Google Code Jam 2003 Announced

An anonymous reader says "O'Reilly Developer News is reporting details of the newest Google programming contest, Google Code Jam 2003. Prizes range from t-shirts to ten grand and you can use any programming language you want to solve the increasingly challenging problems." Update by J : ... as long as it's Java, C++, C# or VB.NET.

Programming competitions, give me a break

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is looking for engineers with the programming skill to rewrite the world's information infrastructure.

Yeah, right. As somebody who manages a number of programmers, I know that the kinds of people who win competitions like this (such as topcoder) simply won't make very good employees. The best programmers I work with are team players who know how to communicate, document and manage working relationships. The high-intensity macho time-critical programming that these competitions fosters is usually counterproductive in a business environment.

- W G

Obviously looking for people to hire

[Washizu]

Friday, October 17 8:00 AM
Monday, October 20 8:00 AM
Friday, November 14 4:00 PM

Who with a job could participate?

Re:Cheap Labor

[MagPulse]

Ha ha. Except:

1. They pay problem writers to come up with fully tested solutions in all four languages.
2. These problems are variants of well-known CS problems and distilled to their essence. Real-world problems are 80% special cases.

great idea

[zarniwhoop]

how about running a competition to tackle large, real-world problems? Like efficient search engines, indexing etc - these problems are big problems that need solving.

As the lady said, faster's not better

[orthogonal]

Programming with a time limit is not a great indication of how likely someone is to writes= robust, durable, re-usable code.

My best code usually results from refactoring, and is made up of several small classes made up of small functions, where each function does one thing and does it well, and each class has a well-defined role, usually in collaboration with other classes.

This is the result of crafting and thinking, not a result of typing as fast as I can, trying for a quick and dirty solution to one specific problem.

Re:Programming competitions, give me a break

[lars]

[i]The best programmers I work with are team players who know how to communicate, document and manage working relationships.[/i]

Wouldn't you know it, most of the highly ranked TopCoders I've met excel in all of the areas you mention. Just because someone is smart and skilled at one thing doesn't mean they're deficient in other areas. Usually there's quite a strong correlation.

[i]The high-intensity macho time-critical programming that these competitions fosters is usually counterproductive in a business environment.[/i]

TopCoder emphasizes (or attempts to) problem solving skills, which tend to be universally applicable.

Re:Programming competitions, give me a break

[geekoid]

Gee, whatever you do, don't do the tasks neccessary to see that communication happens. I mean you would really want to manage now, would you?

Mos of the top programmers I have worked with, hateed meetings, came to work around 9-10 oclock, worked till 6-7 oclock and were very terse when documanting.
However, I trusted there skills, and respected there experience, and saw to it that they had direction. These guys kicked out some wicked code that blew people away.
When I was managing, I took the intiative to see that what was needed to be communicated, was communicated.

Re:Mmm..

[EastCoastSurfer]

the only thing sweeter than money earned is money won.

So true, but let me add to it. Money won from someone else just like you is the purest form of what you describe. For example, winning at blackjack in a casino is fun, but beating people at the poker table is a rush that can't be matched.

Re:Any language?

[Chundra]

I wonder why python isn't listed...this quote comes right off the python.org front page:

"Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we're looking for more people with skills in this language." said Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google, Inc.

VB.NET! Christ!

Re:TopCoder competitions low on quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

There is an plugin available that wil parse the problem and write out the declarations and such for you, together with a testing harness to run all the sample testcases at once without you having to type them in. It is legal to use it in the contest.

Also, many of the higher rank coders have a library of macros they use. Bascially a few pages of stuff they paste befroe every solution. (Note: They all agree that this should never be done in production code, so even if you're horrified don't assume they'll be coding like this in the real world).

Things like:
#define for_all(it, x) for(it = x.begin();it!=x.end(); ++it)

The above saves time when writing STL loops (All highly ranked topcoders doing C++ use the STL heavily).

Register with topcoder and you can look at the high ranked people, and their asnwers to previous problems. You'll see what I mean.