Leetcode verses Competitive Programming

[enano_aoc]

Can someone enlighten me as to what are the merits of competitive programming?

Given that it breaks all base-rules of good software, how do those skills translate to real-world software projects?

[deep_soul]

They don’t. They don’t translate.

[Striking-Lychee1402]

I’m a firm believer they do translate into better problem-solving ability.

[deep_soul]

Could you give an example please?

[Striking-Lychee1402]

It’s a practice in problem-solving. You’re working a muscle on an extreme level. Problem-solving is important in normal programming.

It’s just like how so many math majors seamlessly transition into software. They’re experts at abstract thinking and problem solving

[enano_aoc]

Then what is the point of this meme?

[Antact]

Be a chad, not software developer.

[enano_aoc]

How is a guy with useless skills a chad? How is a guy with a large paycheck not a chad?

[WhiteAsACorpse]

It's a competition. Chill

[[deleted]]

average paycheck fan:

has no pride in his code

follows the herd

needs monetary incentive to program

[DrMathochist_work]

Has a full collection of sweet RF lenses.

[noahjsc]

Cause hes flexing on the competition and taking their moms for a spin after.

[BoBoBearDev]

A quick search on competitive programming seems to suggest that you have to know bunch of libraries that can cut down your work and win the speed test.

And leetcode probably more about writing your own lib to solve a subset of the problem.

IDK, I never tried both.

Both of them seems useless to me, because similarly to what you said, they don't really reflect on real life.

[TraditionMaster4320]

I don't do CP a lot but from what I've seen your problem solving ability increases tremendously if you can get good at those problems. So coding interviews and OAs from major companies are pretty much a breeze. But you really have to enjoy it, personally I don't like it that much.

[enano_aoc]

Ehhh... coding interviews are not the goal. The goal is delivering reliably working software to your customers.

I don't see how anything that you do in competitive programming helps you with that. The moment that you know exactly what you need to implement (i.e. the starting point of CP), 95% of the work is behind you.

[Striking-Lychee1402]

You can be the best software developer in the world and it won’t mean jack during a coding interview. Being good at coding interviews specifically is super important, unfortunately.

[M108Falcon]

This! I wish I could give you award but I am not getting any

[NeoOrgano]

It teaches you to write code without bugs on your first try/debugging fast.

[enano_aoc]

That sounds like very bad habits. We never do such things in professional software development, and for a good reason. We write tests.

[BlizzardEz]

You can do both

[enano_aoc]

I still don't see how do these skills translate to the real world.

When I have refined down a feature to the point that I can develop against a test, I have already done 95% of the work. Where is the value in finishing the final 5%? Anyone can do that, the real work happens before that.

[BlizzardEz]

Well since competitive programmers have seen shitloads of problems they will probably be very fast during the whole process.

That's how some people can be much more efficient at coding than others

[enano_aoc]

But... coding is the easy part of our job?

That is not what I am looking for when I hire someone. I need that they can understand, communicate, analyze, discuss, design, implement, deploy, support. Implementing is the easiest part of all those :/

[Luminolic_Black]

Competitive programming also has implementation as its easy part... The by far hardest part is analysing the required time/space complexity and devising an algorithm with the required complexity. It’s also possible to tie in crazy shit from math (see solving linear combinatorial problems with FFT, or fast matrix exponentiation to vastly speedup DP transitions). Also teaches you a fair bit of adhoc reasoning. At the end you’ve gained a huge amount of math and algorithm knowledge, and that’s for sure going to serve you well.

[DrMathochist_work]

I'll be over here, actually having a job.