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A comment on Programmers of ITMO University win the ACM ICPC for the sixth time. Parent comment

Re:Programmers of ITMO University win the ACM ICPC for the s... by custo15 on Friday May 22, 2015 @08:17AM (#9587809)
I'm agree that there's a passion among developers for such contests in Moscow, too. But my point is that this is not something "prestigious" and as a consequence a reason why many people "spending a lot of time" for it.

I mean you will not get any major benefits for investing in this, or something. It's interesting but not must-have for a professional developer. And that's why I not see a lot of people around coding contest-like tasks instead of, for example, contibuting to open source or doing freelance job, etc.

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Re:Programmers of ITMO University win the ACM ICPC for the s... by x4m on Friday May 22, 2015 @11:14AM (#9588785)
That`s true, according to Peter Norvig "Being good at programming competitions correlates negatively with being good on the job" http://www.catonmat.net/blog/programming-competitions-work-p...
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Re:Programmers of ITMO University win the ACM ICPC for the s... by minwcnt5 on Friday May 22, 2015 @12:18PM (#9589236)
You forgot to add the key qualifier "at Google". That says nothing about how being good at programming competitions correlates with being good on the job in general.

It's also kind of common sense that if you spend a lot of time working on something that's not really related to your industry job that won't be as good at said industry job as if you spent that time, say, writing open source machine learning software. People just assume that programming == software engineering, but programming competitions are a lot more similar to math competitions than they are to real world jobs.

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Re:Programmers of ITMO University win the ACM ICPC for the s... by mzl on Saturday May 23, 2015 @01:45AM (#9592110)
Norvigs claim can quite probably be credited to selection bias. See http://erikbern.com/2015/04/07/norvigs-claim-that-programmin... for some nice graphs.
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