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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?
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. . .
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
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.
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
Maybe not secure, but they developed the site in 21.3 seconds.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
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