The World's Greatest Competitive Programmer

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The World's Greatest Competitive Programmer

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 7, 2012 @04:34AM 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."

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As a Professional Developer... by jellomizer · 2012-08-07 04:37 · 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.

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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 · 2012-08-07 04:40 · 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.
  
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  "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 · 2012-08-07 04:52 · 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 Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-07 04:55 · 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.
4. Re:As a Professional Developer... by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · 2012-08-07 04:59 · 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.
  
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5. Re:As a Professional Developer... by vlm · 2012-08-07 05:04 · 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.
  
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  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
6. Re:As a Professional Developer... by oakgrove · 2012-08-07 05:12 · 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.
  
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Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-07 04:38 · Score: 5, Funny

We're talking about coding competitions here, not posting-to-slashdot competitions.
Re:Heard of the slow food movement? by oakgrove · 2012-08-07 05:01 · 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.

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The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
The World's Greatest Competitive Middle Manager by MyLongNickName · 2012-08-07 05:08 · 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.

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See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Re:Privacy issues by Skapare · 2012-08-07 05:44 · Score: 5, Funny

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

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now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Sure, coding from scratch... by SuperKendall · 2012-08-07 07:44 · 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!

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"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley