Slashdot Mirror
Meet the Michael Jordan of Sport Coding
pacopico writes: Gennady Korotkevich — aka Tourist — has spent a decade ruling the world of sport coding. He dominates TopCoder, Codeforces and just about every tournament sponsored by the likes of Google and Facebook. Bloomberg has profiled Korotkevich's rise through the sport coding ranks and taken a deep look at what makes this sport weirdly wonderful. The big takeaway from the piece seems to be that sport coding has emerged as a way for very young coders to make names for themselves and get top jobs — sometimes by skipping college altogether.
Man makes name for himself in industry after years of hard work, study, diligent research - not fucking news.
Man is briefly fastest coder after leaving school because he can't cope with having to learn a bit of history alongside his talents - fucking news.
Stop this shit, because Kid who is briefly fastest coder could have gone to fucking school, even specialist computing school, and been an even better coder.
But that's not fucking news, is it?
Nothing compared to speed posting.
There are the solitary genius bloggers, often in academia, and there are the people who listen and work well in a bigger team. often in an office environment.
Then there are people who do well at quizzes.
For some reason we're obsessing with this last category. Perhaps it's that a lot of pseudopsychology has entered the hiring process, and we assume it's possible to use simple markers of complex abilities. It isn't. The same rule as ever applies: the guy who likes his work and who has a track record of doing good work is the one you want. The rock stars are good performers, so put them on stage, but not behind a desk.
Ballmer peak
The recent "social coding" phenomenon is anything but social.
For those who don't know, it takes the traditional idea of open source software development, but infuses it with concepts from the social media sphere.
People get together on sites like GitHub, which allows source code hosting, plus a bunch of Facebook-like functionality. The code isn't there just because it's code that does something of practical value; the code is there because it's an idol that needs to be worshipped, even if it's rife with bugs and generally useless. The bug tracker isn't about reporting and following the progress of problems; it's a medium for ongoing social discussion. The wiki isn't about community-driven documentation about the software; it's a platform for the politically correct crowd to post codes-of-conduct and to outdo one another at being the most "tolerant".
It's no longer just about people getting together online to work on open source software. It's about this software consuming one's life and social identity.
It's not about people working together to build something great. It's not about writing high-quality, useful software. It's about who can submit the most (typically useless) issues, or who can submit the most (typically useless) pull requests, or who can add the most (typically useless) unit tests, or who can inject (typically useless) information into each and every discussion. It's about who can most loudly accuse others of being "intolerant" in the bug report comments.
Social coding brings out the worst people, and it brings out the worst in these people. It's not about strong personalities like Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman who can also create great software. It's about mediocre, if not outright awful, programmers who can't program worth a damn, yet who feel the need to build up this aura of them being fantastic programmers who churn out many lines of code, submit many patches, create many wiki pages, and report many bugs, even if all of this work is utter shit.
In the end, social coding ends up being a very anti-social activity. It attracts social rejects who aren't there to communicate in any good-natured way, but who rather try to outcompete one another on pointless metrics, perhaps in order to feel some sense of power in a life that they otherwise have no control over, or perhaps to get some sense of value out of a life that's otherwise void of all purpose.
People from around the world working together on an open source project in order to create great software is an amazing thing, and it should be encouraged. People from around the world working together on an open source project in order to find some shred of meaning in a meaningless existence is a disturbing thing, and it should be discouraged.
To save others googling - Jordan is a freakishly tall black American former professional basketball player.
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOO! MOOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU C++ COWS!!
I'm thankful for this each and every day! You people make my life so much easier.
See, my job is to come along and fix the many, many mistakes that self-taught programmers tend to make.
These self-taught programmers create absolutely monstrous software disasters. These systems are utterly broken from top to bottom.
Thanks to my many years of formal education and experience, I know how to easily avoid the mistakes that these untrained amateurs make time and time again.
I take completely broken software systems hacked together by self-taught programmers, and turn them into reliable systems that actually work.
Yes, that often does mean throwing away most, if not all, of your work. But if it weren't for all of these self-taught programmers half-assing it all over the place, I wouldn't have a job!
In fact, the more you get paid, the more I eventually get paid when I clean up your disaster! You guys set the baseline high, which I then get to multiply many times over.
Keep doing what you're doing! I'm actually really looking forward to the crap you guys will do with Rust. I see it's getting more and more hype, and I know that it won't live up to this hype. I'm going to have many lucrative years ahead replacing awful Rust code with working C++ code, I do believe!
This is yet another way industry is trying to dumb-down the intellectual and creative processes involved in software development. These companies will not be happy unlike they can hire a dollar-a-day "coder" standing outside Home Depot.
I actually RTFA, because this interested me. And its a fascinating subject. I only sorta knew about these, i.e. hackathons, but I didn't realize there where giant, international, money-prize competitions. This, to me, is coding in its rawest, purest form. No business side, no integration, just problem solving in all its pure elegance and source code in all its unhindered, non-process, non-styleguide'd glory. I know I'm a huge geek but its honestly breathtaking.
