Competitive programming is useless
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Competitive programming is useless
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Re: Competitive programming is useless
#2Technology can change after few years, but strong foundations can be helpful for many years.
Re: Competitive programming is useless
#3I understand the rant but I would like to hire someone who are good at solving problems (of any kind) and can detect the edge cases very well and without deep math or competitive programming knowledge, it's not possible at all these days.
However, I am an undergrad myself and sometimes I take pride in being a generalist, spent my fair share of time on every abstraction layers of CS possible. Now that I'm in my final year, I'm concentrating to know more about *nix system internals, doing a thesis on Computer File Systems and occasionally doing Competitive Programming to be a better problem solver.
I understand the rant.
Re: Competitive programming is useless
#4> Assuming for a minute that students from lesser tier colleges are less smart (possibly untrue but again a discussion for another day)
Let’s discuss it now: they are NOT ‘less smart.’
Re: Competitive programming is useless
#5I understand the rant but I would like to hire someone who are good at solving problems (of any kind) and can detect the edge cases very well and without deep math or competitive programming knowledge, it's not possible at all these days. However, I am an undergrad myself and sometimes I take pride in being a generalist, spent my fair share of time on every abstraction layers of CS possible. Now that I'm in my final…
people spent their bachelors degree solving problems of some kind. turns out problems of different kind requires different bachelor degrees. for porkin sake, people need to grow up and accept that the state of the art measurement models of human raw intelligence have flaws so much that they can be rendered useless.
Re: Competitive programming is useless
#6From my point of view, the correlation is definitely not 1, but while competitive code is not good code, and therefore the skills and discipline differ, there is a strong correlation between good competitive programmer and good programmers. Just like sprinters and marathonians, sure best sprinters are not necessarily the best runners for long distance, but they are definitely better than me.
Re: Competitive programming is useless
#7> Assuming for a minute that students from lesser tier colleges are less smart (possibly untrue but again a discussion for another day) Let’s discuss it now: they are NOT ‘less smart.’
Yeah, this. My home state's college's CS program boasted it was one of the best in the northwest. My friends that went through it constantly had to ask me to explain simple stuff to them because the professor's assignments were wrong or confusing.
Compare that to our local community college, which seemed to have a much more well-rounded course and taught the fundamentals in a way that made much more sense.
Anecdotal of course but certainly defies the "rule".
Another anecdote: I did maybe 100 interviews while I worked at Uber. If I had to guess, I'd say 30% were from university grads (or soon-to-be grads).
Of those, most couldn't hardly write a line of code. Several candidates in the same age group came from a non-college/-university background and usually outshone those who did.
Re: Competitive programming is useless
#8Algorithms are important, competitive programming isn't in my opinion
Re: Competitive programming is useless
#9> Assuming for a minute that students from lesser tier colleges are less smart (possibly untrue but again a discussion for another day) Let’s discuss it now: they are NOT ‘less smart.’
Yeah, this. My home state's college's CS program boasted it was one of the best in the northwest. My friends that went through it constantly had to ask me to explain simple stuff to them because the professor's assignments were wrong or confusing. Compare that to our local community college, which seemed to have a much more well-rounded course and taught the fundamentals in a way that made much more sense. Anecdotal…
I'm someone outside USA. Can you clarify your comparison between state vs community?
Re: Competitive programming is useless
#10From my point of view, the correlation is definitely not 1, but while competitive code is not good code, and therefore the skills and discipline differ, there is a strong correlation between good competitive programmer and good programmers. Just like sprinters and marathonians, sure best sprinters are not necessarily the best runners for long distance, but they are definitely better than me.
According to Peter Norvig, the correlation is actually negative!