR girl in the interview by talking about your assault rifle collection" should cover it) gets 3 or 4 unsolicited calls per week from recruiters begging for them to interview. Seriously, get a Linkedin profile, write "programmer" in the skills section, and watch the emails flood in. If your skill set is 30 years out of date and you use nothing but AS400 RPG2 or you refuse to use a mainstream platform/language then it is your own damn fault. If you have any experience in C# or Java, and cannot get a job, there must be something horribly horribly wrong (other languages are good too, and I do not actually use much of either at work these days, but they are currently pretty much job-guaranteed languages).

  29. Videos of Mr. Petr Mitrichev coding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
  30. made the mistake of hiring one once by Surt · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Once. Consistently ranked in the top 5% on a lot of these coding competitions. He's really fast. Gets amazing things working in remarkably short time. Unfortunately they're an unmaintainable mess, and tend to be packed with bugs. They work for exactly the cases known at the start (well, sometimes only even most of those), and break as soon as they find a new edge case. We got a very low to possibly negative net productivity out of him.

    --
    "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
    1. Re:made the mistake of hiring one once by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm sorry that I let you down, sir.

      for x=1 to 10
      writeline ("Forgive me");
      next

    2. Re:made the mistake of hiring one once by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, it would have been better had he been lower than 5% in the rankings.

    3. Re:made the mistake of hiring one once by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      5% is very easy to get. -.- (I did and I am not good at all) Petr is in top 0.01%. No surprise google trusts their search engine on them.

  31. Re:Sprint vs. marathon. You need them both. by Skapare · · Score: 1

    I don't think they do programming contests for large scale projects that need to be reliable, accurate, and thoroughly secure ... such as a banking system. I would not put a whole lot of value in contest wins when hiring developers for such projects.

    --
    now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
  32. Spades by sexconker · · Score: 1

    Let's call a spade a spade.
    Companies aren't funding this shit to look for top talent, they're funding this shit to look for efficient monkey slaves.

  33. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The programming market in the US is awful. Unless you're already a senior programmer, in which case you're fine unless you're in an unfashionable field and have just been made redundant, it's extremely hard to get a job. I say this as a business owner who watches excellent candidates scramble for employment.

    Correction: The programming market in the US varies by region. In the Midwest, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an available programming job.

    I have heard that the situation is much as you describe along the East and West Coasts, though.

  34. Amazing that he does this for relaxation now by PhamTrinli · · Score: 1

    I've done these while preparing for a job interview, and they are really hard (apart from the earlier competitions). It's amazing to me that this guy does them for relaxation. It shows just how different people can be, or how plastic the brain is.

  35. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Intelligence is luck, just like retardation. No-one was born "deserving" their intelligence or stupidity.

    Envy is a rational response to the arbitrary hands nature deals. Religion teaches us that envy is bad because, well, then you might actually dare to speak up against the status quo. This is why Western children are taught from a young age that envy is wrong.

    That's not what your parent was arguing, of course. Though perhaps it should have been.

  36. High-level vs. Low-level coding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If your algorithms change or need to be adjusted frequently then you may need to modify the relative level of the coding. For example, if you go to a doctor they won't tell you a bunch of medical jargon and expect that you know what it means...even though they're precisely explaining what is going on, what will transpire, and what the solution is; they will tell you in terms that you can understand. The same is true with programming. For very complex algorithms that can be maintained by a couple people you have more flexibility with how low-level you can be with the data structures and overall design. If you have a vast set of algorithms that many people must maintain the it make sense to "dumb" it down a little and focus more on creating a maintainable codebase rather than something overly complex.

  37. Re:Sprint vs. marathon. You need them both. by tnk1 · · Score: 1

    If you start off with the second person, you generally do not need the first person.

    I have nothing against these sorts of contests, but I'd rather see a competition where a developer writes an elegant solution to a problem in some reasonable amount of time, and *documents their approach completely*.

    Code poorly designed and without a good set of documentation is a perishable asset to any business that has changing needs... which is most of them.

  38. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yes, because success with the ladies (if you can even call most of them that nowadays) is the only measurement of worth men have, right?

  39. "I code to win for me!" by Trashcan+Romeo · · Score: 1

    "For me!"

  40. Re:LOL by Sun · · Score: 1

    Intelligence is luck, just like retardation. No-one was born "deserving" their intelligence or stupidity.

    So far, so good.

    Envy is a rational response to the arbitrary hands nature deals.

    There is nothing rational about envy. Rationally, some people have to be smarter than others, just as some people have to get lucky. It is not rational to discriminate against smarter people for being smarter, nor is it rational to try and eliminate luck.

    Religion teaches us that envy is bad because, well, then you might actually dare to speak up against the status quo. This is why Western children are taught from a young age that envy is wrong.

