Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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