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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."
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.
We're talking about coding competitions here, not posting-to-slashdot competitions.
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.
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?
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
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.
...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. . . .
. . . 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!
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. . .
Eunuchs have an unfair advantage.
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.
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?
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
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
Seems interesting that the registration link is not https
http://www.facebook.com/hackercup/register
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
"For me!"
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
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.
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
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...
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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
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.
So everyone else has the problem, and you're the only one who doesn't.
In my experience, that is usually a red flag.
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 !
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
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
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"?
i think i love you. no homo.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.
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.
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?
Those of you, who think you code it all, are very annoying to those of us who do.
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
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.
Logged in to mod this up. No mod points. Me sad.
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.
Free Martian Whores!
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
He had me at 'progressively leverage existing focused materials'
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
So how's the weather up there? is it lonely?
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
He probably bought it on craigslist
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
So do my PDP RT11 TSX RPL skillz get me a call?
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.