The World's Greatest Competitive Programmer 202
An anonymous reader writes "Technology Review profiles Petr Mitrichev, who has since 2005 dominated the world of competitive programming, a little known sport where competitors furiously code for five hours in pursuit of glory and cash prizes worth tens of thousands of dollars. Mitrichev now works for Google, and competes only for leisure, but is still ranked number one. Many large tech companies, such as Facebook and Google, now sponsor and pay close attention to competitive coding contests, seeing them as a place to recruit new talent."
As a Professional Developer... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Professional Developer, competitions hurt my ego, so I will come up with scores of excuses on how competitive programming isn't a good measure of one skill. I prefer to keep the illusion that I am the best programmer out there, just because I tend to out perform my peers.
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Wow - Mod this one +1 Honest :)
Min
Re:As a Professional Developer... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a decent measure, but not a great one, since it adds a time-based component. Saying that being the best competitive programmer is a measure of overall skill is like saying the best speed-chess player is the best overall chess player. It simply isn't true (although it could be, it usually isn't), although the speed-chess player is undoubtedly very good.
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Sure, some of the technically best programmers are slow as hell, but these companies want their products out fast. I'm not surprised they shop there.
Re:As a Professional Developer... (Score:5, Interesting)
Does nobody remember an article on Slashdot a few years back?
1. The top programmers are 4x as productive as the average one.
2. There are some problems the top programmers can do the average ones cannot no matter how much time they were given.
If you don't fall into that category, and you probably know if you do, don't bother.
Actually the fastest guy would probably benefit from a small audience of programmers pointing out he missed a semicolon or that array is wrong-sized somewhere. This would be obvious to you as such a top programmer.
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This being said, I had the chance to participe to some Topcoder SRM with Petr (even in the same "room"), and
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Actually the fastest guy would probably benefit from a small audience of programmers pointing out he missed a semicolon or that array is wrong-sized somewhere. This would be obvious to you as such a top programmer.
Where I work, we inflict this on all our "top" programmers. You want that code in, you get a review. A star programmer produces more and better code when four or five junior developers are critiquing his code for missed edge cases, confusing function names, ugly control flow, lack of unittests, etc.
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I'm not the best, I'm just competent. I know I'm better than some people I've worked with, I also know I'm nowhere near as good as other people I've worked with. I do what my employers want: they feed me a requirement, I churn out working code.
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Drag racing probably started out as two guys competing to see whether the Ford or Chevy could haul a bale of hay uphill faster.
Fast-forward a couple decades, and the only competitive drag racers are cars that can't burn normal gasoline or haul even 2 people and can literally barely turn at all.
Weird stuff happens when you optimize along one or two dimensions only.
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To be clear, it's not like (at the highest level) they are doing something in 1 hour that would take the average guy 4 or something. The top level problems are often difficult enough that an average programmer would never complete them (or at least not without significant outside assistance and/or further education). Between equally matched competitors it can sometimes be a race, but in general these competitions are better thought of as tests: can you solve this problem?
Comparing top competitors to regul
Heard of the slow food movement? (Score:4, Interesting)
They appreciate quality food that takes time to prepare.
So do I. I don't give a rat's tail what you can come up with in 2 hours. What are you wise enough to come up with in two years?
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If you absolutely must do a food analogy you would do better to compare McDonalds "food" with a fancy gourmet restaurant. Certainly for a given number of employees in a limited amount of time, serving up Big Macs will always win any unit production or economic profit contest, but...
Or if you're willing to permit inter species competition you've got the whole flies on dog poop thing and "a trillion flies can't all be wrong" etc etc.
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An excellent restaraunt doesn't have to be any more expensive than MacDonald's. D'Arcy's Pint here in Springfield (my favorite eatery) has food so good I once took a fat woman there, and walking back to the car she said "I had a food orgasm!" It's only slightly more expensive than McD. You do have to wait quite a while for a table, though, the place is always packed.
George Ranks used to have excellent food when Dave Irvin owned it (he's been to chef school and had recipes published in gourmet cooking magazi
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That said, I've written my share of quick and dirty code. I always hated doing it, though.
This is what I prefer, and thankfully, it is now a big part of my job.
