How do you guys balance job with competitive programming ?

Hi guys ! I'm about to get out of my university and step into the corporate world. In India, most competitive programmers stop competing once they leave college. Most of them are in this game for sake of getting jobs at tech giants like Google, Microsoft etc. However, some people never stop competing. There are some who learnt competitive programming while being employed. If you are one of them who hasn't left competitive programming while working, I would request you to share your strategy. How do you balance to do both while still remaining strong during competitions ? I'm just curious.

• 4 years ago, # ^ | Thanks ! That's helpful. Time has come for me to maintain a delicate balance between job and competitions.

• 4 hours ago, # ^ | May I ask you why you don’t participate in contests recent years? I have a dream to be a grand master, but unfortunately my job is too long, 10:00-21:00 or later. I think a man who can persist in something he love is very cool.

• 3 years ago, # ^ | Or make Competitive Programming your job.

  • 3 years ago, # ^ | Errichto , is your full time job Competitive Programming?

    • 3 years ago, # ^ | I wish. I'm just a Youtuber.

      • 3 years ago, # ^ | Does Youtube pay enough? Or you also have another job?

        • 3 years ago, # ^ | I guess I teach programming.

      • 3 years ago, # ^ | That can still be very lucrative if you're popular or know how to abuse algorithms. Hauptsturmführer PewDiePie is also "just a Youtuber".

  • 3 years ago, # ^ | ← Rev. 2 →   +15 I am always curious about people having a full-time career in CP (I might pursue this direction in the future if I am bored with working as big industry's slaves, who knows). How does this job imply to your career progression? Do CP companies (like HackerRank?, Atcoder?) make enough money and how? etc? I would very love to hear rng_58's story/opinion about having a full-time career in setting CP problems.

    • 3 years ago, # ^ | Hackerrank and plenty of similar websites have money because they are about coding interviews and matching programmers with employers. Working for them will make you enough money assuming you don't live in a rich/expensive country. So, go for it if you want to work remotely. You can prepare problems and materials but for sure it won't be on the level of CP contests. Just setting problems for the whole life is hard or impossible because you might run out of ideas. The way to go is to become a coordinator/tester, I guess. Some people combine that with working in universities and usually doing some research. I'm quite sure though that you can earn more while working in big companies. My plan is to organize classes and maybe camps/workshops myself (ofc. not alone).

      • 3 years ago, # ^ | Wondering if tourist planned to make a life by yearly winning major algorithm contests

      • 3 years ago, # ^ | ← Rev. 2 →   +13 I am curious how many problems those companies virtually need for preparing coding tests. Even if you could be paid per problem set, it doesn't mean you could earn billions of dollars if you made billions of problem sets. Assume: I think I could write two whole AtCoder Beginner Contest problem sets in a day if I did as a full-time job, and that would sum up to 10 sets in a week. But who on earth would hold beginner's contests that frequently?? What if another coder is interested in doing the same job? (By the way I am also interested in teaching CP related courses)

        • 3 years ago, # ^ | Are you sure about that? Writing statements and preparing tests isn't always that easy. Plus you should watch the contest and answer questions, what takes 2 hours itself. Hackerearth needs hundreds of trivial problems so maybe they would want such a person :D And you could mix it up with doing harder rounds and then I'm sure you won't saturate the problem-creating market.

          • 3 years ago, # ^ | This is a method one of my friends uses to make easy problems: Choose the type of inputs (the one with a fixed number of integers, like [L, R, X] or [N, M]) Choose the type of mathematical facts (e.g. the sum of digits, divisors) Choose what to calculate (e.g. maximum value, # of ~, output everything that satisfy ~) Combine the three to make one problem Under this method, you don't even have to spend hours to prepare data sets. Mostly random cases + a few tricky cases would work.

            • 3 years ago, # ^ | "I can do a shitty job quickly." Well, I won't argue with that. Your friend creates boring problems. I hope Atcoder doesn't accept so many of those.