    I don't know about "wrong". Envy means wasting time and energy over things you cannot, and probably shouldn't, change. You can prevent a certain undeserving (whatever that means) someone from being popular or successful, but you simply cannot prevent undeserving people, in general, from being so.

    Spend that energy you meant to burn over jealousy and anger into making yourself better, for whatever definition of "better" that suites you (richer, more educated, better married, whatever), accept that some people will always be better, by your own criteria, than you, and you will lead much happier life than by being envious.

    I don't know whether envy is a "bad" thing, but it is certainly counter productive and unhelpful all round.

    Shachar

  41. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    But... but... it's a really awesome assault rifle collection! Each unit lovingly wrapped in the skin of a dead woman's underwear. What would be the point of it if not to get a job easier?

    I even wrote some software specifically to organize it by age of the victim.

  42. lambda lamda lamda! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    On your mark!
    Get set!
    Nerds!!!

  43. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So, it's cool to lose your virginity in college after you're old enough to get into a bar? And you make it sound like he more or less "bought" it. Yeah, totally not a loser.

  44. Re:LOL by Eponymous+Hero · · Score: 1

    i now dedicate every single post i write in lowercase to your dissatisfaction. may you suffer severely for a very long time. here's some lowercase business ipsum to keep the suffering going...

    completely customize process-centric catalysts for change vis-a-vis dynamic supply chains. efficiently synergize seamless leadership rather than 24/7 users. competently target economically sound roi whereas 2.0 markets. continually evolve highly efficient total linkage through multidisciplinary web services. collaboratively embrace client-focused portals through cooperative customer service. progressively leverage existing focused materials after cross-platform total linkage. continually mesh resource sucking schemas via b2c alignments. globally cultivate sustainable vortals after compelling markets. compellingly network client-focused services for global meta-services.

    professionally reintermediate compelling best practices via timely best practices. dynamically scale seamless users via wireless infrastructures. continually administrate magnetic content through multimedia based platforms. rapidiously formulate bricks-and-clicks content without intuitive paradigms. continually incentivize effective strategic theme areas through interdependent markets. compellingly deploy resource maximizing results after turnkey systems. credibly grow stand-alone growth strategies with bricks-and-clicks partnerships. authoritatively matrix one-to-one infrastructures after process-centric schemas. competently matrix plug-and-play models with state of the art sources.

    professionally evisculate virtual e-tailers with team driven architectures. competently customize standardized metrics after innovative processes. monotonectally embrace team driven e-services after excellent process improvements. proactively unleash impactful core competencies through standardized deliverables. dynamically incentivize world-class applications after bleeding-edge e-markets. dynamically generate visionary convergence with functionalized e-commerce. authoritatively evisculate sustainable mindshare via next-generation relationships. credibly underwhelm accurate growth strategies before excellent vortals. assertively drive alternative leadership with b2b interfaces. dramatically harness resource maximizing metrics without strategic synergy. proactively cultivate enterprise-wide e-business without out-of-the-box customer service. assertively restore global growth strategies without performance based growth strategies.

    i wish i could be there in person to watch you twitch out.

    --
    insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
  45. Re:LOL by HeckRuler · · Score: 2

    Yeah, pretty much this.

    But to ward all you coasters away from my precious succulent jobs, I'll warn you that we hit 110 degF back there, and the entire month of July was 90+ and humid. Our winters AVERAGE at 18 degF, can swing down to -20 and we regularly get feet of snow that lasts the entire winter (just not the last one, that was pretty mild). You have to drive 3 hours before you reach civilization. We don't have fresh fish. And remember to scrap the mud off your boots before you get on our wooden sidewalks.

  46. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    it could've just as easily been you.. you and your 'colleagues' just won a lottery..

    I've noticed that those who are unhappy with their lot in life almost always blame outside influences for their situation (even supernatural ones, as in your case), rather than looking inward to see what they could be doing differently. It's always somebody else's fault. The world is against me. I just have bad luck. The Man is trying to keep me down. Any of those sound familiar?

    Newsflash: Life is not fair. The world owes you nothing. You have you carve out your own living on this rock. If you were fortunate enough to be born into a western society where water, food, and shelter are easy to come by, then you have nobody but yourself to blame for your lack of success.

    there aren't enough positions to go around no matter how good the programmer is.

    I've been an avionics technician, a helpdesk monkey, a sysadmin, a consultant, a web developer, and a software engineer. I have no college degree, I'm 30 years old, and make almost 6 figures in the Midwest. I've never had a "break in employment" since I landed my first job as a teenager. Do you think that's because I sat around and fucking waited for a position to open up for me?

    besides being relatively wealthy, most of the programmers I've met are also politically correct bitches who do what their wives tell them to, making them perfect pets for their feminist indoctrinated wives. that might make the marriages 'successful', on the outside, but the psychological dynamics on the inside are inhuman.