That being said, I have the chance to never have this code see production without being enterprisified by the professional developers under my command. The two frequent use case I encounter for that type of coding is when a showstopping bug happen or when a proof of concept is required before allocating resources to a project.
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That said, I've written my share of quick and dirty code. I always hated doing it, though.
... The agonizing experience of "Ah, its an icky hack, but I'll just run it this one time, you know for cleanup" and next thing you know to your horror it somehow winds its way into production. Oh the pain it burns.
Re:Heard of the slow food movement? (Score:5, Interesting)
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A sysadmin for a trivial network, maybe. For a non trivial system, being a sysadmin may be harder than being a developer.
You have to ensure that developers can deliver product, ensure uptime, debug production performance problems...
Production performance problems includes finding the easy things like missing indexes on database tables, or optimising SQL to figuring out the appropriate data structures in code. In the past year, I have written, debugged and tuned code in C++, Java, Python, Perl, SQL, Ruby and
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Debugging production problems is the development team's problem where I work, ditto for anything related to databases used by our software.
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You have to ensure that developers can deliver product, ensure uptime, debug production performance problems...
Here I do that for the application expressed by the code under my jurisdiction, the web team lead architect does that for theirs and so does the one in IT. We have hardware-network team that keep the machines and networks running, all under the supervision of the info-sec team.
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Comparing apples to oranges I think. Not saying one is more important than the other, though I suppose you could compare a programmer with a janitor if you really wanted to. System admins have some programming skills, but there is also integration and working on a timeline that you seldom get being a programmer. When the active system has a limited amount of scheduled downtime or when an unexpected failure happens, being able to run through thousands or more lines of code to identify the problem and f
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Not sure what you are saying here. When I worked in system administration, I didn't do much programming. But I can remember having to scan code quickly when problems arose at times. Other times it was about setting up automation, ensuring packages worked well together, knowing the right people to call if I couldn't fix the problem quickly, documenting the systems, interviewing vendors, etc, etc, etc.
I'm just saying that the skills involved as a system admin are different than those of a developer and
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Being a sys admin is a joke compared to being a developer (unless maybe you are a code monkey churning junk). Yes, you need to know lots of random information, but it's all "trivia" style information, e.g., Google knows it all. Being a developer often involves knowing a lot more than language syntax (the "trivia" portion of knowledge here).
How do switches work, and how does that impact how you will lay out your storage networks? Do you need a separate switch for each path between SAN and server-- what sort of impact will that make? How do VLANs work, and what path is traffic likely to travel if you use VLANs and trunk ports going through a layer-3 firewall? What will adding STP do to your network setup? How will it react when a single link is lost, and why?
You may be right that it is a different sort of problem solving, but I think you ar
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Re:Heard of the slow food movement? (Score:4, Interesting)
Mark Zuckerberg competed on TopCoder (though he wasn't terribly committed, and didn't do terribly well) before he was famous. If you follow Slashdot, you'll remember the final Rubik's cube proof - that was done largely by high ranked TopCoders. One of the early developers for Writely was also one of TopCoder's first dominant competitors (snewman). Google is filled with current and former TopCoder competitors - they're doing heavy lifting all over the company, and Google spends tons of time and effort to get more (as do many other companies). I still get calls from companies (particularly high-frequency-trader type companies, but tech in general) fairly often based on my mediocre (and now semi-ancient) TopCoder participation.
Naturally, though, most programmers (of any sort) are going to be fairly anonymous contributors on larger projects.
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Has anyone ever compiled a report on the longer term noteworthy projects of these competitive programmers? I'd be interested in seeing if there is anything I use regularly or admire would be on the list. If they aren't cut out for that I'd bet they'd make hulluva sys-admins though.
I've interviewed many and hired some of these guys. They tend to be much better than average in the right environment. Watch a few of PM's screencasts, you'll see a) things are named well and consistently, b) he doesn't run the code until he thinks the algorithm is right, c) a lot of it works first time, d) if it doesn't run first time, he thinks and the problem and then fixes it.
The ability to accurately write 20 lines of production quality code and have it run first time is a pretty good basic skill to ha
Re:As a Professional Developer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it an effective metric to rank skill?
Yes it is maybe not the skills you care about, but it is most assuredly a measure of skill. I could see how having someone on the team that has almost immediate insight into how to solve complex problems would save an entire team time. Doesn't mean the same person is the best choice to sit down and write the enterprise level code to actually implement their insight though.
