Mark Zuckerberg's TopCoder profile
topcoder.com
topcoder.com
I rather suspect cultural memory is short-term.
People do and will remember Jackson because of the music with lasting value he left behind, not because they remember listening to that music 20 years ago.
Facebook will, wenn G+ eats its lunch in a year or two, leave nothing tangible, audible or visible behind. Facebook will be just a memory, and memories quickly fade. Do you remember browsing geocities or tripod sites? Exactly. Me neither.
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.
dangelo Algorithm Rating: 2351 Total Earnings: $3,082.50 School: California Institute of Technology http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=26098...
Is it a significant measurement of how good a developer you are (in other words, do employers look at it)?
I'm not sure if employers look at it. Of course, if you get into the higher ratings, it's a nice thing to have on your resume. It also depends on the employer as well, I remember for instance one of the founders of LikeALittle was a TopCoder India champion, so for a startup like that, TopCoder experience might be something that they find interesting.
Being high-rated in these competitions requires quite a high amount of practice and participation, so in that time, you could've been learning a lot of new skills and building things.
However, knowing a lot about algorithms can be very useful in many situations as well. And for instance, Google has those (in)famous algorithms questions in their interviews, so I guess you'd be more confortable in them.
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.
If you're in school and have the opportunity to participate in a club or practice by yourself, I definitely recommend it.
You'll probably screw up the first few times you participate; that's pretty normal, so don't let that get you down!
Of course you can do the archived problems for practice, but starting with live matches is much more exciting.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or just hire someone who understand the problem while you understand the goal :-)
I have not looked further at his code for more clues, but it would probably be interesting to delve deeper.