7 ms·

Mark Zuckerberg's TopCoder profile

93 points by Peteris 15y ago

seles 15y ago
Hmm, at first glance, his rating is pretty low. But he made a total of $124. I am guessing this is because he was an early adopter of topcoder and they gave out prizes easier back then. I think this probably is the real Zuckerberg because of the usage was so long ago (2002). I have not looked further at his code for more clues, but it would probably be interesting to delve deeper.
- ralfd 15y ago
  In 2002 he was 17/18 years old.
- morazow 15y ago
  In early years there was SRM each week and prizes were high.
- mthreat 15y ago
  In the early days it was pretty easy to make money. I paid my rent from TopCoder earnings for a few months in 2001.
mquander 15y ago
I could understand this post if Zuckerberg had like a 2200 rating, or if he did an SRM last month at 4 in the morning, but what on Earth are we supposed to take away from this?
- code_devil 15y ago
  It may not have much meaning today. But, 50+ years from now, it could well be a part of history related to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
  - synnik 15y ago
    I'll buy that IF you can tell me what innovations in 1961 were affecting the general public, and who was driving them. I rather suspect cultural memory is short-term.
    - cryptoz 15y ago
      Space travel. 1961 was a hot year. Yuri went to space, for example.
      - Evgeny 15y ago
        However it's Yuri's name that comes to mind first, but how many would immediately remember Sergey Korolyov? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Korolyov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Korolyov
  - gnaritas 15y ago
    I doubt in 50 years anyone will know who Zuck is; he's really not that relevant historically. Steve Jobs will be known, Zuck, not from anything he's done yet. Facebook is not original or world changing, it's simply popular. It wasn't the first nor will it be the last social network.
    - olivercameron 15y ago
      That may be true, but give the guy a little credit, he created a service that has 750 million active users. How many other people can say that?
      - gnaritas 15y ago
        I do believe I said it's popular. That's not making history though.
        AltIvan 15y ago
        Yeah, creating something thas is popular IS history... people will still remember Michael Jackson... and Facebook... and another bunch of useless extremly popular things.
sebkomianos 15y ago
I joined TopCoder a couple of months ago but never really got how it works. Am I supposed to try all the challenges/quizes/exercises? Should I give past competitions a try? Is it a significant measurement of how good a developer you are (in other words, do employers look at it)?
- alexdias 15y ago
  A few words in regard to the algoritm competition: you should give past competitions a try in order to get some practice. Your rating is determined by your performance in live challenges. I'm not sure if employers look at it. Of course, if you get into the higher ratings, it's a nice thing to have on your resume. It also depends on the employer as well, I remember for instance one of the founders of LikeALittle was a TopCoder India champion, so for a startup like that, TopCoder experience might be something that they find interesting.
  - mattgreenrocks 15y ago
    Wouldn't it be more productive to create things for resume items?
    - alexdias 15y ago
      Generally, I'd say yes. Being high-rated in these competitions requires quite a high amount of practice and participation, so in that time, you could've been learning a lot of new skills and building things. However, knowing a lot about algorithms can be very useful in many situations as well. And for instance, Google has those (in)famous algorithms questions in their interviews, so I guess you'd be more confortable in them.
    - a3_nm 15y ago
      Algorithms are very useful to know, both for interviews and for real life coding, but a lot of the projects that you'd pursue for fun wouldn't have a lot of algorithmic content. Problems from this sort of contests force you to focus on tasks which make you learn about algorithmics instead of spending your time on ancillary issues.
zobzu 15y ago
topcoder doesnt mean much its just a mind game like so many others you might succeed or fail - if you fail you can learn from your error and understand the problem better the next time. Like everything else. Beside, everyone thinks successful persons are necessarily very smart in all kind of ways. that's of course not true. it takes some smarts, yeah, some luck, some proper timing, and usually faith in yourself/ The smart part is probably a small one in fact.
- egor83 15y ago
  topcoder doesnt mean much its just a mind game TC is a place to learn and practice algorithm development skills, which is MUCH more than just a game. It's not necessary in any programming job, but there are places where this kind of knowledge is really needed - from what I know, Google is one of the examples. So if you like maths/algorithms, TC is a very useful place.
- wslh 15y ago
  "...if you fail you can learn from your error and understand the problem better the next time." Or just hire someone who understand the problem while you understand the goal :-)
sltkr 15y ago
Too bad his last match is so long ago that his solutions aren't available any more. I would have liked to see what kind of code he wrote!
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  The apocrypha from early facebook employees is "not great". Then again, the same was said of Larry and Sergei. Just goes to show that you only need to be "good enough" to ship a popular product, and have the wherewithal to hire better coders once you need to scale.
cosminro 15y ago
Adam D'Angelo's (former FaceBook CTO) TopCoder profile: dangelo Algorithm Rating: 2351 Total Earnings: $3,082.50 School: California Institute of Technology http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=260987 http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=26098...
- swah 15y ago
  And Quora founder.
FrancescoRizzi 15y ago
The one thing to take away from this profile? He figured out how to improve his rating fairly quickly. This U shape is fairly common, but (especially back then), I don't think it would be that common to get on a stable upward trend within 2 months
- cosminro 15y ago
  That rating is pretty low. Your average guy that gets hired at Google or Facebook is >1500 in rating probably.
  - FrancescoRizzi 15y ago
    Well yeah - I didn't mean to say he reached high rating... actually he seems to have lost interest quite fast. But he seemed to get to the upward trend part fairly fast... then again, i went back and checked my own and I seemed to have taken about the same amount of time to get on an upward trend - there were farther dips later on so maybe Mark's span at TC is too short to draw conclusions
    - cosminro 15y ago
      Yup, was thinking the same. He didn't do enough contests to escape higher volatility in the low ratings.
  - rwg 15y ago
    I'm not convinced that ratings from TopCoder's algorithm competitions are an accurate predictor of a participant's programming ability, except perhaps at the extremely low end. This was me nine years ago, fresh out of college with a B.Sc. in Computer Science from a small state university: http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=271286&tab=alg http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=27128... A rating of 1529 or 1679 is "above average" (click the "Rating Distribution" button above the graph), but to be honest, I was a complete crap programmer at the time. I doubt I would have survived as a programmer (or even been considered for a programming position) at Google or similar back then. The same holds true now. I hope that either the ratings distribution is artificially skewed towards the low end (maybe all the good programmers are too busy making lots of money to bother with TopCoder?) or the ratings really don't correspond with programming ability.

