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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.
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.
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
It really depends on what you need them for. Are you developing software with complex functionality or algorithms? Then you can probably use a good top coder. If your software does not have complex functionality but lives in a complex environment, or is simply very large, then you'll want a strong software engineer and architect but you can get away with using average coders. If you work in a complex business setting, you need good business analysts with excellent people skills. These are all gross generalisations but you get the general idea.
Also, in all but a few exceptional cases I would prefer a good programmer who gets along with others over a superhuman coder with poor people skills. The first one will function in a team, coach others to make them better coders as well, and won't be shy to propose better ways of working, tools, processes, etc. The second one will probably end up pissing everybody off.
The coaching bit is the secret sauce to a good tech career, by the way. Good employees continue to grow throughout their career; great employees help others to grow and become more productive as well. Do this well and you'll likely to be recognized for it. One of the reasons that managers are perceived as important (and get paid well) is that they are in a position to make such a difference in team productivity (in reality, they often have an adverse effect). Becoming 10% better yourself is nice, but make a 10 man team perform 10% better is even nicer.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.