That being said...this article is horrible. Ashlee Vance, you might be some sort of bestselling darling-of-the-tech-world author, and congrats on your book on Elon Musk or whatever, but I found this writing almost painful to read.
Theyâ(TM)re not the healthiest-looking bunch, with an average weight that appears to be no more than 120 pounds. There's a disturbingly stereotypical assortment of ticks, both verbal and gesticular, as well as bowl haircuts, wan faces, and shabby clothes. Mark Zuckerberg would look like an Adonis in this room.
his hands swing into motion and beat down on the keyboard with the incredible speed of a court stenographer in the most productive part of a meth binge.
I just have to wonder, why are these writers such assholes? I thought we as a tech society were past nerd bashing. Apparently the "mainstream" is still all about jock-like superiority over other people. Yup, these coder competitors are really smart and hard-working, probably more so than you. So you have to bash them? Why?
I'll leave you with one last quote:
His friends explain that he mostly shuns the press after Wired did a story several years ago, which posited the idea that Korotkevich might âoedie a virgin.â
So does anyone know of any good online tech zines that embrace and exalt this culture, instead of trying to find ways to tear people down?
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
As an employer, I would pick best of these guys over college grads every time.
839*929
I could have sworn I heard "JUST DO IT!" right before my team and I started sport coding the other day...oh wait, that was my boss and I was at work. Sport coding FTW!
I've taken part in a few of these (long ago), but the 'coding' was always extremely minimal. Winning came down to being good at math, knowing things like how to find intersections between a circle and a line, for example. It's cool if people know that, but in my experience with practical for-profit coding for the last twenty years, such problems hardly ever come up - and if they do, it is as a very small part of a much larger piece of software.
In my opinion, the skills demonstrates in this type of coding contest have almost no bearing on any kind of coding carreer. By which I do not mean to downplay their obvious mad c0ding skillz, these are some very smart people, but the article suggests these guys would have high value as corporate coders, which I find rather doubtful.
Something very, very, very wrong in the world if "sport coding" is a thing.
Google buys sport coding live streaming startup in 10 ... 9 ... 8 ... 7 ... ... ...
!!!
Isn't it just perfect to compare the leading top coder to the world's most recognizable figure from team sports?
So how about Nadia Comaneci?
Well, if we eliminate Nadia (either because we can't properly spell her surname on Slashdot, or because none of the 8-digit UIDs know who the fuck she is) then who are we left with, from an individual sport?
I don't think Tiger was ever accused of being perma-virgin material (ditto for Nadal). Pancho Gonzales seems a bit too troubled, but (despite being an elite athlete) he did share the tournaments general disregard for healthy living:
So I'm going to have to go with Rod Laver, the most impressive specimen most people who use the internet have barely heard of.
(I tried to add the 'c' onto 'lick' but /.'s subject length limit prevented me from doing so.)
There's no such thing as "sport coding"!
i bet her vagina smells like garbage, rotten eggs, and fish
I hope no one is equating coding fast with coding well.
How fast is he at re-writing the code to be well thought out, properly designed and correct?
J
He won silver medal at international informatics olympiad and he is a college dropout. He is probably the smartest programmer i know. The people saying that a guy like that can't integrate systems or write code in large complex systems don't know what they are talking about. He now writes linux kernel code, that's pretty complex most of the times. I saw some pretty cool optimizations from him in code that was already written/tested to be high performance. Some people who think about themselves great coders should really try to solve at least one DIV1 topcoder problem.
Thirteen year old mentality; empty cans of Mountain Dew laying about; fingers stained from Doritos.
All that's missing is a mom to scream profanities at, and "sport coders" would fit right in.
I pity the next person that comes along and has to maintain the code that this guy will write.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
It is so funny to read all the hate for competitive programming by people that know nothing about it and nothing about the people involved. I guess, somehow people feel superior because they don't participate? If the only thing I knew about a person was that he/she was brilliant in some particular area, I would assume that they have a better than average chance of being brilliant in other areas, especially related areas. And although I am not a world class programmer myself (even though I literally have a Ph.D. in algorithms) I have had the pleasure of knowing many of the top competitive programmers and can verify that everyone that I know there is a very well rounded coder and normal, social person. Probably more normal than people that spend a lot of time complaining on Slashdot (irony noted). Speed coding is only one thing they can do. They have normal jobs that require their teams to interface with clients, design user interfaces, produce production code, do testing, write documentation, fix bugs, etc. and they do it well. And something that is often missed is that competitive coding is fun. Fun to do and fun to watch. Just like any other sport. Watch this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It is a little hard to tell who is a competitor and who is staff member or sponsor in this video, but basically if they say something dumb, they are not a competitor.