    Misogyny much? Wow.

  47. Re:LOL by Hork_Monkey · · Score: 1

    So everyone else has the problem, and you're the only one who doesn't.

    In my experience, that is usually a red flag.

  48. good for R&D by KernelMuncher · · Score: 1

    I think people who excel at competitions would be a perfect fit for Research and Development positions. That would include programming jobs on the cutting edge of some field (computational biology, financial engineering, petabyte data analytics, etc). The speed and insight required for competition success is exactly the qualities you'd want in roles like that. However prize-winning programmers might find normal enterprise computing jobs dull or uninteresting and would probably not be a good fit. Kentucky Derby winners don't make good plow horses !

  49. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Clearly you've never heard of the Brogrammer. Yeap, the guy in that pic is me. Usually I have three. Suck it, bitch.

  50. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No, but its a big one

  51. Sure, coding from scratch... by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, coding something from scratch over a few hours that works and solves a tough problem is impressive.

    What I really want to see is the "coding hurdles", where developers are thrown into a nightmare of an existing project with 100k lines of bad code, and told to implement five new features... now THAT would be something!

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:Sure, coding from scratch... by CodeBuster · · Score: 1

      where developers are thrown into a nightmare of an existing project with 100k lines of bad code, and told to implement five new features

      Do we get a bonus for submissions that cause the compiler to tap out?

  52. Google Code Jam by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Definitely my favorite competitive programming competition is the Google Code Jam.

    Held annually, its a pretty nice competition. The qualifying round gives you as much time as you want, you just need to get a minimum points to go on. From there, each round is timed, and has 3 sub-rounds set at different times throughout the day. (Its an international competition). Competitors are ranked first by points (correct answers) and then ties are sorted by time taken. The top X of each round goes on to the next. The final round of 25 competitors takes place at Google.

    They're really fun and very challenging. Google comes up with interesting questions, so there's nothing boilerplate here. They often have fun or humorous references, such as the 2011 code jam referencing Portal 2. (In a legally distinct manner). You receive a question, and a very simple example input. Then, when your program is ready, you can ask for the real data input, and you have 5 minutes to submit the proper output as requested by the problem. Performance is not directly judged, but there is a small input set and a large input set (worth more points), and the large input set is specifically chosen by google to be unfeasible to calculate without a sufficient big-O efficiency.

    I highly recommend everyone have a go at it! :D You can practice previous year's problems any time you want.

    http://code.google.com/codejam/

    1. Re:Google Code Jam by MtHuurne · · Score: 1

      My favorite was the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, but you have to be a student to participate in it. Google Code Jam is a very good alternative though and the type of problems is quite similar. I know that I have zero chance of making it to the final, but I did manage to score well enough to get a T-shirt this year.

  53. Is it? by CosaNostra+Pizza+Inc · · Score: 1

    Does competitive programming including games where you must drink a tequila after every x-minutes or x-lines of coding or like something similar to "The Social Network"?

  54. "Best" is a HIGHLY subjective, & variable, ter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's like when I listened to a VERY wise man once in the NFL on TV during an interview (Dexter Manley an NFL star, was great in his time): The interviewer said pretty much along the lines of this to him:

    "Dexter, you're All-Pro this & that: Greatest at your position, perhaps best ever!"

    He said, wisely, in reply:

    ---

    "Guys, listen: There's a guy out there, right now, sitting on a couch watching this. He didn't have the grades, or the luck, to have gone past highschool sports (but he did have the raw skills + inborn talent) - he could be ME, right NOW, and do better... a lot of life, is luck"

    ---

    I am forced to agree. I've seen it in coding, sports, academics, & yes, on the job professionally as a coder too!

    Edward VanHalen of musical "Rock-N-Roll" fame also said something that SORT of dovetails into that:

    ---

    "If I didn't have this guitar and time I put into it? I'd be out there pumping gas..."

    ---

    (In other words, he put in the TIME & EFFORT, & got lucky it paid off! That, in & of itself, CAN BE A GAMBLE!)

    Now, do I *think* the guy this article's about is GOOD? Sure!

    Why?

    He's consistent... that's a mark of a 'great one'!

    * Some "Food 4 Thought", people...

    APK

    P.S.=> I've done some "OK" stuff in my time in the software programming arena, both professionally and in the freeware/shareware circuit, & I've determined 1 thing:

    THERE IS NO "BEST"... not in programming, sports, music, heck - anything!

    There's just more focused & determined workers, who really put their "ALL" into a particular program or topic, and excel because of it... but even they, at least the intelligent ones, most likely realize what I did, or what any boxer knows: Everyone has STRENGTHS in particular areas, & WEAKNESSES in others, nobody knows it all!

