11 ms·

Competitive programming is useless

158 points by pbrw 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hey31212 5y ago
hmm. how so? before we rationalize this statement, ask yourself. what is your current skill level in competitive programming? how good is your C++/Python/Java/etc. and understanding of DS/Algo? If all the answers to these two questions are great then congrats, you're great! otherwise... just think about that question, ever felt passionate or enthusiastic about something? competitive programming can be a passion, competition, both of them. if you think it is useless, then passion is useless, solving is useless, problems are useless... competition is a way to keep improving ourselves! improvement sure isn't useless at all isn't it?
hey31212 5y ago
here's the thing, it all comes to attitude. most people who like to solve problems would think otherwise. i think it's healthier in the long term to be more optimistic about this field rather than be realistic.
Mikios 5y ago
Technology can change after few years, but strong foundations can be helpful for many years.
ovebepari 5y ago
I understand the rant but I would like to hire someone who are good at solving problems (of any kind) and can detect the edge cases very well and without deep math or competitive programming knowledge, it's not possible at all these days. However, I am an undergrad myself and sometimes I take pride in being a generalist, spent my fair share of time on every abstraction layers of CS possible. Now that I'm in my final year, I'm concentrating to know more about *nix system internals, doing a thesis on Computer File Systems and occasionally doing Competitive Programming to be a better problem solver. I understand the rant.
- lol1lol 5y ago
  people spent their bachelors degree solving problems of some kind. turns out problems of different kind requires different bachelor degrees. for porkin sake, people need to grow up and accept that the state of the art measurement models of human raw intelligence have flaws so much that they can be rendered useless.
  - ovebepari 5y ago
    > "turns out problems of different kind requires different bachelor degrees." Aren't we talking about CS here. I understand your point ofc. As a CS undergrad, what other options you have to prove that you are capable and know different strategies and tactics (brute forcing, divide and conquer etc) to handle and maybe solve a problem?
- exdsq 5y ago
  “ but I would like to hire someone who are good at solving problems (of any kind) and can detect the edge cases very well and without deep math or competitive programming knowledge, it's not possible at all these days.” You shouldn’t be so opinionated before you’ve entered the work place. If you find, after a few years of experience, that this is true then fine.
  - ovebepari 5y ago
    My point is competitive programming or math competitions isn't a field specific skill. It teaches you various ways to solve various (life) problems in general. Brute forcing, divide and conquer, backtracking, recursion/Induction can be applied to anything. I'm not opinionated. If there is any other way of proving that someone is good at these tactics, I'd love to work with them.
    - exdsq 5y ago
      > deep math or competitive programming knowledge I think I read too much into deep. Certainly I'd expect any non-junior dev I work with to understand those concepts! But I wouldn't assume someone who published several papers on knot theory is any better at development that someone who hacked together a couple startup side-businesses, except in very very specific domains.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
> Assuming for a minute that students from lesser tier colleges are less smart (possibly untrue but again a discussion for another day) Let’s discuss it now: they are NOT ‘less smart.’
- gmadsen 5y ago
  obviously we are talking about statistics, so of course specific examples exist that run counter to the trend. But without a doubt, I am 100% certain that on average the incoming CS class to MIT is smarter than students in the cs program at some very low ranked state school. you can see the difference in which textbooks the school uses. It would be impossible to teach real analysis with Rudin at an average school or community college. Or the math 55 sequence at Harvard, which basically gives students more mathematical training in a year than the average university student will get in an math entire degree.
  - kemiller2002 5y ago
    Better prepared I would say. There are plenty of kids that don't get the opportunity to show how smart they are. They grow up in the projects, have to work nights to help their family, some have to join gangs to survive. You swap they're upbringing with someone who's parents got to spend 100k on their high school education, provide them the things like a car, so they don't have to ride the bus a hour to and from school, and they'd be a lot different. It's really easy to be a lot smarter when you have a support system that nudges you along the way. Now agreed, there are some kids that really are smarter, but mostly it's about being prepared to handle that rigor.
    - gmadsen 5y ago
      while I agree, that very smart children can be victims of their childhoods, not everyone can prep their way into MIT. that is why Harvard and Yale are more prestigious, its more associated with the powerful, not purely the most academically inclined. To be clear I grew up fairly poor myself with no support system, but not that bad with violence, just trailer park poor, you can tell smart children at a very young age, kindergarten it will be obvious if a student is mathematically gifted(for whatever that is worth, it is certainly not the end all be all indicator of future success). my point is that MIT will have a higher percentage of mathematically gifted students, because it isn't something that can be prepped for. I guess I would be curious on how much a difference it really is , if you could completely control for environment, but even then the difference still exists.
makapuf 5y ago
From my point of view, the correlation is definitely not 1, but while competitive code is not good code, and therefore the skills and discipline differ, there is a strong correlation between good competitive programmer and good programmers. Just like sprinters and marathonians, sure best sprinters are not necessarily the best runners for long distance, but they are definitely better than me.
- nicklaf 5y ago
  According to Peter Norvig, the correlation is actually negative! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdmyUZCl75s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdmyUZCl75s
  - elanning 5y ago
    I believe Norvig later clarified that the negative correlation was untrue or statistical noise.
    - gwern 5y ago
      Correct: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25426329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25426329
  - aliceryhl 5y ago
    This is a classic example of Berkson's paradox [1]. If the job applications you receive have a positive correlation between on-the-job performance and competitive programming performance, and you use competitive programming performance to select who you hire, then you can very easily end up with a negative correlation among the people you actually end up hiring. When you don't include the people you rejected in the statistic, the correlation is useless. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
  - jessebrill55 5y ago
    nicklaf, I somehow came across your comment from 9months ago about TOS and PoTs. I have been struggling with some issue for the last 4 months and doctors aren’t telling me a thing. Would you please get in touch with me via Instagram @jesse.brill or Snapchat jessebrill55 or Facebook (search for Jesse Brill in Atlanta, GA) or via email Jesse.brill@gmail.com I would appreciate talking to you and maybe you can help me.
oenetan 5y ago
Algorithms are important, competitive programming isn't in my opinion
fatjokes 5y ago
