Most of the competitors don't live in Mom's basement, many earn more than enough money not to have to do that. In addition, one of the finalists was just hired by Google, and UBS, one of the sponsors of the event has made two hires so far from the field of TopCoder competitors in the last year or two. VeriSign has also hired many TopCoder competitors and were a sponsor at this year's event.....
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Most of the competitors don't live in Mom's basement, many earn more than enough money not to have to do that. In addition, one of the finalists was just hired by Google, and UBS, one of the sponsors of the event has made two hires so far from the field of TopCoder competitors in the last year or two. VeriSign has also hired many TopCoder competitors and were a sponsor at this year's event.....
So then, how do you square the fact that Poland only makes up .0058% of the world population and they had 11 representatives at this competition???
Surely, there's more at work than just raw numbers here.