Monday, March 12, 2012

To all the people who say programming competitions are useless

There's been this general vibe on HN and r/programming that programming competitions (that involve problems one must solve) on the whole have little to do with programming in general.

I beg to differ.

99% of us can crunch out Javascript and some backend language pretty quickly; some ajax interaction, maybe some form validation and some Twitter and Facebook APIs. And, a lot of us can quickly learn new things when we need to. Need to learn Scala for next project? No problem. Client wants to use the Face.com API? Alright, let's do it.

But, that's not the only stuff that matters.

Your skills are *really* tested when you hit a roadblock that isn't covered by the abstractions you're working on.

For example, the database inserts aren't happening fast enough, and the company doesn't want to buy any more servers to fix the problem, so, you've go to optimize it.

Programming competitions don't test whether or not you can go about updating portions of code, they test whether you are able to write code to solve a problem you've likely never heard of under a time constraint.

And, that's what companies would like in programmers.

Math based problems are just one way of approaching timed problem solving, and they work quite well, since many of us are well versed in at least basic math, and are able to get our hands around the problem so that we can begin to think about implementing it.

So, programming competitions *do* have to do with programming and the ability to solve problems, which is what development is all about.

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