This post really is a rant as the author forewarns, with barely any cohesion and no evidence to back up anything. I fear it has gotten upvotes simply because it's a popular opinion. I don't think it's worth a detailed response so I'll just respond to the reductio ad absurdum in their tl;dr, that competitive programming has been taken to extremes (implicitly by employers). This is plain untrue. Sure a lot of interviews I've been through ask for a coding exam, but in this day and age that's just a wise precaution and no company that I've heard of would hire based purely on that outcome. I've met (interviewed) too many candidates who can sweet talk their way through any technical matter but barely know how to use a couple of for-loops. This isn't a surprise---the push toward driving down the cost of software engineering labor means that there's a massive volume of people churning through the bootcamp machine.
- Jach 5y ago
  I wish it could just be blamed on the bootcamp machine, but I've interviewed enough non-junior full time candidates moving from other companies to wonder how they got into those other companies to begin with, based on their performance with my simple problem where loops aren't even needed, nor are there fancy data structures. I used to ask https://leetcode.com/problems/jump-game/description/ https://leetcode.com/problems/jump-game/description/ but stopped in part because it offered nothing more than pass-fail, in part because of too many fails. Still, it's not exactly a high level competitive programming sort of problem, and there are many ways of solving it...
- Zvez 5y ago
  yeah, for some reason it is a trend to call some basic coding interview problems as something from 'competitive programming'. While in reality it is just on of the metrics of interview - make sure you can code. While some companies sometimes go too far with complexity of problems, even they rarely make decision purely on how fast you can solve the problem.
  - fatjokes 5y ago
    Makes sense as a trend. If you fail a "competitive programming question", then it's the employer that's absurd. If you fail a "basic coding problem", then it's you who is unqualified.
jcranmer 5y ago
I'd disagree with this assessment. In my own experience, I've found that competitive programming is useful in teaching a few skills. However, the apparent point of competitive programming--building up a good repertoire of advanced algorithms and data structures--is pretty close to useless. In my professional career, the most complex algorithm I've ever had to code myself is ... union-find (on like two occasions), with a custom BFS/DFS being the most common algorithm I reach for. Almost everything you will ever need is already implemented in a library for you to reuse, and even reaching for that library is pretty rare. No, the most useful impacts of competitive programming has to do with actually teaching you how to program effectively. The most important advice I got for competitive programming was walk away from the computer. The biggest trap when programming is to write code before you know how to solve a problem, as this will tend to encourage you to spend all of your time making no progress towards actually getting a solution. The tale of the Sudoku solver [1] is salutatory here. Another useful skill is how to debug algorithms. Debugging a competitive programming problem usually amounts to taking an input that fails and trying to understand where in the algorithm (as expressed in poorly written and commented code!) the mistake is. Doing so under the time pressures of a competition also requires being able to rapidly decide if the algorithm is wrong, or it is the implementation is wrong, as well as figuring out where the most likely places for errors are likely to creep in. This kind of experience translates very usefully into professional programming, and debugging is a skill that seems to be poorly acquired by most young programmers. When competitive programming hits the tier where you need to memorize all of the advanced data structures and algorithms to do better, that's where further improvement in the leaderboards no longer translates to better programmers IMHO. But there's still a lot of skills that need to be acquired to move up competitive leaderboards before you reach that point. [1] https://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-solvers.html https://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-...
- alerighi 5y ago
  To me competitive programming doesn't make you a good software engineer. It will teach you bad practices, like abusing of dangerous programming constructs or data structures to optimized the code or just save some typing while writing the code (like one letter variable names, macros, etc), global variables and state in the program, not using common design patterns, not using OOP, not documenting the code and in general writing code that is difficult to maintain because it's not well engineered. You would say that a person would do that only in competition, but in my experience I saw that is not true, because if you learn to program a particular way, you would do the same also in other contexts. Also, the competences that you will acquire by doing competitive programming are next than useless: in the real life I've yet to encounter a situation in which I have to use an algorithm used in a competitive programming competition (yes, I did them with even good results). And if you need them, you don't implement them yourself, but you use a library that manages all the work. The Dijkstra implementation that most competitive programmers use is a toy implementation, not something that you would never use in any sort of enterprise software. The fundamental skill that competitive programming doesn't teach you, that to me is the most important thing for a good software engineer, is using Google to find documentation online. Most of the errors I see by young software engineers could easily been prevented if they did a simple Google search and read the official documentation (not a random blog post)! And yet in competitive programming you are forbid to use the internet, to me it's stupid, it's like requiring to write code with a typewriter just because in the past keyboards and monitors didn't exist.
backprop1993 5y ago
I did competitive programming. I believe you need to push yourself to your limits to understand what your limits are and why you may have some. It helps with self-understanding. One can then figure out how to go further, faster. On a side node, it was in competitive coding that I first ran into students using Ritalin for performance enhancement. Until then I had never run into it before.
exdsq 5y ago
I find it fun to do, like chess or video games. But people on these sites grind challenges for hours a day over months purely to game interviews, which is sad but probably not pointless.
8589934591 5y ago
EDIT: TLDR: There are bigger issues at play at the country's economic level that students take up skills (CP) to get the best paying job possible. This in turn drives companies to make interviews harder to separate rote memorizers from the crowd. I don't see this going away anytime soon and although I agree that leetcode questions aren't the best measure, there is no better alternative as an interviewer to quickly filter out candidates. --- > As a response, college students now pursue competitive programming obsessively to stay on top. In this weird arms race against prospective hires, companies keep asking harder and harder questions in a misguided attempt to raise the bar. You should understand that more students pick it up because of the higher salary offered in the tech industry in your country (India) and this is one of the best bets to lift themselves and their families economically. To be fair, I don't blame them, majority would pick up ~CP~ <job/skill> because it has the highest returns for the effort put in. It's a fault in the system, not the students. Personally I would be wary of anyone who says only competitive programming excites them. I feel that testing algorithms and data structures in some slightly realistic situation is the only way to weed out the pretenders. Anecdotally, I have interviewed screening rounds from junior to senior. The juniors who pretend to like programming are usually filtered out when I change the application of the data structure slightly as compared to a leetcode/geeksforgeeks question. Something as simple as "reverse a paragraph/sentence" as opposed to "reverse a string". Mid level candidates are the most difficult to filter out and this is exactly where the leetcode type questions come into the picture. They are able to talk about their projects as if they designed the entire stack. I have seen them draw the system design diagrams, tell me pros and cons of the stack/tech chosen, but