Ask HN: Why most devs doing competitive programming are unemployed these days? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why most devs doing competitive programming are unemployed these days?

3 pointsdonnie1234512 comments

Give me your honest opinion

Don't you think excessive focus on compitative programming is waste of time ?

I've heard that lots of students especially from Eastern Europe and China and other countries spend lot of time on compitative programming and Math Olympiad instead of actual development

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I work on one of the platforms for coding competitions. The participants are doing just fine. Some work, some choose to only compete because they are students, many do contracts and gig work. Those who are unemployed tend to be that way by choice. We get well-known companies who seek out the participants to offer various kinds of work. I've seen no basis for the idea competing causes unemployment.

I haven't seen evidence of competitive programmers being unemployed at a disproportionate rate but I would say that being able to write code is only one heuristic to how effective you would be as a software engineer. I don't think that excessive focus on competitive programming is a waste of time if you enjoy it. If you are focusing on it for employability, then yes, I think there are likely other places to spend your time more wisely

Previously on "The question is simple: Is it correct that most student who do competitive programming stay unemployed ? Give me your honest opinion." the user deleted all their comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34996991

No I haven't deleted comments No one was responding to that questions

In that case sorry for the accusation. Typically when users can't delete their comments they replace them with dots or 'deleted'. Commenting only dots has no effect (or value).

Well if you're employed you don't need to waste your time on competitive programming

I'm not sure what you mean by competitive programmers?

My thoughts too. I will however give a description of the types of programmers I know who are not unemployed or who have no problems finding work:

* Decent at actual programming

* Can managed time well

* Can manage people (from an interpersonal standpoint) even better

* Understands the problem domain or has the capability to

* Nice and pleasant to be around

* Has more breadth than depth

Coding competitions

How do you know if a programmer is “competitive”? Do you take a look at that programmer’s open source contributions?

Updated

Competitive programming

My Opinion: Yes,They remain unemployed. a) As Industry is maturing day by day,most companies want to hire senior developers.Hiring for junior developers has slowed down. b) Most of the well reputed product based companies have their engineering offices in US where there is infinite supply of fresh grads from premier research institutes.Even these grads are finding it tough to land a job. c) Not all companies are interested in competitive programming contest-it depends on the company,hiring manager,team. d) Let's say you are from Eastern Europe/Russia,China,India,Korea,Japan or other low income countries,hell even from US/Western EU.No company would like to import you just because you won a contest.(This is because these companies are only interested in hiring senior developers.) e) Competitive programming is about solving artificial problems having artificial constraint.Solving such problems doesn't guarantee that you can solve complex problems at professional level. f) FAANG Interviews are conducted to filter out candidate's who can't code.It is possible to pass these interviews without CP experience.I personally know lot of such developers.

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