93 points by Peteris 15y ago

seles 15y ago

Hmm, at first glance, his rating is pretty low. But he made a total of $124. I am guessing this is because he was an early adopter of topcoder and they gave out prizes easier back then. I think this probably is the real Zuckerberg because of the usage was so long ago (2002). I have not looked further at his code for more clues, but it would probably be interesting to delve deeper.

ralfd 15y ago
In 2002 he was 17/18 years old.
morazow 15y ago
In early years there was SRM each week and prizes were high.
mthreat 15y ago
In the early days it was pretty easy to make money. I paid my rent from TopCoder earnings for a few months in 2001.

mquander 15y ago

I could understand this post if Zuckerberg had like a 2200 rating, or if he did an SRM last month at 4 in the morning, but what on Earth are we supposed to take away from this?

code_devil 15y ago
It may not have much meaning today. But, 50+ years from now, it could well be a part of history related to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
- synnik 15y ago
  I'll buy that IF you can tell me what innovations in 1961 were affecting the general public, and who was driving them. I rather suspect cultural memory is short-term.
  - cryptoz 15y ago
    Space travel. 1961 was a hot year. Yuri went to space, for example.
    - Evgeny 15y ago
      However it's Yuri's name that comes to mind first, but how many would immediately remember Sergey Korolyov? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Korolyov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Korolyov
- gnaritas 15y ago
  I doubt in 50 years anyone will know who Zuck is; he's really not that relevant historically. Steve Jobs will be known, Zuck, not from anything he's done yet. Facebook is not original or world changing, it's simply popular. It wasn't the first nor will it be the last social network.
  - olivercameron 15y ago
    That may be true, but give the guy a little credit, he created a service that has 750 million active users. How many other people can say that?
    - gnaritas 15y ago
      I do believe I said it's popular. That's not making history though.
      - AltIvan 15y ago
        Yeah, creating something thas is popular IS history... people will still remember Michael Jackson... and Facebook... and another bunch of useless extremly popular things.

sebkomianos 15y ago

I joined TopCoder a couple of months ago but never really got how it works. Am I supposed to try all the challenges/quizes/exercises? Should I give past competitions a try? Is it a significant measurement of how good a developer you are (in other words, do employers look at it)?

