

Ask YC: Any hackers here ever in an online coding competition? - thorax

If you've used Top Coder or submitted in the obfuscated code contests, what's been your experience? Do you see value in these as a mark of a  good hacker?<p>Would you be more likely to hire someone who did well in these?
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kryptos
I finished my UG last year from India, but participated in several OPC's(
Online prog contests) winning a few. I also represented my Univ in IBM-
ICPC(Inter collegiate prog contest).. all of these were wonderful
experiences.Trying out such problems really helps ... and increases your
understanding of algorithm complexity and related literature... Google Summer
of code during the last year of Univ was also fun.. albeit a different kind of
experience...nonetheless taught me a lot. Both me,and my teammate during these
code contests who was also a high performer in TC and currently work at
different startups. I genuinely believe these experiences definitely made us
better hackers.

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bscofield
I won the solo division for the Rails Rumble a few months ago. For me, the
most valuable part of the competition was how inspirational it turned out to
be. Seeing how much was accomplished under severe constraints (48 hours, max 4
people per team) shed new light on all my other development efforts.

I imagine that people who do well at such competitions would be better hires,
but that would be due to other factors - passion for coding, good time
management skills, etc. I doubt it's a major difference, though.

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mixmax
My old lead-hacker was in a few.

Got disqualified in one too because they didn't believe he had built the stuff
himself in the allotted timeframe :-(

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xirium
I've had that problem too. There was a competition, possibly in 2004, to win
an old BBC Micro by writing a program on a BBC Micro. I wrote a program to
draw a spinning tetrahedron with back face culling. I was disqualified because
they thought that I'd memorised a type-it-in listing from an old magazine. I
also won the 1996 IOCCC Best Layout.

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manny
All I do is constantly think about the next project-euler challenge
(www.projecteuler.net).

...Religiously.

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andr
Would Google Summer of Code count? I participated in the first one with
Mambo/Joomla, but was fairly disappointed.

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kingnothing
Why were you disappointed?

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comatose_kid
I've played around with Top Coder. Good scores mean you know your algorithms
very well, and are really fluent with your language of choice.

That said, I'd be just as inclined to hire someone who had an impressive side-
project or two on their website.

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phaedrus
I was a finalist in The Daily WTF programming contest:

[http://dennisferron.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-contest-i-
didn...](http://dennisferron.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-contest-i-didnt-win-
but-could-have.html)

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treeform
yep pyweek.org mostly

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jward
Ditto with pyweek and also LD48.

