Google Code Jam Winner Announced 325
Wild-eyed Visionary writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, Jimmy Mardell, 25, of Stockholm, Sweden, beat out more than 5,000 coders to win $10,000 in Google's second annual
Code Jam programming contest.
Second place: Christopher Hendrie (Canada),
third place: Eugene Vasilchenko (Russia),
fourth place: Tomasz Czajka (Poland).
Tom Rokicki, of dvips/Radical Eye Software fame, was the oldest finalist at age 40."
What did they write? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google - Champion of the Common Man (Score:5, Insightful)
Congrats to the guys who won, and a special congratulation to Google for being my favorite company on planet earth.
Re:Bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
you run a company where you don't hire certain people b/c of arbitrary charecteristics and see how well you do.... I want to be your competitor so I can crush with w/ my diverse team of superior intellect and ability because I draw from a larger pool of talent instead of your artifically limited one....
Re:Anyone notice that the winners are... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yay Jimmy! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure everyone who's ever owned a recent TI graphing calculator (TI-83 and up) will remember zTetris, among other puzzle games, that Jimmy wrote.
Jimmy Mardell [ticalc.org]
Re:Google - Champion of the Common Man (Score:5, Insightful)
Your two aforementioned companies are both publicly owned. They are legally bound to do what is in the best financial interests of their shareholders. The actual owners of the company are not involved in the daily management and have only one, single-minded reason for owning stock: profit.
When Google finally bites the bullet and has a billion dollars in other people's money, a old-school board of directors, along with the need to please the SEC and Wall Street analysts, things will change drastically. You'll suddenly see Google become much more conservative because they have so many interests to look out for and competing voices to listen to.
Then some other upstart, agile company will usurp the crown and be the geek's new flavor-of-the-week. It's just how capitalism works. The moral: Don't get to blindly attacted to Google or you're going to feel deeply betrayed--they *are* only a business after all.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Decency? This was a competion and the best men won, what's indecent about that?
Patriotism? If google ran a crooked competition where an american got a prize they didn't earn would that make you proud? Wouldn't it be better to keep trying until you win fair and square and then take pride in that?
Re:Anyone notice that the winners are... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
It'd be interesting to see how our top X compare to another country's top X or just who has the top coder over all.
The statistics as they are, are pretty much meaningless.
Ben
Re:Anyone notice that the winners are... (Score:3, Insightful)
That argument doesn't hold water when you account for the penetration of computers into the lives of those 5.7 billion vs. our 300 million.
www.topcoder.com - you are being exploited! (Score:2, Insightful)
The people who are competing for prizes are, AFAICT, donating their labor to solve real problems for real companies. Take a look at the set of current "competitions" here [topcoder.com]
Or, how about this quote (trying to lure "customers", ahem... Donations for competitions):
or, this one:
So, do you want to work for free, for a chance to win less than you would have made in your job to do the same thing? All for the opportunity to get listed as a good coder on a site that exploits you?
If so, be embarrassed... Be very embarrassed.
Totally worth it (Score:3, Insightful)
Just to clue you in to a little known fact:
The vast majority of people in developed countries make nowhere near $70 an hour.
I'd venture that a lot of the people going in for something like that probably make more in the $10-20 range.
$10,000 is a hell of a lot of money for someone just starting out, or not making $140,000 a year like yourself.
Re:Bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry to the americans that *aren't* like that - as with most things, the few spoil it for everyone.
The problem with TopCoder (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is all well and good if you need to hack something out real quick, but if you need to get something stable, robust, high performance and high quality, you're talking about a whole different set of skills.
Re:Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google - Champion of the Common Man (Score:5, Insightful)
I use google all the time, because they know what I want, not because they are some sort of do-gooders... Because they aren't.
Re:Bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Now THERE'S a Polish Joke for you! (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't have many universities (for the size of the population) but they provide some of the toughest, highest quality courses in math, engineering and Computer Science.
I spent only three years in a Polish high school (they normally last four or five years) and went straight to a third year of a top British University in their Electrical Engineering programme. All of the math required was covered in the first couple of years in my high school.
Re:Google is snobby.. I hope this wakes them up (Score:2, Insightful)
First of all, a Comp Sci degree consists of more than simply programming courses. In fact, instruction in particular programming languages is minimal in any decent Comp Sci program of which I know. What you learn instead are concepts, which if you learn them adequately, you should be able to apply to any number of situations. Besides computer related courses, you are also required to take courses that may be in unrelated subjects like (gasp!) English, History, Philosophy, or the Arts and Social Sciences in general. Being able to succeed in a broad range of courses and being able to learn abstract concepts indicates to an employer that you can do more than just code. Frankly, I would rather take a job that requires a degree than one that doesn't, because chances are that the job that requires a degree will allow some career mobility and won't restrict you to solely being a coder for the time during which you are at the company. The job that requires only that you know umpteen million languages or software products basically means you will be confined to a very narrow role while you're employed in that job, and when those particular tasks are no longer relevant to the company, you will be expendable.
I have worked with "college dropouts" in the past, and my experience has not been the most positive. Some of them, I agree, were very good coders, but this seemed to be the extent of their abilities. There were certain aspects of the product on which I worked that had a more mathematical bent, and when these aspects of the product were discussed among the degreed developers, those without the degrees seemed to have no clue what we were talking about.
Having said all that, I have also worked with degreed developers who are incompetent. But, in general, my expereince has been that those with a degree are better overall developers than those without. I think people in the business world realize this as well, and that is why a lot of jobs in the software industry require a degree.
Re:Anyone notice that the winners are... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google - Champion of the Common Man (Score:3, Insightful)
It's actually very easy to be loyal to smaller companies that still have a human face. As companies grow they usually jump off the cluetrain [cluetrain.com] and become impersonal assholes in order to extract maximum profit. Google is set to do that.
I'm sure COSCO is your kind of company though... cheap slave-products.
--
Re:What did they write? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:First line of the article (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The problem with TopCoder (Score:4, Insightful)
Stupid argument. Draw your own conclusions
Note that when you win NASCAR, the trophy you get isn't for "Safest Commuter Driver" either. TopCoder, however, supposedly ranks developers according to their talent and ability. This is not, however, what they are doing. They're ranking them by their ability to come up with quick hacky solutions - not real software engineering.
Re:The problem with TopCoder (Score:1, Insightful)
As for what one can conclude from the TopCoder FAQ --
they say they're looking for ways to make their contests
measure coding skills other than quickly hacking out minimal algorithms to simple problem descriptions. Therefore one can conclude that that's all their contests measure.