Rather than a solver of laid out complex problem (Score:3)
I would rather have someone with good ability to create a well-factored domain model and description of solution requirements, given a client with a vague idea of what they want.
I would rather have someone who can first come up with all the important design constraints and trade-offs in a domain and problem, then creatively suggest alternative solutions, then they can methodically explore and compare how well each solution meets the constraints, and can methodically explore the pro-con decision tree on the
Re:As a Professional Developer... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, and given how tough a lot of the programming challenge questions are (I did a few in college, and did reasonably well), being able to win a competition means the person was able to solve most or all of the problems, correctly, and *with all the edge cases considered*, in a very short period of time. So while I wouldn't care if a guy was #1 in the world or #10 in his college, I would see someone doing well in it as a very good recommendation for their programming skills.
Thinking of all the edge cases i
Re:As a Professional Developer... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say that the biggest problem here is that being good at these competitions does not necessarily mean that one would provide great value for the company and it does not even have much to do with technical skills. In the real world the problems are never well defined, the "scoring" rules are non-existent. Then, there are "people" skills.
I don't want to diminish this guy's achievement, I know for sure he is a great developer in all other respects, but these competitions measure only one projection of a skill on a specific axis.
Re:As a Professional Developer... (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot the most important part from an economic standpoint, maintainability.
I can squirt out multi line regexes that are not troubleshootable by anyone, not even myself. Very quickly too. Doesn't mean its a good long term idea.
You know you're in trouble when the fastest way to debug a big mass of regex is to rewrite it from scratch.
Re:Name your price! (Score:5, Insightful)
ROI talks, bullshit walks.
True ROI includes a lot more than just how fast the code got written. It includes how easy it is to maintain, how reliable it is, and these days, almost invariably how secure it is.
Beware of bean-counters. Anything that doesn't look like a bean, they ignore.
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Version 2? Well, since the speed coding champ banged out code that did one thing, one specific way, under a specific set of conditions, it's gonna take a ibt longer.
Had the project been properly engineered, version 2, 3, and 4 could all be released much more quickly than the speed coder initially banged out version 1. You could be working on version 5 by the time your speed coder wraps up version 2.
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And yet .... Google is the one with the 50 mil to do the buying.
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And yet .... Google is the one with the 50 mil to do the buying.
...by having a near monopoly in the online advertising business, not because of their software business.
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One could argue that their monopoly on that business exists only because of their software. But that would be crazy because their dominance of that industry clearly predates their software development phase.
Re:As a Professional Developer... (Score:5, Interesting)
As a Professional Developer, competitions hurt my ego, so I will come up with scores of excuses on how competitive programming isn't a good measure of one skill. I prefer to keep the illusion that I am the best programmer out there, just because I tend to out perform my peers.
As a former competitive programmer (ACM/ICPC, TopCoder, UVA, IPSC, you name it) and a long time professional programmer (going on 13 years now) I have to say that I have never seen such a rate of improvement in my programming abilities as the couple of years that I took competitions seriously.
These improvements included not only coding speed, but also high accuracy under time constraints, the ability to predict and analyze edge cases and weird scenarios, thinking about efficiency in terms of Big-O and implementation specific constants, and a lot more. Not to mention a good working knowledge of a lot of data structures and algorithms most programmers never even hear about, which is a given for any competitive competitive programmer. These traits, I think you agree, are what every good programmer could use.
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I was an early Beta Tester for TopCoder... That turned me off to the competitive programming thing. (even though I won... Only because I was the only one who submitted code... It didn't even compile, they didn't bother telling us what was needed to compile the code. I tried uploading my Jar file, I tried just uploading my source... It compiles fine on my computer but just not on the TopCoder. I was tremendously frustrated with it.
They probably have fixed it sense the early Beta Days. But sense then the id
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First Impressions, are always the biggest ones.
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Syntax errors, are the biggest ones.
Re:As a Professional Developer... (Score:5, Funny)
I used to read the alumni magazine USC sends me. About 10 years ago I started an article about some woman who was upholding USC standards yada yada, and she had three patents, fed starving children in Africa, brought ponies to the poor kids in Australia, helped fight an Ebola outbreak in, wherever, Canada or something, and was now starting a tech business, and on and on...
