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Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2017) [pdf]

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Re: Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2017) [pdf]

#41

Post by zerr »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #38
gaius wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the entire point of those kinds of interviews. It’s a strong filter for “recent graduate” while maintaining plausible deniability for ageism. It has a secondary effect of filtering for “willing to do unpaid overtime”.

Maybe it's just a way to provide a fair test that anyone with ability can pass with a little practice?

I wouldn't call it "a little practice". There are people who are "into" competitive programming and there are people who aren't, and those "fair" tests are skewed towards the former group. The worst thing is that the actual job has nothing to do with the competitive programming at all.

Re: Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2017) [pdf]

#42

Post by gaius »

harshgupta wrote: post #40
gaius wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the entire point of those kinds of interviews. It’s a strong filter for “recent graduate” while maintaining plausible deniability for ageism. It has a secondary effect of filtering for “willing to do unpaid overtime”.

I think its more of aptitude test in a domain common to all programmers.

Yeah right. Tell me the last time you built your own red-black tree in real actual code at work. Or did a sort by any other means than tacking “order by” on the end of a query.

They are a test of how recently you crammed for your CS finals, that’s all.

Re: Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2017) [pdf]

#43

Post by gaius »

zerr wrote: post #41
fjsolwmv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just a way to provide a fair test that anyone with ability can pass with a little practice?

I wouldn't call it "a little practice". There are people who are "into" competitive programming and there are people who aren't, and those "fair" tests are skewed towards the former group. The worst thing is that the actual job has nothing to do with the competitive programming at all.

Another filter for age is that 20-something’s are more likely to have time for this whereas older people may have more time commitments already

People in their 20s and 30s now will regret not stamping out ageism when they hit their 40s and 50s, as they inevitably will

Re: Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2017) [pdf]

#44

Post by JohnSz »

tzipp wrote: post #33
zerr wrote: post #29

The most irritating thing with these competitive/algo stuff is that no matter how many times you master it - eventually you always forget it, because you don't need it on a daily (or more like yearly) basis in the real world.

If you really needed to remember it, you could employ spaced-repetition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

I use Spaced Repition for chess openings as I can't refer to a book while playing a tournament game. That's not the case for programming.

Re: Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2017) [pdf]

#45

Post by banachtarski »

bitL wrote: post #21
NetOpWibby wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL

He's not joking though. I've experienced 3 rounds of stupid tricky questions followed by a 4 hour "take home" project at a UK startup in Deep Learning before they were willing to even send flight tickets to London, and the feedback I've received was so comical that I almost wrote a blog post about it (I still might). Another robotic startup in SV grills with 6-hour stupid codility tests as a first phase (i.e. waste 6…

The problem is, for every person like you, there's a person like me that actually likes those types of challenges and wouldn't actually mind being thrown into that type of gauntlet. My years of experience be damned.

Re: Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2017) [pdf]

#47

Post by irundebian »

svat wrote: post #24
legohead wrote: post #11

Seemed interesting up until the "Shortening code" section, that'd drive me mad.

Another reason for shortening code in programming contests (apart from being able to type and edit/iterate faster) is that it helps you avoid errors. For example, in the heat of the moment and under intense time pressure (e.g. you have finally figured out the algorithm to solve the problem, but you have only 13 minutes left to implement it or whatever), it's easy to write code like this: for (int i = 0; i instead of…

I'm not sure that you avoid errors by forcing yourself to write short code. With C macros.

Re: Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2017) [pdf]

#48

Post by saagarjha »

donttrack wrote: post #46

I would watch programming contests live streams.. Are there any available?

In my experience, most of the time goes into coming up with an algorithm or debugging. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think those would be particularly interesting to watch.

Re: Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2017) [pdf]

#50

Post by saagarjha »

thallium205 wrote: post #18
chris11 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code should be written for readability, not typing speed.

But if you're in a competitive environment that requires speed, why would you write for readability?

Because you’ll end up debugging the code an hour later when it fails on an edge case?
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