they would usually fail in easy/medium level leetcode questions. Seniors are the easiest to filter. We give them the easiest question possible and ask them to solve it. This is done with a huge disclaimer that this is a screening round and that the intention is to see you can actually write code and answer questions about it in real time. Questions are easy array/string leetcode setting them up for success. The good ones just finish it up in hardly 10 mins and move on the the design round following immediately. The bad ones just beat around the bush saying they wont code despite the disclaimer. The really bad ones are ones who cite N yoe so they shouldn't be tested on coding (this is when the senior dev steps in and recommends not to proceed with the interview anymore). Coming back to the article, unless you have candidates/people who are actually interested in building software, and only when other jobs around you on avg pay a decent amount of salary for the place you live in, I am positive people will do everything they can to get the best ROI to become more sustainable in life. This is evident in > 5 yoe hires when people are in a more stable posn in tech economically and as interviewees they realise what they like/dislike and as interviewers you can discern whether they can actually do the job properly.
eat_veggies 5y ago
Competitive programming is useless, but most things are useless! And here "useful" only means useful in the context of building and evaluating skills for industry. But my friends who do competitive programming do it because it's fun, and some of them don't even want to work in tech when they graduate! There is a kind of pleasure in connecting the pipes and optimizing the loops and building a sick dynamic programming recurrence relation or whatever; we desire these flows. Who cares what skills they build?
- yCombLinks 5y ago
  Agree completely, it's really fun. It's unfortunate it's factors so heavily into some hiring processes though.
andreygrehov 5y ago
Competitive programming is just like a sport, as in every sport some people may like it, some may not. When it comes to programming interviews, companies do not try to check how good your competitive programming skills are, but they measure your will power, eg whether you were able to commit time to learn and understand DS&A in such a way that you can easily juggle them.
forkLding 5y ago
I think competitive programming is useful as an interview style if you want to learn a language and gain that development intuition of stop, think, clarify, design, code and test. But do I think people are taking it too far? Definitely. A typical comment or interview experience on Leetcode is that they take 3 months to prepare and do algorithms questions for FAANG interviews to pass the interview. In the process, some individuals skip class or other things. I don't think that is right personally.
sage76 5y ago
Years ago I managed to clear super competitive algo/DS rounds for a big firm and then failed spectacularly at the job, because I had no idea what they were talking about half the time the projects were being discussed. I wish they had just asked more pertinent questions and saved everyone some time and me the humiliation.
levmiseri 5y ago
Just a tiny bit offtopic, but for a different kind of competitive programming, I made https://yare.io https://yare.io (1v1 StarCraft-like RTS, but you control units by writing javascript).
deltasixeight 5y ago
There needs to be science on this. Some way to quantitatively measure the performance of programmers who do competitive programming and to measure ones that don't. Until then everyone will agree or disagree but some science will prove a definitive answer. It is very much worth doing such science given the prevalence of testing a programmer for such competitive skills and the fact that many consider such skills useless against the actual daily tasks of a programmer.
tester756 5y ago
Time to start asking more about security and OOP on interviews OOP is kind of topic that everybody is expected to know, yet for some reasons there are huge gaps between people when it comes to proficency at it, at modeling systems and domains correctly.
- Jach 5y ago
  Precisely because huge gaps exist, asking about OOP leads to disappointment. I don't suggest doing it -- or if you do, first try it out on coworkers (even just knowing what SOLID principles are, never mind any nuance about them), and if you're finding that it's filtering them, you don't work at an org where it makes sense to filter new hires the same way.
commandlinefan 5y ago
Reminds me of a comic I saw: Interviewer: How do you swap two variables without using a temporary variable? Candidate: x = x + y; y = x - y; x = x - y! Interviewer: You're hired! ... two months later ... Boss: What the hell is this code you wrote? Programmer: I swapped two variables without using a temporary variable! Boss: You're fired!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jesusohchrist 5y ago
  a,b := 1,2 a,b = b,a
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  This is so true. I've been looking around at jobs, and was advised to start practising on HackerRank for the technical interviews. I've been coding professionally for 30-ish years. There is very little that I've seen on HackerRank that comes anywhere close to a "real" software problem that I've faced developing actual software. Why is this being used to do technical interviews? What's the thinking here?
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    My guess is that people who can't code can't pass, but people who can code might pass. It's a kind of extreme fear of false positive. Then the firm that does the testing needs to look like they're doing something beyond fizzbuzz and you end up with crazy tests. It never made sense to me, I always just do a technical conversation and if for some reason a muggle has gotten an offer it's easy to detect and deal with. People don't last long in coding jobs if they can't do it anyway.
    - marcus_holmes 5y ago
      hehe, I have a war story about that... Back during Y2K I was working as a contractor for a large organisation. I was hired by a recruitment company, who were hired by the customer to provide a large number of contractors. Evidently someone messed up, and we had a guy join the team who couldn't code. He'd heard about the money to be made in Y2K, had done some simple exercises, and slipped through the screening process. But once he started it was obvious he had no idea what he was doing. We pushed back at the recruitment company, but apparently they couldn't fire him because they'd have to admit to the customer that they'd hired someone who couldn't code, and politically that wasn't acceptable. We were told to cover for him. So this guy clocked in every day and did nothing, literally nothing, all day, earning really good money for it. We disabled his login, so he couldn't do anything on the PC sat in front of him. If anyone from the customer organisation came by he had to look busy somehow - it was on him if he failed to do that and the customer started asking questions about him. He couldn't even read a book at his desk in case he got caught doing it. It must have been hell for him. We ended up feeling that he deserved the money just for being able to do that day in day out for months. I would have gone crazy. In the end, I moved on before he did so I don't know how it ended. I often think of that guy when pondering how life in a stable-but-boring job would be.
nikita 5y ago
I'm been following competitive programming for years and know multiple extremely successful "grads" of IOI and ACM ICPC. I have an ICPC bronze medal myself. The HN crowd will know Adam D'Angelo (IOI Gold) - cofounder of Quora and Nikolay Durov (IOI ICPC Gold) - cofounder of Telegram. My personal examples are Singlestore (billion dollar company) which I cofounded and Near Protocol - 5Bln market cap crypto company cofoundered by Alex (ICPC Gold). There are also numerous fantastic engineers that have competitive programming under their belt working for tech primes and startups. People who win are usually very very smart. AND they learn to work hard - you can't win without great work ethics. Skills wise you learn many algorithms and data structures cold. Plus you learn how to write small program with very few bugs from the the first try. Do they come out as complete package of a well rounded engineer - no, but there are years ahead to learn and they are trained to learn fast. Bottom line is I can't disagree more. People familiar with the subject are often lucky to have the team and come with great network of nerd friend. Of course you will find people from this world who don't succeed, but more plenty become fantastic engineers.
