
Mark Zuckerberg's TopCoder profile - Peteris
http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=276132
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mquander
I could understand this post if Zuckerberg had like a 2200 rating, or if he
did an SRM last month at 4 in the morning, but what on Earth are we supposed
to take away from this?

~~~
code_devil
It may not have much meaning today. But, 50+ years from now, it could well be
a part of history related to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

~~~
gnaritas
I doubt in 50 years anyone will know who Zuck is; he's really not that
relevant historically. Steve Jobs will be known, Zuck, not from anything he's
done yet. Facebook is not original or world changing, it's simply popular. It
wasn't the first nor will it be the last social network.

~~~
olivercameron
That may be true, but give the guy a little credit, he created a service that
has 750 million active users. How many other people can say that?

~~~
wisty
Larry and Sergy, Robyn Li, the iTunes store, the QQ guys, Jerry Yang and David
Filo, Ballmer. (note, I'm guessing)

There's tonnes of sites that serve 750 million. No service that has the same
amount of activity, but in 10 years a few status updates will seem like
usernet does today.

~~~
olivercameron
Jeez, you guys don't see the significance of a product having 750 million
active users? I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it's historical significance,
especially without any precedent.

~~~
dorian-graph
No precedent? I assume you know of MySpace and the like so what do you mean
there is no precedent to Facebook? Or do you mean to a product that has 750
million active users?

~~~
olivercameron
MySpace had nowhere near the audience of Facebook, today. And yes, I mean a
product that has nearly 750 million active users.

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cosminro
Adam D'Angelo's (former FaceBook CTO) TopCoder profile:

dangelo Algorithm Rating: 2351 Total Earnings: $3,082.50 School: California
Institute of Technology
[http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=26098...](http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=260987)

~~~
swah
And Quora founder.

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sebkomianos
I joined TopCoder a couple of months ago but never really got how it works. Am
I supposed to try all the challenges/quizes/exercises? Should I give past
competitions a try?

Is it a significant measurement of how good a developer you are (in other
words, do employers look at it)?

~~~
sukuriant
When I was still in college, the BEST general-purpose training I ever received
was in my ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) training,
and the contests that followed. Topcoder was one of the methods we used to
train for the contests, among Usaco, old ICPC contests, Project Euler, UVa
(another set of contest problems). Some people used SPOJ and other such
places.

From the years I was on the team, if I improved at anything, it was the
ability to look at a problem, and solve it. I've gotten to use little bits of
it in the year and a half I've been working, but it was more the experience I
found profitable and would encourage anyone to do the same.

Disclaimer: I was on the UCF programming team for 5 years.

~~~
boxysean
Practicing at all of these contests you mentioned basically guaranteed all my
future steps (employment, school). It's not everything but it's a lot that you
won't be able to do past college.

If you're in school and have the opportunity to participate in a club or
practice by yourself, I definitely recommend it.

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FrancescoRizzi
The one thing to take away from this profile? He figured out how to improve
his rating fairly quickly. This U shape is fairly common, but (especially back
then), I don't think it would be that common to get on a stable upward trend
within 2 months

~~~
cosminro
That rating is pretty low. Your average guy that gets hired at Google or
Facebook is >1500 in rating probably.

~~~
rwg
I'm not convinced that ratings from TopCoder's algorithm competitions are an
accurate predictor of a participant's programming ability, except perhaps at
the extremely low end.

This was me nine years ago, fresh out of college with a B.Sc. in Computer
Science from a small state university:

[http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=27128...](http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=271286&tab=alg)

A rating of 1529 or 1679 is "above average" (click the "Rating Distribution"
button above the graph), but to be honest, I was a complete crap programmer at
the time. I doubt I would have survived as a programmer (or even been
considered for a programming position) at Google or similar back then. The
same holds true now.

I hope that either the ratings distribution is artificially skewed towards the
low end (maybe all the good programmers are too busy making lots of money to
bother with TopCoder?) or the ratings really don't correspond with programming
ability.

~~~
cosminro
2002 is quite a while back, the problems have steadily increased in
difficulty, try and look at a div 1 set now.

Also the competition is much tougher as back then I think the site was mostly
open to people from the US while now you can see US is 6th in the rankings
<http://www.topcoder.com/stat?c=country_avg_rating>

That said as my experience goes (referred 23 inters who did internships at
Google and 9 who got a full time offer), >1500 rating is pretty good at least
for whiteboard coding and algorithms questions. That's not enough of course,
huge gaps in other areas won't help you. But 1500 rating is a great start.

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zobzu
topcoder doesnt mean much its just a mind game like so many others you might
succeed or fail - if you fail you can learn from your error and understand the
problem better the next time. Like everything else. Beside, everyone thinks
successful persons are necessarily very smart in all kind of ways.

that's of course not true. it takes some smarts, yeah, some luck, some proper
timing, and usually faith in yourself/ The smart part is probably a small one
in fact.

~~~
egor83
_topcoder doesnt mean much its just a mind game_

TC is a place to learn and practice algorithm development skills, which is
MUCH more than just a game.

It's not necessary in any programming job, but there are places where this
kind of knowledge is really needed - from what I know, Google is one of the
examples.

So if you like maths/algorithms, TC is a very useful place.

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sltkr
Too bad his last match is so long ago that his solutions aren't available any
more. I would have liked to see what kind of code he wrote!

~~~
redthrowaway
The apocrypha from early facebook employees is "not great". Then again, the
same was said of Larry and Sergei. Just goes to show that you only need to be
"good enough" to ship a popular product, and have the wherewithal to hire
better coders once you need to scale.

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seles
Hmm, at first glance, his rating is pretty low. But he made a total of $124. I
am guessing this is because he was an early adopter of topcoder and they gave
out prizes easier back then. I think this probably is the real Zuckerberg
because of the usage was so long ago (2002).

I have not looked further at his code for more clues, but it would probably be
interesting to delve deeper.

~~~
ralfd
In 2002 he was 17/18 years old.

