Comment by 0x20cowboy
19 hours ago
Competitive Programming is such an asinine concept.
It’s like competitive knitting, or competitive architecture.
This focus on the inane is what has really damaged this industries perception in engineering IMO.
19 hours ago
Competitive Programming is such an asinine concept.
It’s like competitive knitting, or competitive architecture.
This focus on the inane is what has really damaged this industries perception in engineering IMO.
Competitive programming is a fun activity with little to no relation with the actual industry.
Why would influence perception in any way being an unrelated very niche hobby?
Incorrect. It is the basis of leetcode interviews.
In that case, I would frame as it is ruining interviews.
The actual day to day of the industry, stays unnafected.
it is mostly just a math/logic contest, with the benefit that you can get the result on the fly, and maybe cheese some problems without rigourous proof
or you can look at other form of competitive programming, like heuristic contest, that would teach you how to use baseline, run tests, adapt strategies based on given data
no one consider a time limited contest (hours to maybe days) same as engineering job, they do this for the fun of it
Unfortunately you are wrong and this is what led to leetcode style interviews where times puzzles are the gate keeping factor. It has literally ruined the industry.
Leetcode was designed to collectively implement bias towards young talented people whose only obsession at that point of time is their work. So no kids, family, free time, and no financial freedom (mortgages, loans). Once you build such culture, it starts to grow and gatekeep by itself from within.
AI is the only thing that has ruined the industry
Nothing wrong with competitive things.
What is concerning, however, is when the competitors of these sports decide that their sport should become a filter for things adjacent to said sport.
The rationale is usually something like: "Competitive programming might not be a robust predictor for job performance, but most competitive programmers I know are also good developers, thus we must use competitive programming as a qualifying factor for hiring new developers." and weight it heavily compared to other signals.
I think competitive programming only focus on few technical aspects, like: algorithmic thinking, familiary with various data structures, complexity-performance trade-off, etc etc.
Nothing is wrong with that. Think of it as intellectual exercise. Fair enough, real world software development involves other factors.
more like competitive horse riding. Done for fun, but in everyday life you use a car.
Well, there is just horse riding as well, done for fun. I think this is a better analogy.