- clusterhacks 5y ago
  Smart and works hard is important but I'm very much not convinced that success in competitive programming (or leet-coding in interviews) is the only, or even best, way to signal those attributes to an employer. I'll also contradict myself on how important smart and works hard actually is. I'm just a normal programmer who has had a few normal programming jobs. The vast majority of my career has been about doing relatively low-key programming and data munging. When I think back on software engineers "in the trenches" of standard corporate jobs I don't see any deep need to be particularly smart and hard working. Maybe "doggedly stubborn" about not giving up and making some progress each day instead.
- jimsimmons 5y ago
  A few successful competitive programmers being successful in general doesn't make it a good metric for all programmers. I'd say the same about competitive math too, despite Terry Tao being a pretty great counter example. What actually happens at all levels below the gold medalist level is completely different. People memorize leetcode and think they're gods of CS. Ultimately, you have to agree, these competitions come down to learning a vast repo of tactics. A guy who is generally good at CS or math can't show up and do well. You have to burn a lot of midnight oil so to speak. IMO such data structure and algo mastery is largely illusionary. It mainly depends on the trends in the game at that point in time. If you see people who do well in such competitions, they have embedded themselves in these communities and think about it all day. Why should every programmer be held to this arbitrary standard? What if I want to learn ML, compilers and programming languages or study distributed systems? They are as much CS as anything else but you don't get a cookie every time you navigate a tricky situation. There is no gamification so you have to tread your own course. That IMO takes a lot more originality than what these rat races foster.
BrandoElFollito 5y ago
I like the coding challenges we have at the office. The ones who want come to solve a few riddles (this is a nation-wide competition), food and drinks are provided, we have the opportunity to chat a bit and I can claim my last place, live every year. This allows people who like these kind of things to get together in a relaxed environment.
- maccolgan 5y ago
  So you use coding challenges as a form of social get together?
  - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
    Yes, this is an event we have once a year. The number of seats is limited but we usually hover at 30-40 people (it is held after work hours, we are dependent on the start time, which is the same for everyone in the country)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
low-rank 5y ago
well, it's kinda funny that taking leetcode as an example of competitive programming, my man...
bayonetz 5y ago
Obviously it’s not useless if people find it useful such as the people who compete. By some metric you care about it may be “useless”, but who made you the arbiter of metrics? Competitive programming may or may not correlate with success at say software engineering, but that isn’t grounds to say it’s useless. An Olympic archer may or may not be a terrible bow hunter in the wilderness but they still have a clear skill that is useful by metrics such as people want to watch it, practice it, and compete in it. Dualist thinking like this where things are strictly good/bad, useful/useless, etc. is a really limiting thought pattern. How about instead of “is this thing useful OR useless?” we ask “in what ways is this thing useful? In what ways is this thing not useful? How can we best leverage these properties?”
cush 5y ago
Hot takes like this suck all the life (and not to mention diversity) out of our profession. Every competitive coder I've ever met does it because they think it's fun.
mvanaltvorst 5y ago
Competitive programming is fun and trains quick and accurate problem solving. You can critique the fact that modern programming interviews seem to be too focused on short leetcode problems, but that is an entirely different field than competitive programming. "Mathematical textbook problems are useless, because scribbling mathematics in a notebook is not best practice! Real mathematicians exclusively spend their time writing academic papers."
decebalus1 5y ago
> Competitive programming is a good tool for building the programming muscle. An extreme pursuit of competitive programming is worse than useless. Unfortunately, companies and students are both headed in that direction at the moment instead So if both companies and students are heading in that direction then it's not that useless, isn't it? This is a low effort anti programming interview difficulty inflation rant. But anyway, competitive programming is one thing, tech interviews are another thing if you want to get technical about it. Mostly different set of skills are cultivated by each. Finally, saying competitive programming is useless is equivalent to saying golf is useless (for example). Some people really enjoy competitive programming.
hvocode 5y ago
Competitive programming is fun. It’s amazing that some people seem to think everything is about career path optimization. Are we not allowed to do things for fun or just to pass the time anymore without someone writing that we’re wasting our time since it isn’t boosting our career?
- postalrat 5y ago
  Debugging is fun (at least for me). We should replace programming tests with debugging tests in interviews.
da39a3ee 5y ago
There's a lot of complaining about algorithms/data structures interview questions. But at the end of the day it is up to the hiring companies how they want to triage and select candidates. Rather than complaining, what would be more compelling is evidence that companies using these sorts of interviews are actually damaging themselves. At the moment, the most successful tech companies in human history are using those sorts of interviews, so the burden of proof seems to fall on the complainers.
stevesimmons 5y ago
The article leaves out one very important skill: teamwork. Teamwork is tested very well by contests like the ACM ICPC programming competition: teams of 3 people, one computer, and 7 or so problems to solve in 5 hours. Speaking from first hand experience, my team won the ICPC (many years ago...) based totally on coaching on our teamwork. Essentially, we arrived in the competition city 5 days early and somehow got adopted by the coach of another country's team (which said they didn't need her help). She spent those 5 days observing us approach each phase of the contest, and gave feedback on every aspect on how we worked together: triaging the problems in the first minutes of the contest, who to allocate which problems to, optimising sharing the single computer, when to switch when stuck, helping each other debug, etc, etc. Right down to how to lay out our stationery and stack our working notes on the table. After doing 2-3 prior competition problem sets a day for 5 days, we became an amazingly efficient machine. Not because we were individually better problem solvers (thought there was some improvement there). But because we all instinctively did the right things in the right order, there was no dead time, no miscommunication, and no stress about our performance versus others. Thanks to Raewyn's coaching, we converted probably a 5th place into a convincing 1st place. And she'd already won 1st place with her own country's team two years earlier. So the focus on teamwork paid off. Both in our contest, and in work situations subsequently...
kadoban 5y ago
Who cares? It's fun. Oh you're using it to pick who to hire to write mostly CRUD apps? Yeah, don't do that.
thallukrish 5y ago
Anything competitive is useless
wilmer05 5y ago
I never get offended by any news. But this one is on the limit. On my case I wish I would have started before with competitive programming. I learnt skills that almost no one has and I think is one of the skills that makes me unique.
naveen99 5y ago
Typing speed contest in the Olympics ? Sounds like fun.

158 points by pbrw 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hmm. how so? before we rationalize this statement, ask yourself. what is your current skill level in competitive programming? how good is your C++/Python/Java/etc. and understanding of DS/Algo? If all the answers to these two questions are great then congrats, you're great! otherwise... just think about that question, ever felt passionate or enthusiastic about something? competitive programming can be a passion, competition, both of them. if you think it is useless, then passion is useless, solving is useless, problems are useless... competition is a way to keep improving ourselves! improvement sure isn't useless at all isn't it?

hey31212 5y ago

here's the thing, it all comes to attitude. most people who like to solve problems would think otherwise. i think it's healthier in the long term to be more optimistic about this field rather than be realistic.

Mikios 5y ago

Technology can change after few years, but strong foundations can be helpful for many years.

ovebepari 5y ago

I understand the rant but I would like to hire someone who are good at solving problems (of any kind) and can detect the edge cases very well and without deep math or competitive programming knowledge, it's not possible at all these days. However, I am an undergrad myself and sometimes I take pride in being a generalist, spent my fair share of time on every abstraction layers of CS possible. Now that I'm in my final year, I'm concentrating to know more about *nix system internals, doing a thesis on Computer File Systems and occasionally doing Competitive Programming to be a better problem solver. I understand the rant.

lol1lol 5y ago
people spent their bachelors degree solving problems of some kind. turns out problems of different kind requires different bachelor degrees. for porkin sake, people need to grow up and accept that the state of the art measurement models of human raw intelligence have flaws so much that they can be rendered useless.
- ovebepari 5y ago
  > "turns out problems of different kind requires different bachelor degrees." Aren't we talking about CS here. I understand your point ofc. As a CS undergrad, what other options you have to prove that you are capable and know different strategies and tactics (brute forcing, divide and conquer etc) to handle and maybe solve a problem?
exdsq 5y ago
“ but I would like to hire someone who are good at solving problems (of any kind) and can detect the edge cases very well and without deep math or competitive programming knowledge, it's not possible at all these days.” You shouldn’t be so opinionated before you’ve entered the work place. If you find, after a few years of experience, that this is true then fine.
- ovebepari 5y ago
  My point is competitive programming or math competitions isn't a field specific skill. It teaches you various ways to solve various (life) problems in general. Brute forcing, divide and conquer, backtracking, recursion/Induction can be applied to anything. I'm not opinionated. If there is any other way of proving that someone is good at these tactics, I'd love to work with them.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    > deep math or competitive programming knowledge I think I read too much into deep. Certainly I'd expect any non-junior dev I work with to understand those concepts! But I wouldn't assume someone who published several papers on knot theory is any better at development that someone who hacked together a couple startup side-businesses, except in very very specific domains.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

> Assuming for a minute that students from lesser tier colleges are less smart (possibly untrue but again a discussion for another day) Let’s discuss it now: they are NOT ‘less smart.’

gmadsen 5y ago
obviously we are talking about statistics, so of course specific examples exist that run counter to the trend. But without a doubt, I am 100% certain that on average the incoming CS class to MIT is smarter than students in the cs program at some very low ranked state school. you can see the difference in which textbooks the school uses. It would be impossible to teach real analysis with Rudin at an average school or community college. Or the math 55 sequence at Harvard, which basically gives students more mathematical training in a year than the average university student will get in an math entire degree.
- kemiller2002 5y ago
  Better prepared I would say. There are plenty of kids that don't get the opportunity to show how smart they are. They grow up in the projects, have to work nights to help their family, some have to join gangs to survive. You swap they're upbringing with someone who's parents got to spend 100k on their high school education, provide them the things like a car, so they don't have to ride the bus a hour to and from school, and they'd be a lot different. It's really easy to be a lot smarter when you have a support system that nudges you along the way. Now agreed, there are some kids that really are smarter, but mostly it's about being prepared to handle that rigor.
  - gmadsen 5y ago
    while I agree, that very smart children can be victims of their childhoods, not everyone can prep their way into MIT. that is why Harvard and Yale are more prestigious, its more associated with the powerful, not purely the most academically inclined. To be clear I grew up fairly poor myself with no support system, but not that bad with violence, just trailer park poor, you can tell smart children at a very young age, kindergarten it will be obvious if a student is mathematically gifted(for whatever that is worth, it is certainly not the end all be all indicator of future success). my point is that MIT will have a higher percentage of mathematically gifted students, because it isn't something that can be prepped for. I guess I would be curious on how much a difference it really is , if you could completely control for environment, but even then the difference still exists.

makapuf 5y ago

From my point of view, the correlation is definitely not 1, but while competitive code is not good code, and therefore the skills and discipline differ, there is a strong correlation between good competitive programmer and good programmers. Just like sprinters and marathonians, sure best sprinters are not necessarily the best runners for long distance, but they are definitely better than me.

nicklaf 5y ago
According to Peter Norvig, the correlation is actually negative! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdmyUZCl75s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdmyUZCl75s
- elanning 5y ago
  I believe Norvig later clarified that the negative correlation was untrue or statistical noise.
  - gwern 5y ago
    Correct: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25426329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25426329
- aliceryhl 5y ago
  This is a classic example of Berkson's paradox [1]. If the job applications you receive have a positive correlation between on-the-job performance and competitive programming performance, and you use competitive programming performance to select who you hire, then you can very easily end up with a negative correlation among the people you actually end up hiring. When you don't include the people you rejected in the statistic, the correlation is useless. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
- jessebrill55 5y ago
  nicklaf, I somehow came across your comment from 9months ago about TOS and PoTs. I have been struggling with some issue for the last 4 months and doctors aren’t telling me a thing. Would you please get in touch with me via Instagram @jesse.brill or Snapchat jessebrill55 or Facebook (search for Jesse Brill in Atlanta, GA) or via email Jesse.brill@gmail.com I would appreciate talking to you and maybe you can help me.

oenetan 5y ago

Algorithms are important, competitive programming isn't in my opinion

fatjokes 5y ago

This post really is a rant as the author forewarns, with barely any cohesion and no evidence to back up anything. I fear it has gotten upvotes simply because it's a popular opinion. I don't think it's worth a detailed response so I'll just respond to the reductio ad absurdum in their tl;dr, that competitive programming has been taken to extremes (implicitly by employers). This is plain untrue. Sure a lot of interviews I've been through ask for a coding exam, but in this day and age that's just a wise precaution and no company that I've heard of would hire based purely on that outcome. I've met (interviewed) too many candidates who can sweet talk their way through any technical matter but barely know how to use a couple of for-loops. This isn't a surprise---the push toward driving down the cost of software engineering labor means that there's a massive volume of people churning through the bootcamp machine.

Jach 5y ago
I wish it could just be blamed on the bootcamp machine, but I've interviewed enough non-junior full time candidates moving from other companies to wonder how they got into those other companies to begin with, based on their performance with my simple problem where loops aren't even needed, nor are there fancy data structures. I used to ask https://leetcode.com/problems/jump-game/description/ https://leetcode.com/problems/jump-game/description/ but stopped in part because it offered nothing more than pass-fail, in part because of too many fails. Still, it's not exactly a high level competitive programming sort of problem, and there are many ways of solving it...
Zvez 5y ago
yeah, for some reason it is a trend to call some basic coding interview problems as something from 'competitive programming'. While in reality it is just on of the metrics of interview - make sure you can code. While some companies sometimes go too far with complexity of problems, even they rarely make decision purely on how fast you can solve the problem.
- fatjokes 5y ago
  Makes sense as a trend. If you fail a "competitive programming question", then it's the employer that's absurd. If you fail a "basic coding problem", then it's you who is unqualified.

jcranmer 5y ago

I'd disagree with this assessment. In my own experience, I've found that competitive programming is useful in teaching a few skills. However, the apparent point of competitive programming--building up a good repertoire of advanced algorithms and data structures--is pretty close to useless. In my professional career, the most complex algorithm I've ever had to code myself is ... union-find (on like two occasions), with a custom BFS/DFS being the most common algorithm I reach for. Almost everything you will ever need is already implemented in a library for you to reuse, and even reaching for that library is pretty rare. No, the most useful impacts of competitive programming has to do with actually teaching you how to program effectively. The most important advice I got for competitive programming was walk away from the computer. The biggest trap when programming is to write code before you know how to solve a problem, as this will tend to encourage you to spend all of your time making no progress towards actually getting a solution. The tale of the Sudoku solver [1] is salutatory here. Another useful skill is how to debug algorithms. Debugging a competitive programming problem usually amounts to taking an input that fails and trying to understand where in the algorithm (as expressed in poorly written and commented code!) the mistake is. Doing so under the time pressures of a competition also requires being able to rapidly decide if the algorithm is wrong, or it is the implementation is wrong, as well as figuring out where the most likely places for errors are likely to creep in. This kind of experience translates very usefully into professional programming, and debugging is a skill that seems to be poorly acquired by most young programmers. When competitive programming hits the tier where you need to memorize all of the advanced data structures and algorithms to do better, that's where further improvement in the leaderboards no longer translates to better programmers IMHO. But there's still a lot of skills that need to be acquired to move up competitive leaderboards before you reach that point. [1] https://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-solvers.html https://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-...

alerighi 5y ago
To me competitive programming doesn't make you a good software engineer. It will teach you bad practices, like abusing of dangerous programming constructs or data structures to optimized the code or just save some typing while writing the code (like one letter variable names, macros, etc), global variables and state in the program, not using common design patterns, not using OOP, not documenting the code and in general writing code that is difficult to maintain because it's not well engineered. You would say that a person would do that only in competition, but in my experience I saw that is not true, because if you learn to program a particular way, you would do the same also in other contexts. Also, the competences that you will acquire by doing competitive programming are next than useless: in the real life I've yet to encounter a situation in which I have to use an algorithm used in a competitive programming competition (yes, I did them with even good results). And if you need them, you don't implement them yourself, but you use a library that manages all the work. The Dijkstra implementation that most competitive programmers use is a toy implementation, not something that you would never use in any sort of enterprise software. The fundamental skill that competitive programming doesn't teach you, that to me is the most important thing for a good software engineer, is using Google to find documentation online. Most of the errors I see by young software engineers could easily been prevented if they did a simple Google search and read the official documentation (not a random blog post)! And yet in competitive programming you are forbid to use the internet, to me it's stupid, it's like requiring to write code with a typewriter just because in the past keyboards and monitors didn't exist.

backprop1993 5y ago

I did competitive programming. I believe you need to push yourself to your limits to understand what your limits are and why you may have some. It helps with self-understanding. One can then figure out how to go further, faster. On a side node, it was in competitive coding that I first ran into students using Ritalin for performance enhancement. Until then I had never run into it before.

exdsq 5y ago

I find it fun to do, like chess or video games. But people on these sites grind challenges for hours a day over months purely to game interviews, which is sad but probably not pointless.

8589934591 5y ago

EDIT: TLDR: There are bigger issues at play at the country's economic level that students take up skills (CP) to get the best paying job possible. This in turn drives companies to make interviews harder to separate rote memorizers from the crowd. I don't see this going away anytime soon and although I agree that leetcode questions aren't the best measure, there is no better alternative as an interviewer to quickly filter out candidates. --- > As a response, college students now pursue competitive programming obsessively to stay on top. In this weird arms race against prospective hires, companies keep asking harder and harder questions in a misguided attempt to raise the bar. You should understand that more students pick it up because of the higher salary offered in the tech industry in your country (India) and this is one of the best bets to lift themselves and their families economically. To be fair, I don't blame them, majority would pick up ~CP~ <job/skill> because it has the highest returns for the effort put in. It's a fault in the system, not the students. Personally I would be wary of anyone who says only competitive programming excites them. I feel that testing algorithms and data structures in some slightly realistic situation is the only way to weed out the pretenders. Anecdotally, I have interviewed screening rounds from junior to senior. The juniors who pretend to like programming are usually filtered out when I change the application of the data structure slightly as compared to a leetcode/geeksforgeeks question. Something as simple as "reverse a paragraph/sentence" as opposed to "reverse a string". Mid level candidates are the most difficult to filter out and this is exactly where the leetcode type questions come into the picture. They are able to talk about their projects as if they designed the entire stack. I have seen them draw the system design diagrams, tell me pros and cons of the stack/tech chosen, but they would usually fail in easy/medium level leetcode questions. Seniors are the easiest to filter. We give them the easiest question possible and ask them to solve it. This is done with a huge disclaimer that this is a screening round and that the intention is to see you can actually write code and answer questions about it in real time. Questions are easy array/string leetcode setting them up for success. The good ones just finish it up in hardly 10 mins and move on the the design round following immediately. The bad ones just beat around the bush saying they wont code despite the disclaimer. The really bad ones are ones who cite N yoe so they shouldn't be tested on coding (this is when the senior dev steps in and recommends not to proceed with the interview anymore). Coming back to the article, unless you have candidates/people who are actually interested in building software, and only when other jobs around you on avg pay a decent amount of salary for the place you live in, I am positive people will do everything they can to get the best ROI to become more sustainable in life. This is evident in > 5 yoe hires when people are in a more stable posn in tech economically and as interviewees they realise what they like/dislike and as interviewers you can discern whether they can actually do the job properly.

eat_veggies 5y ago

Competitive programming is useless, but most things are useless! And here "useful" only means useful in the context of building and evaluating skills for industry. But my friends who do competitive programming do it because it's fun, and some of them don't even want to work in tech when they graduate! There is a kind of pleasure in connecting the pipes and optimizing the loops and building a sick dynamic programming recurrence relation or whatever; we desire these flows. Who cares what skills they build?

yCombLinks 5y ago
Agree completely, it's really fun. It's unfortunate it's factors so heavily into some hiring processes though.

andreygrehov 5y ago

Competitive programming is just like a sport, as in every sport some people may like it, some may not. When it comes to programming interviews, companies do not try to check how good your competitive programming skills are, but they measure your will power, eg whether you were able to commit time to learn and understand DS&A in such a way that you can easily juggle them.

forkLding 5y ago

I think competitive programming is useful as an interview style if you want to learn a language and gain that development intuition of stop, think, clarify, design, code and test. But do I think people are taking it too far? Definitely. A typical comment or interview experience on Leetcode is that they take 3 months to prepare and do algorithms questions for FAANG interviews to pass the interview. In the process, some individuals skip class or other things. I don't think that is right personally.

sage76 5y ago

Years ago I managed to clear super competitive algo/DS rounds for a big firm and then failed spectacularly at the job, because I had no idea what they were talking about half the time the projects were being discussed. I wish they had just asked more pertinent questions and saved everyone some time and me the humiliation.

levmiseri 5y ago

Just a tiny bit offtopic, but for a different kind of competitive programming, I made https://yare.io https://yare.io (1v1 StarCraft-like RTS, but you control units by writing javascript).

deltasixeight 5y ago

There needs to be science on this. Some way to quantitatively measure the performance of programmers who do competitive programming and to measure ones that don't. Until then everyone will agree or disagree but some science will prove a definitive answer. It is very much worth doing such science given the prevalence of testing a programmer for such competitive skills and the fact that many consider such skills useless against the actual daily tasks of a programmer.

tester756 5y ago

Time to start asking more about security and OOP on interviews OOP is kind of topic that everybody is expected to know, yet for some reasons there are huge gaps between people when it comes to proficency at it, at modeling systems and domains correctly.

Jach 5y ago
Precisely because huge gaps exist, asking about OOP leads to disappointment. I don't suggest doing it -- or if you do, first try it out on coworkers (even just knowing what SOLID principles are, never mind any nuance about them), and if you're finding that it's filtering them, you don't work at an org where it makes sense to filter new hires the same way.

commandlinefan 5y ago

Reminds me of a comic I saw: Interviewer: How do you swap two variables without using a temporary variable? Candidate: x = x + y; y = x - y; x = x - y! Interviewer: You're hired! ... two months later ... Boss: What the hell is this code you wrote? Programmer: I swapped two variables without using a temporary variable! Boss: You're fired!

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jesusohchrist 5y ago
a,b := 1,2 a,b = b,a
marcus_holmes 5y ago
This is so true. I've been looking around at jobs, and was advised to start practising on HackerRank for the technical interviews. I've been coding professionally for 30-ish years. There is very little that I've seen on HackerRank that comes anywhere close to a "real" software problem that I've faced developing actual software. Why is this being used to do technical interviews? What's the thinking here?
- lordnacho 5y ago
  My guess is that people who can't code can't pass, but people who can code might pass. It's a kind of extreme fear of false positive. Then the firm that does the testing needs to look like they're doing something beyond fizzbuzz and you end up with crazy tests. It never made sense to me, I always just do a technical conversation and if for some reason a muggle has gotten an offer it's easy to detect and deal with. People don't last long in coding jobs if they can't do it anyway.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    hehe, I have a war story about that... Back during Y2K I was working as a contractor for a large organisation. I was hired by a recruitment company, who were hired by the customer to provide a large number of contractors. Evidently someone messed up, and we had a guy join the team who couldn't code. He'd heard about the money to be made in Y2K, had done some simple exercises, and slipped through the screening process. But once he started it was obvious he had no idea what he was doing. We pushed back at the recruitment company, but apparently they couldn't fire him because they'd have to admit to the customer that they'd hired someone who couldn't code, and politically that wasn't acceptable. We were told to cover for him. So this guy clocked in every day and did nothing, literally nothing, all day, earning really good money for it. We disabled his login, so he couldn't do anything on the PC sat in front of him. If anyone from the customer organisation came by he had to look busy somehow - it was on him if he failed to do that and the customer started asking questions about him. He couldn't even read a book at his desk in case he got caught doing it. It must have been hell for him. We ended up feeling that he deserved the money just for being able to do that day in day out for months. I would have gone crazy. In the end, I moved on before he did so I don't know how it ended. I often think of that guy when pondering how life in a stable-but-boring job would be.

nikita 5y ago

I'm been following competitive programming for years and know multiple extremely successful "grads" of IOI and ACM ICPC. I have an ICPC bronze medal myself. The HN crowd will know Adam D'Angelo (IOI Gold) - cofounder of Quora and Nikolay Durov (IOI ICPC Gold) - cofounder of Telegram. My personal examples are Singlestore (billion dollar company) which I cofounded and Near Protocol - 5Bln market cap crypto company cofoundered by Alex (ICPC Gold). There are also numerous fantastic engineers that have competitive programming under their belt working for tech primes and startups. People who win are usually very very smart. AND they learn to work hard - you can't win without great work ethics. Skills wise you learn many algorithms and data structures cold. Plus you learn how to write small program with very few bugs from the the first try. Do they come out as complete package of a well rounded engineer - no, but there are years ahead to learn and they are trained to learn fast. Bottom line is I can't disagree more. People familiar with the subject are often lucky to have the team and come with great network of nerd friend. Of course you will find people from this world who don't succeed, but more plenty become fantastic engineers.

