4 ms·

…yes? Lol. I’ve moonlighted on upwork for easy cash in the past. Not all of us made 200k/year in our first job out of college a decade and a half ago. Yes, I w

…yes? Lol. I’ve moonlighted on upwork for easy cash in the past. Not all of us made 200k/year in our first job out of college a decade and a half ago. Yes, I was part of a USA team in an international competition. I won our region. For what it’s worth, competitive programming isn’t like sports. The playing field isn’t that good, and the amount of work it takes to make it past regionals and to an international competition is waaaay less than any sport or even something like chess I suspect.

bragger 4y ago
The field is definitely weak. I got a top 50 result in round 3 (but not top 25) of my first GCJ, my second programming contest ever, the first being the one time I showed up for one in college, and that score was ahead of some ICPC and IOI gold medalists. My only preparation being doing a few practice problems from prior years and making a blank C++ file with some includes, an empty main function, and "using namespace std;". I think it helped to have some background in time-constrained thinking from high school math contests, but I was never particularly good at those, either.
- versteegen 4y ago
  Let's admit it (your username does), you're very good. Code Jam seems to reward problem solving and maths/CS ability far more than programming ability, relative to other coding competitions. The most important thing is analysing the problem, not memorising standard algorithms. That's why you could do so well with so little competition experience. And why I have stuffed up so many GCJ rounds. That said, sometimes the field really is weak. I finished in the top 1000 on the first Distributed Code Jam and got a t-shirt just because... less than 1000 qualifying contestants were willing to even figure out the novel setup and compete. (Actually I did badly.)
  - geraldwhen 4y ago
    Most people will not be able to solve longest common substring without being familiar with the problem ahead of time, and many programming problems can be broken down or transformed into similar algorithms. Identifying root applicable algorithms and reproducing them quickly is what you study when competing in programming competitions.

bragger 4y ago

The field is definitely weak. I got a top 50 result in round 3 (but not top 25) of my first GCJ, my second programming contest ever, the first being the one time I showed up for one in college, and that score was ahead of some ICPC and IOI gold medalists. My only preparation being doing a few practice problems from prior years and making a blank C++ file with some includes, an empty main function, and "using namespace std;". I think it helped to have some background in time-constrained thinking from high school math contests, but I was never particularly good at those, either.

versteegen 4y ago
Let's admit it (your username does), you're very good. Code Jam seems to reward problem solving and maths/CS ability far more than programming ability, relative to other coding competitions. The most important thing is analysing the problem, not memorising standard algorithms. That's why you could do so well with so little competition experience. And why I have stuffed up so many GCJ rounds. That said, sometimes the field really is weak. I finished in the top 1000 on the first Distributed Code Jam and got a t-shirt just because... less than 1000 qualifying contestants were willing to even figure out the novel setup and compete. (Actually I did badly.)
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  Most people will not be able to solve longest common substring without being familiar with the problem ahead of time, and many programming problems can be broken down or transformed into similar algorithms. Identifying root applicable algorithms and reproducing them quickly is what you study when competing in programming competitions.