Disclaimer: MSFT employee working closely with Windows 8 I speak as a former programming team member from a very high ranking school in the SE Region according

Disclaimer: MSFT employee working closely with Windows 8 I speak as a former programming team member from a very high ranking school in the SE Region according to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest regionals. "He's also been primed to expect a difficult task by his annoyingly condescending son. I'm not at all surprised that he struggled with it." This has an enormous effect on a person's ability to solve problems. I learned this one day speaking with one of our coaches. I took what I recall to be a 1000 or 1100 point TopCoder Level 1 problem and told him it was "easy". I was being sarcastic, but he took me seriously and efforted more at the problem because it was "easy". He even postulated a few theories on how to solve the problem in our conversation. He said the reason he even did that was because I told him it was easy. Had I said it was hard, the results may have been different.