clusterhacks 5y ago
Smart and works hard is important but I'm very much not convinced that success in competitive programming (or leet-coding in interviews) is the only, or even best, way to signal those attributes to an employer. I'll also contradict myself on how important smart and works hard actually is. I'm just a normal programmer who has had a few normal programming jobs. The vast majority of my career has been about doing relatively low-key programming and data munging. When I think back on software engineers "in the trenches" of standard corporate jobs I don't see any deep need to be particularly smart and hard working. Maybe "doggedly stubborn" about not giving up and making some progress each day instead.
jimsimmons 5y ago
A few successful competitive programmers being successful in general doesn't make it a good metric for all programmers. I'd say the same about competitive math too, despite Terry Tao being a pretty great counter example. What actually happens at all levels below the gold medalist level is completely different. People memorize leetcode and think they're gods of CS. Ultimately, you have to agree, these competitions come down to learning a vast repo of tactics. A guy who is generally good at CS or math can't show up and do well. You have to burn a lot of midnight oil so to speak. IMO such data structure and algo mastery is largely illusionary. It mainly depends on the trends in the game at that point in time. If you see people who do well in such competitions, they have embedded themselves in these communities and think about it all day. Why should every programmer be held to this arbitrary standard? What if I want to learn ML, compilers and programming languages or study distributed systems? They are as much CS as anything else but you don't get a cookie every time you navigate a tricky situation. There is no gamification so you have to tread your own course. That IMO takes a lot more originality than what these rat races foster.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

I like the coding challenges we have at the office. The ones who want come to solve a few riddles (this is a nation-wide competition), food and drinks are provided, we have the opportunity to chat a bit and I can claim my last place, live every year. This allows people who like these kind of things to get together in a relaxed environment.

maccolgan 5y ago
So you use coding challenges as a form of social get together?
- BrandoElFollito 5y ago
  Yes, this is an event we have once a year. The number of seats is limited but we usually hover at 30-40 people (it is held after work hours, we are dependent on the start time, which is the same for everyone in the country)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

low-rank 5y ago

well, it's kinda funny that taking leetcode as an example of competitive programming, my man...

bayonetz 5y ago

Obviously it’s not useless if people find it useful such as the people who compete. By some metric you care about it may be “useless”, but who made you the arbiter of metrics? Competitive programming may or may not correlate with success at say software engineering, but that isn’t grounds to say it’s useless. An Olympic archer may or may not be a terrible bow hunter in the wilderness but they still have a clear skill that is useful by metrics such as people want to watch it, practice it, and compete in it. Dualist thinking like this where things are strictly good/bad, useful/useless, etc. is a really limiting thought pattern. How about instead of “is this thing useful OR useless?” we ask “in what ways is this thing useful? In what ways is this thing not useful? How can we best leverage these properties?”

cush 5y ago

Hot takes like this suck all the life (and not to mention diversity) out of our profession. Every competitive coder I've ever met does it because they think it's fun.

mvanaltvorst 5y ago

Competitive programming is fun and trains quick and accurate problem solving. You can critique the fact that modern programming interviews seem to be too focused on short leetcode problems, but that is an entirely different field than competitive programming. "Mathematical textbook problems are useless, because scribbling mathematics in a notebook is not best practice! Real mathematicians exclusively spend their time writing academic papers."

decebalus1 5y ago

> Competitive programming is a good tool for building the programming muscle. An extreme pursuit of competitive programming is worse than useless. Unfortunately, companies and students are both headed in that direction at the moment instead So if both companies and students are heading in that direction then it's not that useless, isn't it? This is a low effort anti programming interview difficulty inflation rant. But anyway, competitive programming is one thing, tech interviews are another thing if you want to get technical about it. Mostly different set of skills are cultivated by each. Finally, saying competitive programming is useless is equivalent to saying golf is useless (for example). Some people really enjoy competitive programming.

hvocode 5y ago

Competitive programming is fun. It’s amazing that some people seem to think everything is about career path optimization. Are we not allowed to do things for fun or just to pass the time anymore without someone writing that we’re wasting our time since it isn’t boosting our career?

postalrat 5y ago
Debugging is fun (at least for me). We should replace programming tests with debugging tests in interviews.

da39a3ee 5y ago

There's a lot of complaining about algorithms/data structures interview questions. But at the end of the day it is up to the hiring companies how they want to triage and select candidates. Rather than complaining, what would be more compelling is evidence that companies using these sorts of interviews are actually damaging themselves. At the moment, the most successful tech companies in human history are using those sorts of interviews, so the burden of proof seems to fall on the complainers.

stevesimmons 5y ago

The article leaves out one very important skill: teamwork. Teamwork is tested very well by contests like the ACM ICPC programming competition: teams of 3 people, one computer, and 7 or so problems to solve in 5 hours. Speaking from first hand experience, my team won the ICPC (many years ago...) based totally on coaching on our teamwork. Essentially, we arrived in the competition city 5 days early and somehow got adopted by the coach of another country's team (which said they didn't need her help). She spent those 5 days observing us approach each phase of the contest, and gave feedback on every aspect on how we worked together: triaging the problems in the first minutes of the contest, who to allocate which problems to, optimising sharing the single computer, when to switch when stuck, helping each other debug, etc, etc. Right down to how to lay out our stationery and stack our working notes on the table. After doing 2-3 prior competition problem sets a day for 5 days, we became an amazingly efficient machine. Not because we were individually better problem solvers (thought there was some improvement there). But because we all instinctively did the right things in the right order, there was no dead time, no miscommunication, and no stress about our performance versus others. Thanks to Raewyn's coaching, we converted probably a 5th place into a convincing 1st place. And she'd already won 1st place with her own country's team two years earlier. So the focus on teamwork paid off. Both in our contest, and in work situations subsequently...

kadoban 5y ago

Who cares? It's fun. Oh you're using it to pick who to hire to write mostly CRUD apps? Yeah, don't do that.

thallukrish 5y ago

Anything competitive is useless

wilmer05 5y ago

I never get offended by any news. But this one is on the limit. On my case I wish I would have started before with competitive programming. I learnt skills that almost no one has and I think is one of the skills that makes me unique.

naveen99 5y ago

Typing speed contest in the Olympics ? Sounds like fun.