alexdias 15y ago
A few words in regard to the algoritm competition: you should give past competitions a try in order to get some practice. Your rating is determined by your performance in live challenges. I'm not sure if employers look at it. Of course, if you get into the higher ratings, it's a nice thing to have on your resume. It also depends on the employer as well, I remember for instance one of the founders of LikeALittle was a TopCoder India champion, so for a startup like that, TopCoder experience might be something that they find interesting.
- mattgreenrocks 15y ago
  Wouldn't it be more productive to create things for resume items?
  - alexdias 15y ago
    Generally, I'd say yes. Being high-rated in these competitions requires quite a high amount of practice and participation, so in that time, you could've been learning a lot of new skills and building things. However, knowing a lot about algorithms can be very useful in many situations as well. And for instance, Google has those (in)famous algorithms questions in their interviews, so I guess you'd be more confortable in them.
  - a3_nm 15y ago
    Algorithms are very useful to know, both for interviews and for real life coding, but a lot of the projects that you'd pursue for fun wouldn't have a lot of algorithmic content. Problems from this sort of contests force you to focus on tasks which make you learn about algorithmics instead of spending your time on ancillary issues.

zobzu 15y ago

topcoder doesnt mean much its just a mind game like so many others you might succeed or fail - if you fail you can learn from your error and understand the problem better the next time. Like everything else. Beside, everyone thinks successful persons are necessarily very smart in all kind of ways. that's of course not true. it takes some smarts, yeah, some luck, some proper timing, and usually faith in yourself/ The smart part is probably a small one in fact.

egor83 15y ago
topcoder doesnt mean much its just a mind game TC is a place to learn and practice algorithm development skills, which is MUCH more than just a game. It's not necessary in any programming job, but there are places where this kind of knowledge is really needed - from what I know, Google is one of the examples. So if you like maths/algorithms, TC is a very useful place.
wslh 15y ago
"...if you fail you can learn from your error and understand the problem better the next time." Or just hire someone who understand the problem while you understand the goal :-)

sltkr 15y ago

Too bad his last match is so long ago that his solutions aren't available any more. I would have liked to see what kind of code he wrote!

redthrowaway 15y ago
The apocrypha from early facebook employees is "not great". Then again, the same was said of Larry and Sergei. Just goes to show that you only need to be "good enough" to ship a popular product, and have the wherewithal to hire better coders once you need to scale.

cosminro 15y ago

Adam D'Angelo's (former FaceBook CTO) TopCoder profile: dangelo Algorithm Rating: 2351 Total Earnings: $3,082.50 School: California Institute of Technology http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=260987 http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=26098...

swah 15y ago
And Quora founder.

FrancescoRizzi 15y ago

The one thing to take away from this profile? He figured out how to improve his rating fairly quickly. This U shape is fairly common, but (especially back then), I don't think it would be that common to get on a stable upward trend within 2 months

cosminro 15y ago
That rating is pretty low. Your average guy that gets hired at Google or Facebook is >1500 in rating probably.
- FrancescoRizzi 15y ago
  Well yeah - I didn't mean to say he reached high rating... actually he seems to have lost interest quite fast. But he seemed to get to the upward trend part fairly fast... then again, i went back and checked my own and I seemed to have taken about the same amount of time to get on an upward trend - there were farther dips later on so maybe Mark's span at TC is too short to draw conclusions
  - cosminro 15y ago
    Yup, was thinking the same. He didn't do enough contests to escape higher volatility in the low ratings.
- rwg 15y ago
  I'm not convinced that ratings from TopCoder's algorithm competitions are an accurate predictor of a participant's programming ability, except perhaps at the extremely low end. This was me nine years ago, fresh out of college with a B.Sc. in Computer Science from a small state university: http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=271286&tab=alg http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=27128... A rating of 1529 or 1679 is "above average" (click the "Rating Distribution" button above the graph), but to be honest, I was a complete crap programmer at the time. I doubt I would have survived as a programmer (or even been considered for a programming position) at Google or similar back then. The same holds true now. I hope that either the ratings distribution is artificially skewed towards the low end (maybe all the good programmers are too busy making lots of money to bother with TopCoder?) or the ratings really don't correspond with programming ability.