Turn the page to her photo and details. She's... 26 years old. That was the turning point for me. Well, one of them.I realized I was shit and started hating the world. Some people just have what I call the life force, and I know I don't have it, and no, it's not intended as a SW reference.
I built an awesome mountain temple this week in Minecraft, though... has an indoor forest... yeah, I suck. :(
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Some people just happen to be in the right place at the right time. They're not necessarily the best at what they're doing, but they were able to capitalize on the opportunities when they arose. Many people wouldn't even notice the opportunity if it presented itself others cripple themselves with self doubt or stubbornness.
In my experience, having a pool of dependable contacts is the best path to success. If you weren't lucky enough to grow up in the right neighborhood or didn't attend one of the top univer
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Oh, I'm not a strict nature or nurture type by any stretch, but I can't escape the sense that there is some inadequately defined factor involved. It could be one or the other or a function of both. People call it drive or ambition but what I'm trying to describe seems to be an unconscious source that leads to those other things.
All I really know is that I don't have it. My head is full of neat projects, but I no longer have the ability to see the point to doing any of them, and even when I did it seemed mor
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Well... I was thinking of building a suspension bridge from the temple to the neighboring mountain.
Maybe I should finally start a Facebook account. The XBox Minecraft can automatically post screenshots to your Facebook. I'd use it just for that.
I'll go the extra mile and make the bridge purple. Man, that's a lot of dye and a lot of sheep.
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Thanks, anonymous entity. :)
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Well, competitive programming with a time limit seems to be vastly different from real world programming. In the length it takes to do the competition I may only have come up with a few lines of code and am still waiting for a build to finish or I spent that time just trying to figure out what a bug might be. My guess is that they do a lot of incredibly high level code, slapping together pre-built components, etc. Then presumably you have to be highly knowledgeable in one particular area and hope that's
Re:As a Professional Developer... (Score:5, Interesting)
After writing this, I got on a little bit of a tangent so it isn't all necessarily directed at you, LifeIs0x2A so don't be offended if it seems slightly condescending or obnoxious.
If you're proficient in practically any language, find a small under 10 person company to work for and it almost doesn't matter what you do they'll think you walk on water. Of course, do a good job out of professional pride if nothing else but in small businesses the IT guy that "makes shit happen" gets a ton of respect. Early in my career I started out at a sports wholesale distributor that wanted to insource their IT stuff. A friend of a friend heard about it and got me the interview. As a hobbyist I was already proficient in Python, Java, and web technology in addition to odds and ends like AutoIt and the ilk. I aced the "interview" which was basically, "Can you do computer stuff?" and got started. There was so much slop that could easily be automated I was like a kid in a candy store. One minute I was writing a custom database front-end that shortened the 20 minutes it took to enter products into the website to about 2 minutes and the next moment I was working on the sales/CMS application the salespeople (when it was finished) started running around with. It was great. It got to the point that the bosses daughter was bringing me home cooked meals to my desk everyday already heated up and ready to go. I'll stop there.
The point is if Google won't hire you then fuck them. If you have some skills then alpha the fuck up and network. There are plenty of opportunities for the taking.
Re:As a Professional Developer... (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you're proficient in practically any language, find a small under 10 person company to work for and it almost doesn't matter what you do they'll think you walk on water.
No offence taken. Why do you think I founded my own company? :-) Like that I can witness myself walking on water every single day!
It got to the point that the bosses daughter was bringing me home cooked meals to my desk everyday already heated up and ready to go. I'll stop there.
I have to admit, that sounds tempting..
The point is if Google won't hire you then fuck them. If you have some skills then alpha the fuck up and network. There are plenty of opportunities for the taking.
Right, actually it was a good thing they didn't take me. I think what I'm doing now is the right way.
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I can say I am Bill Gates you know.
Most advice Bill Gates could ever give you would likely be worthless. There can be only one Bill Gates and trying to emulate him would only lead you to disappointment. That goes for any hyper-achieving multi-billionaire vis-Ã-vis you. You will never be the man Steve Jobs was or any other titan in the tech industry. If you had that in you we wouldn't be having this conversation. The reason I shared a little bit of my story is that anybody on this site that lives in a free society can do what I did.
