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The World's Greatest Competitive Programmer

Posted by timothy on from the wait-for-the-congressional-hearings dept.

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."

6 of 202 comments (clear)

  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 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
    2. 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.

    3. 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
    4. 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.

  2. 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.