111–120 of 127 posts
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.
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Give us a frelling break. Please don't willingly invite derison.
It's not ok to comment like this here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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I'm not sure that you avoid errors by forcing yourself to write short code. With C macros.
When you write "FOR(i,n)", instead of "for (int i = 0; i That being said, I've found that competitive programmers sometimes write extremely ugly code. It's surprising to see how they are able to solve such complex problems, and yet can't (or don't value) write readable and structured code. Maybe they are so sharp that they don't feel the need to make their code more readable.
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Sure, that might be the case. But for those funny needs I have a "crazy algorithm course" from a top 10 university, ACM ICPC and Kaggle or other paid competitions I can attend. I am not going to go through such an interview doing simple silly things I did dozen times before at FB/Goog/etc., when I know I can use that time to work on something more interesting, or just for relaxing after a hard work/enjoying accomplis…
I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve built a feature that was presented as a coding exercise, possibly more than once.
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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.
Sure, that might be the case. But for those funny needs I have a "crazy algorithm course" from a top 10 university, ACM ICPC and Kaggle or other paid competitions I can attend. I am not going to go through such an interview doing simple silly things I did dozen times before at FB/Goog/etc., when I know I can use that time to work on something more interesting, or just for relaxing after a hard work/enjoying accomplis…
During my professional time I write software to make money. During my free time I write software to make money. As an aging software engineer algorithmic questions just screen for how much time you're willing to put into an interviewing. GitHub screens for how much of a sucker you are.
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.
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Sure, that might be the case. But for those funny needs I have a "crazy algorithm course" from a top 10 university, ACM ICPC and Kaggle or other paid competitions I can attend. I am not going to go through such an interview doing simple silly things I did dozen times before at FB/Goog/etc., when I know I can use that time to work on something more interesting, or just for relaxing after a hard work/enjoying accomplis…
There's irony. Asking for GitHub is 10x worse than algorithmic questions. I just went through the interview process at big companies, with all the resources out there it's easy to get good at these types of questions. During my professional time I write software to make money. During my free time I write software to make money. As an aging software engineer algorithmic questions just screen for how much time you're w…
I see in the comments that some people conflate competitive programming and technical interviews. Technical interviews (at least in companies such as facebook and google) are usually much easier than competitive programming problems. The problem you find on leetcode for interview preparation would be considered beginner problems in competitions such as google code jam.
> Technical interviews (at least in companies such as facebook and google) are usually much easier than competitive programming problems. Probably. But if you are a student outside U.S where the opportunities are an order of magnitude less the only way to even land an interview with these companies is by doing competitive programming. Google selects students through APAC test in Asia where you have to be top n% in th…
Are any of them bad developers?