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You're not Mr. Bill Gates nor his peer. You cutting him down's laughable.
You're misunderstanding me, AC. I gather English isn't your first language so you might have difficulty picking up on the subtleties. My point was that what worked for Bill Gates would never work for regular people as Bill Gates functions on such a level that getting advice from him would be like trying to get advice from Brad Pitt on how to be stunningly handsome. So anything he would like say that you could use would be so general as to be practically worthless. Now if you were the head of some multi-
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Street Corner Of Programming (Score:2, Funny)
The Fast and the Furious... (Score:2)
...a little known sport where competitors furiously code for five hours in pursuit of glory and cash prizes...
That was the original story line for a movie [wikipedia.org], but I hear Vin Diesel preferred cars over code.
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"That was the original story line for aÂmovie
, but I hear Vin Diesel preferred cars over code."
Yes. The one about coding was starred by Emacsn Gasoline instead.
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Why isn't this +5 funny yet?
So if programming now is a REAL sport . . . (Score:2)
. . . which drugs are we supposed to take, to improve our performance? Will they institute doping controls?
All REAL sports have drugs. If your sport does not involve drug enhanced performance, it isn't a REAL sport.
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Ritalin, Adderal, the list goes on.
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Sadly, drug abuse is actually quite prevalent in the sport.
The World's Greatest Competitive Middle Manager (Score:5, Funny)
As a manager, our tests are a bit more strenuous reflecting the importance of the synergies of many diverse skills. The dynamic test includes email with a certain threshold of cc’s to disinterested parties. We get bonus points for lunches out and extra points on top of that for lunches paid for by vendors. A second part of the exam includes writing unintelligible memos and unfollowable policies. Tests are administered through the cloud, using value-added third-party vendors. Oh yeah, more bonus points for using management speak words.
I'm world champion, baby.
Privacy issues (Score:2)
http://www.facebook.com/hackercup/register [facebook.com]
Re:Privacy issues (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe not secure, but they developed the site in 21.3 seconds.
Detroit Public Schools HS programming teams (Score:5, Interesting)
I went to high school in Detroit in the late 80's and, believe it or not, there was an official city-wide high school computer programming league much like the high school sports teams. We were given a list of individual tasks and had to write a program in BASIC on IBM XT's and the entire event was timed. Each working program was dropped onto floppy and handed to the judges to execute with their own data sets and we were scored based on time to execute (if it took too long it had to be rewritten) and if it actually worked.
I led my school's team to 3rd place three years in a row back then. I had often wondered if there were leagues like this in other cities. Not sure if it still exists either but it was great back then.
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I did this sort of thing in high school in the late 80s during individual regional contests, but never in league play. That would have been fun!
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There was in Illinois, but it wasn't a team sport. Everyone competed on their own. I took first place in state.
made the mistake of hiring one once (Score:4, Insightful)
Once. Consistently ranked in the top 5% on a lot of these coding competitions. He's really fast. Gets amazing things working in remarkably short time. Unfortunately they're an unmaintainable mess, and tend to be packed with bugs. They work for exactly the cases known at the start (well, sometimes only even most of those), and break as soon as they find a new edge case. We got a very low to possibly negative net productivity out of him.
Sure, coding from scratch... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, coding something from scratch over a few hours that works and solves a tough problem is impressive.
What I really want to see is the "coding hurdles", where developers are thrown into a nightmare of an existing project with 100k lines of bad code, and told to implement five new features... now THAT would be something!
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where developers are thrown into a nightmare of an existing project with 100k lines of bad code, and told to implement five new features
Do we get a bonus for submissions that cause the compiler to tap out?
Is it? (Score:2)
Re:LOL (Score:5, Funny)
We're talking about coding competitions here, not posting-to-slashdot competitions.
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Heh. Speak for yourself. A friend of mine lost his virginity in Phoenix, at ACM conference, and we were there for the college programming contest. It must have been '94/'95 or something. The organizers were generous, and we ended up at a fancy bar after the closing dinner. We were happy with how we had done, and success + cash is VERY attractive to some women.
Actually, I think that the whole 'computer nerds have no girlfriends' is a obsolete tropes. The losers in their parents' basement, maybe. But no
Re:LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
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If you can convert being a computer nerd into a successful component of your career it can certainly help attract women. If your computer nerd behaviour is your life, without anything but personal fulfillment from it (i.e. you happily lounge around in your underwear eating twinkies and can't get a decent job) then you're unlikely to have much success with the ladies.
