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Comment by droz | Hacker News Reader

Seems somewhat nonsensical to claim the man is the "best computer programmer in the world", (ignoring for a moment the notion that there is such a thing) since only a small percentage of computer programmers in the world even participate in these events and that the "best computer programmer in the world" couldn't care less about such competitions.

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It was quote from MIT Technology review paper. Objectively I agree. TopCoder is very well known competition, also Petr won Facebook's Hacker Cup. But this is not the whole World. There're also ACM competitions, International computer science olympiads and many other corporate contests.

Which he also won.

  His accomplishments include gold (2000, 2002) and silver (2001) medals in the IOI, gold medals (2003, 2005) in the ACM ICPC World Finals as part of the team of Moscow State University and ...

nice

And there's also the real world where the "best programmer" isn't entering pointless contests.

Ah yes. The real world. Where people with pointless skills get hired by Google, even though the ability to design and implement clever algorithms is an irrelevant programmer skill.

I can't design or implement clever algorithms. I must be the best programmer in the world!

It is NOT an irrelevant programmer skill. It is a programmer skill which is relevant for certain projects and irrelevant to others.

Being the best in the world at anything is usually a good sign. Given two candidates for a programming position who appeared to have roughly equal skills based on the interview, but where one had held the world record in weightlifting and the other hadn't, I'd hire the one with the world record in weightlifting. The skill is utterly irrelevant to all programming projects, but the dedication needed to become the best in the world at something... that's valuable.

I wonder if people call these contests "pointless" out of jealousy.

I'm jealous of the depth of single subject knowledge they have.

But, my day job requires a T shaped employee with really long arms.

Do you work at Valve? :-)

There is also that part of real world which needs programmers who are good at finding and implementing algorithms. Calling someone "best programmer in the world" because he won some coding competitions is dishonest, but pretending that he isn't somehow programming in the real world is outright quackery. Yes, that CMS, HR management, project management... needs to be written and it doesn't involve any clever algorithms, but that new storage back-end for MySQL, matching algorithm for dating site, data compression for backup service, shopping recommendation needs to be written as well.

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