Great. Thanks!
A Competitive Programmer's Handbook
71–80 of 171 posts
Re: A Competitive Programmer's Handbook
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know where you're getting those figures from, but they're off by more than a factor of 2 based on information I have from friends in Google and previous disclosures here on HN by Googlers. Google won't pay most new hires out of school much over $100k in the bay area, and they adjust based on living expense. AFAIK the higher end of junior compensation is close to $200k, which is where you start getting into th…
For new grad (B.S.) software engineers this year, the standard offer is ~160k total compensation amortized over the first four years, including signing/target annual bonus but not including any raises or stock refreshers that may happen. I'm graduating with an M.S., starting this summer. Using competing offers, I negotiated up to 190-195k amortized over four years, including 215-220k in the first year (because of sig…
Off topic from parent. But which companies were your competing offers from?
I failed to negotiate recently with other offers.
Re: A Competitive Programmer's Handbook
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to be a really well paid programmer, just learn java and assorted technologies and go work for a bank.
...and be outsourced to the fine Bangalorian sweatshops sooner or later. :) And it is not "really well paid". Really well paid is, like, 250k/year, and it is somewhat hard to extract it from just Java in an average bank.
> ...and be outsourced to the fine Bangalorian sweatshops sooner or later.
In my experience, the jobs of the mediocre get outsourced to said sweatshops to be done by equally mediocre people for cheaper. I've worked for two big banks as a software dev, and there are plenty of long term, extremely high paid positions for Java engineers that'll never get outsourced.
The model seems to be: have a group of on-site, well paid smart people build out a toolset, toss it to offshore to build useless CRUD features onto.
> Really well paid is, like, 250k/year, and it is somewhat hard to extract it from just Java in an average bank.
I disagree. There were a bunch of engineers at both banks that were clearing ~200-300k a year, and not in San Francisco. Granted, some of them were Oracle DBAs, but there were a bunch of Java-specific people as well.
Re: A Competitive Programmer's Handbook
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same skills used in competitive programming are needed to pass a modern day technical interview at some of the larger companies. So I wouldn't necessarily say it has nothing to do with getting a better job or salary.
I can do well enough on programming challenges at a place like HackerRank. However, I very rarely actually get to the technical interview in a job application; most commonly, I apply and don't hear back from the company. So as far as I'm concerned, I need better something but that something isn't better skills.
More networking, possibly better networking (easy, I think).
Better university name (hard to do).
Better company names (not that hard, I think).
(Major) Open Source contributions (not hard, but time consuming).
Other studies or certifications (easy).
If they're not calling you, I'd work on these.
Re: A Competitive Programmer's Handbook
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The book I recommend to people getting started is Competitive Programming 3 [1] by Steven and Felix Halim. It's pretty great if you have already a basic grasp of simple algorithms and a bit of C++. And as you say you need to practice, and the book incentivizes it. They accompany the book with precisely problems from UVa Online Judge, some of them solved and with code (in the book and in the site). [1] https://cpbook.…
Are the only difference between CP 1,2 and 3 that each is a newer version? It's hard to tell from the site.
yes, i believe so.
Re: A Competitive Programmer's Handbook
#76Competitive programming = coding challenges, like Google Code Jam and HackerRank. Nothing to do with getting a better job or a better salary.
Nothing to do with the actual job but it is heavily used for interviews to get that actual job, unfortunately.
This is my understanding as well. Data structures and basic algo comes up in interviews, and if you pass that's probably the last of it too.
I never studied them originally, but once I realised it was a blocker to getting a new job I spent some time to learn the basics at least which truly helped a lot. It was also a bit of fun, to be honest - even though they have almost no bearing on the day to day work.
So I'm interested in this book as it's a remarkably concise list of related things to learn.
Re: A Competitive Programmer's Handbook
#77Another good resource for clearing technical whiteboarding tests.
Re: A Competitive Programmer's Handbook
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
For new grad (B.S.) software engineers this year, the standard offer is ~160k total compensation amortized over the first four years, including signing/target annual bonus but not including any raises or stock refreshers that may happen. I'm graduating with an M.S., starting this summer. Using competing offers, I negotiated up to 190-195k amortized over four years, including 215-220k in the first year (because of sig…
Off topic from parent. But which companies were your competing offers from? I failed to negotiate recently with other offers.
Facebook. From what I can tell, Google's negotiating strategy is to offer max(their initial offer, highest competing offer+10k). The only people I heard of them not doing that for were those getting absurd amounts of stock from Snap, pre-IPO (like $300k+ worth at estimated IPO price over four years).
Re: A Competitive Programmer's Handbook
#79Another good resource for clearing technical whiteboarding tests.
That was my thought while reading through it, but its basically just an algorithms textbook, which makes technical interviews seem even more daunting.
Re: A Competitive Programmer's Handbook
#80This book is being used for an optional undergrad algorithms course at University of Helsinki. We have programming competition style assignments: pass/fail tests on a server with time and memory limits. Really fun challenges (and hard!!). Nice to see the author getting some recognition at HN :)
You can find the course material and assignments from https://cses.fi/alon/ - however, it's all in Finnish.