The effect of being employed by google or facebook helps a lot too, since non tech people at least know those companies exist. I know a guy w
Re:LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
Woah. I'm surprised you can type with that chip on your shoulder. Ease up there . . .
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In my experience, that is usually a red flag.
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most of the programmers I've met are also politically correct bitches who do what their wives tell them to, making them perfect pets for their feminist indoctrinated wives
back the truck up. this is what normal people call a "married man." the wife doesn't have to be feminist and the man doesn't have to be a programmer. i get the feeling you live in a very remote place and never travel more than a 20 mile radius from your home. ha
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completely customize process-centric catalysts for change vis-a-vis dynamic supply chains. efficiently synergize seamless leadership rather than 24/7 users. competently target economically sound roi whereas 2.0 markets. continually evolve highly efficient total linkage through multidisciplinary web services. collabo
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Sorry, but I read. There are certain conventions that make reading easier, and your writing in lowercase IS AS BAD AS WRITING IN ALL CAPS. IT'S EXACTLY THE SAME THING, KID.
If you want an adult to read what you write and take you seriously, do it correctly or be known as a childish fool.
If you want me to read that wall of gibberish, rewrite it like you would write a story or resume. It's unreadable as is. You show contempt for those you wish to communicate with, don't expect any readers.
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But to ward all you coasters away from my precious succulent jobs, I'll warn you that we hit 110 degF back there, and the entire month of July was 90+ and humid. Our winters AVERAGE at 18 degF, can swing down to -20 and we regularly get feet of snow that lasts the entire winter (just not the last one, that was pretty mild). You have to drive 3 hours before you reach civilization. We don't have fresh fish. And remember to scrap the mud off your boots before you get on our wooden si
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> you and your 'colleagues' just won a lottery
Sure, it sounds like a lottery. No way the ACM finalists would be able to find jobs on the basis of their skills alone. It has to be luck.
"I believe in luck. That's how I explain the success of people whom I hate and envy"
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Intelligence is luck, just like retardation. No-one was born "deserving" their intelligence or stupidity.
So far, so good.
Envy is a rational response to the arbitrary hands nature deals.
There is nothing rational about envy. Rationally, some people have to be smarter than others, just as some people have to get lucky. It is not rational to discriminate against smarter people for being smarter, nor is it rational to try and eliminate luck.
Religion teaches us that envy is bad because, well, then you might actually dare to speak up against the status quo. This is why Western children are taught from a young age that envy is wrong.
I don't know about "wrong". Envy means wasting time and energy over things you cannot, and probably shouldn't, change. You can prevent a certain undeserving (whatever that means) someone from being popular or successful, but you simply canno
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Might as well have a world's greatest virgin competition...
...
Which makes me ponder, by what metric would we measure the "world's greatest virgin?" Ability to remain abstinent in the face of constant temptation?
Damn you, AC, you just stole my afternoon...
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Eunuchs have an unfair advantage.
Re:Fast != Good (Score:4, Insightful)
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In those competitions, reducing the amount of typing actually goes towards your benefit. I know, because I've sort of played with those things some years ago (until I realized I'm at most mediocre at that stuff). So the code *does* look ugly (or at least incomprehensible). I'd be surprised if they use variable names more than two characters.
I know a guy who's been in the IOI and ACM World Finals, and he's famous for not doing any indentation :-p
Of course, the vast majority of them know the difference betwee
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I don't think they do programming contests for large scale projects that need to be reliable, accurate, and thoroughly secure ... such as a banking system. I would not put a whole lot of value in contest wins when hiring developers for such projects.
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If you start off with the second person, you generally do not need the first person.
I have nothing against these sorts of contests, but I'd rather see a competition where a developer writes an elegant solution to a problem in some reasonable amount of time, and *documents their approach completely*.
Code poorly designed and without a good set of documentation is a perishable asset to any business that has changing needs... which is most of them.
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My favorite was the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, but you have to be a student to participate in it. Google Code Jam is a very good alternative though and the type of problems is quite similar. I know that I have zero chance of making it to the final, but I did manage to score well enough to get a T-shirt this year.