    Plus, face it:

    Yes, you can have "off days" (what writers call 'writers-block' pretty much), & can have FAIL days too... there's always SOMEONE out there that could "take you on, & out" (Any day of the week... period!)...

    ... apk

  55. BBD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dude, you pegged my Buzzword Bullshit Detector in the first sentence. Well played sir! :D

  56. Re:LOL by BronsCon · · Score: 1

    i think i love you. no homo.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  57. Arguably by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    >Improving search results now involves more subtle tweaks, such as finding synonyms or other language tricks to help extract extra meaning from a user's search terms.

  58. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Well, the bearded guy DID come out of one on the day he was born.

    Also, he may have spent some time at a house of ill repute.

  59. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    yes, because not using a shift key on a casual forum equates to joblessness. i'd expect this from today's crop of 18yos, but not from someone with a 5 digit uid. surely you can reason better than the supposed idiocy you're ranting about?

  60. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    1. lotteries aren't supernatural.

    2. never said it was 'always' someone else's fault. we don't live in vaccums so everyones life situation is governed by chance. you can manipulate it somewhat with effort, but the result desired is not even close to a given.

    3. that's right, the world owes us nothing. if anything I agreed with you, so maybe society should quit blaming people/calling them losers if they can't find work. if life isn't fair, it can't be entirely their fault. the real question is, what should these people do? just because you've gotten a stellar work career and never fell off doesn't mean the rest of us have. spare me the preaching if you haven't lived that life, thank you. it's these western societies that only allow one shot and zero fails that cause these situations in the first place. such societies deserve the run amok socialism these 'unemployable vagrants' demand (and usually get) at the expense of your liberties.

    4. oh? so you magically made up work from nothing? how else would a position open? either the company's hiring or it's not. sometimes, you can manipulate your way in, but that is not usually the case.

    4. ad hom much? wow. nowhere did I say I hate women. only people who've been indoctrinated to knee-jerk defend feminism from any and all criticism say that. I relayed my anecdotal observations of typical marital dynamics today. most guys today are pathetic spineless twats, employed or not.

  61. Rather than a solver of laid out complex problem by presidenteloco · · Score: 2

    I would rather have someone with good ability to create a well-factored domain model and description of solution requirements, given a client with a vague idea of what they want.

    I would rather have someone who can first come up with all the important design constraints and trade-offs in a domain and problem, then creatively suggest alternative solutions, then they can methodically explore and compare how well each solution meets the constraints, and can methodically explore the pro-con decision tree on the trade-offs, to perhaps come up with a least bad solution (from this perspective), then a least bad solution (from that other perspective/priority weighting).

    And I would rather have someone with great debugging skills; a great designer of experiments, a methodical fact gatherer, who knows what they don't know, and also one who occasionally gets, after pondering or exploring, deep creative insights into the probable or possible cause of the bug; someone who can debug well on their own or in a dialectic conversation with another programmer.

    --

    Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
  62. no contest by systemsplanet · · Score: 1

    Those of you, who think you code it all, are very annoying to those of us who do.

  63. Re:Rather than a solver of laid out complex proble by Hogmoru · · Score: 1

    Logged in to mod this up. No mod points. Me sad.

  64. Re:LOL by mcgrew · · Score: 1

    Sorry, but I read. There are certain conventions that make reading easier, and your writing in lowercase IS AS BAD AS WRITING IN ALL CAPS. IT'S EXACTLY THE SAME THING, KID.

    If you want an adult to read what you write and take you seriously, do it correctly or be known as a childish fool.

    If you want me to read that wall of gibberish, rewrite it like you would write a story or resume. It's unreadable as is. You show contempt for those you wish to communicate with, don't expect any readers.

  65. Re:LOL by Eponymous+Hero · · Score: 1

    yeah the excellent karma just magically appeared. nobody reads what i say let alone agrees with me. you need to let it go man. you're gonna break out in hives if you keep this up. btw, you keep calling me kid. how old are you, if you don't mind me asking?

    --
    insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
  66. Re:LOL by kbx911 · · Score: 0

    lol nice burn, the OP's comment "Might as well have a world's greatest virgin competition..." was really really stupid, why do stupid cmments get shown up first on /.?

  67. oh yeah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I think I was this on NBC Olympics coverage last night.

  68. Re:LOL by uninformedLuddite · · Score: 1

    He had me at 'progressively leverage existing focused materials'

    --
    The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
  69. Re:LOL by uninformedLuddite · · Score: 1

    So how's the weather up there? is it lonely?

    --
    The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
  70. Re:LOL by uninformedLuddite · · Score: 1

    He probably bought it on craigslist

    --
    The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
  71. Re:LOL by uninformedLuddite · · Score: 1

    So do my PDP RT11 TSX RPL skillz get me a call?

    --
    The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.