Comment by nikita | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikita | Hacker News Reader

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I'm been following competitive programming for years and know multiple extremely successful "grads" of IOI and ACM ICPC. I have an ICPC bronze medal myself.

The HN crowd will know Adam D'Angelo (IOI Gold) - cofounder of Quora and Nikolay Durov (IOI ICPC Gold) - cofounder of Telegram. My personal examples are Singlestore (billion dollar company) which I cofounded and Near Protocol - 5Bln market cap crypto company cofoundered by Alex (ICPC Gold). There are also numerous fantastic engineers that have competitive programming under their belt working for tech primes and startups.

People who win are usually very very smart. AND they learn to work hard - you can't win without great work ethics. Skills wise you learn many algorithms and data structures cold. Plus you learn how to write small program with very few bugs from the the first try. Do they come out as complete package of a well rounded engineer - no, but there are years ahead to learn and they are trained to learn fast.

Bottom line is I can't disagree more. People familiar with the subject are often lucky to have the team and come with great network of nerd friend. Of course you will find people from this world who don't succeed, but more plenty become fantastic engineers.

A few successful competitive programmers being successful in general doesn't make it a good metric for all programmers. I'd say the same about competitive math too, despite Terry Tao being a pretty great counter example.

What actually happens at all levels below the gold medalist level is completely different. People memorize leetcode and think they're gods of CS. Ultimately, you have to agree, these competitions come down to learning a vast repo of tactics. A guy who is generally good at CS or math can't show up and do well. You have to burn a lot of midnight oil so to speak.

IMO such data structure and algo mastery is largely illusionary. It mainly depends on the trends in the game at that point in time. If you see people who do well in such competitions, they have embedded themselves in these communities and think about it all day. Why should every programmer be held to this arbitrary standard? What if I want to learn ML, compilers and programming languages or study distributed systems? They are as much CS as anything else but you don't get a cookie every time you navigate a tricky situation. There is no gamification so you have to tread your own course. That IMO takes a lot more originality than what these rat races foster.

> People memorize leetcode and think they're gods of CS how fast you go from 'all levels below gold' to this while probably such people do exist (never actually met someone who tried to memorize concrete solutions), they have nothing to do with competitive programming. Because you won't go far with bunch of memorized (and not understood) solutions of previous competitions. Even learning basic algorithm's implementations won't get you too high in competitions. Because you actually have to understand different approaches to actually be able to solve new problems.

> A guy who is generally good at CS or math can't show up and do wel

this is also not true. While you won't get like first places without practice, you still will be able to solve basic problems (if your cs degree has any substance behind it). And during interview it certainly shows. Nobody will give you hard problems which you can solve only by having some very specific knowledge of this particular problem. If you don't know some algorithm by hard but still can work out some approach using you background knowledge, you will pass almost any interview.

Smart and works hard is important but I'm very much not convinced that success in competitive programming (or leet-coding in interviews) is the only, or even best, way to signal those attributes to an employer.

I'll also contradict myself on how important smart and works hard actually is. I'm just a normal programmer who has had a few normal programming jobs. The vast majority of my career has been about doing relatively low-key programming and data munging. When I think back on software engineers "in the trenches" of standard corporate jobs I don't see any deep need to be particularly smart and hard working. Maybe "doggedly stubborn" about not giving up and making some progress each day instead.

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