To intercept the expected comments that these contests have nothing to do with real world skill (in programming, not 'cracking'), Steve Newman, cofounder of Wri

To intercept the expected comments that these contests have nothing to do with real world skill (in programming, not 'cracking'), Steve Newman, cofounder of Writely, was a top competitor on TopCoder, as was Adam De'Angelo, previously CTO of Facebook. Craig Silverstein, an ACM ICPC programming competition world champion, was Director of Technology and employee #1 at Google. This does refer to the algorithmic competitions specifically, the correlation between achievement in the design/development competitions is less clear.