              • 3 years ago, # ^ | Who cares the first few problems' quality. Beginners should solve a lot of problems to get used to coding anyway.

              • 3 years ago, # ^ | Who cares? Those who solve those first few problems ;p Not everybody competes to excel in competitive programming. Some do it for fun, some for simple practice. Why won't we put some interesting problems there to show them that competitive programming is something they can enjoy?

              • 3 years ago, # ^ | I often use the method which EnumerativeCombinatorics wrote to make first some number of problems on ARCs. It is extremely useful, and I agree that I can prepare 2 ABCs everyday. The process to make problems can be divided in following steps. Come up with problems. Once we succeeded to “stop” our brain so that we cannot think about hard things, it takes 5 mins in average to come up with an easy problem. What is important here is to think about the future: you prepare the problems. You should discard the ideas, that you need to write complex generators and problem statements. The problems, which can be explained in one line, and have inputs with constant number of integers, are best. Write statements, make solutions and make test cases. It should be easy task, if you properly made problems. Once I did RTA to prepare first 3 problems of ARC. It took only 40 mins. You may think that the problems produced by this procedure is boring. But, in nature, easy problems are nothing other than boring, since it tests whether the competitors know the grammar of the languages and idea of time complexity. Interesting problems should be harder because they require some thinking, and too hard for very first problems.

              • 3 years ago, # ^ | You know, you are that one of my friends.

              • 3 years ago, # ^ | I don't argue that it's possible to quickly prepare a boring problem. But I explained why you shouldn't. Don't write ARC if you don't care about its participants.

              • 3 years ago, # ^ | I don't know the examples of interesting problems, which are suitable for very first problems. If it is a contest for Div.1, I don't take this method because the easiest problem is enough hard to make it interesting. And I didn't say that I don't care about the participants. The main purpose of very first problems is testing whether the participant know the basic grammar of languages and the way to implement some basic functions (such as, standard io, taking max of array, reversing a sequence, calculate Fibonacci). I think that my "automatical" problem-producing method produces the problems which satisfies this condition, because I combine these techniques. Although the problems are boring for me because I already know how to implement the basic things, it doesn't mean these are bad problems.

• 3 years ago, # ^ | ← Rev. 2 →   +51 Yes, there are 17 m's in the suffix, its easy to remember coz Eminem's birthday falls on 17th October.

  • 3 years ago, # ^ | oh wow..superb method to remember no. of m's in suffix..hahha

    • 3 years ago, # ^ | Actually his handle a lot easier

      • 3 years ago, # ^ | A Fake ID created, just to post a comment here.

      • 3 years ago, # ^ | By the way my team name at ICPC 2016 was IIIlIIIllIIlIlIIllIlIllllllIII but I still remember the correct name. Quiz: Guess why.

• 3 years ago, # ^ | Akashdeep Nain ?

• 3 years ago, # ^ | Vipul Sharma?

• 3 years ago, # ^ | For all you know, your manager might have a software on your comp that can view your screen :O

• 3 years ago, # ^ | For all you know, LTDT could be your manager.

• 3 years ago, # ^ | Does this magical job exist?

  • 3 years ago, # ^ | ← Rev. 3 →   +19 Yes, which is the main work I'm doing at Facebook right now :) (maybe the algorithm itself is too simple for you, but I still find it interesting none the less).

    • 3 years ago, # ^ | But will it actually provide any benefits for your competitive programming skills? Unless the job itself resembles competitive programming, and so do algorithms that you have to work with — I doubt that developing/optimizing "some algorithm" would be very helpful. For example, in my current project at Google I really don't have sufficient math knowledge to understand some of the parts (it requires knowing statistics, and I don't have that background), but I don't even think that learning corresponding theory would make me better at something like Project Euler — leave aside actual competitive programming. The only part of my job that I find related to competitive programming is test-solving problems for Google programming competitions (which would cover all problems from Google Code Jam and Google Kick Start).

      • 3 years ago, # ^ | Like anything else, it's up to your goal. Probably the algorithm in your day job is not sufficient (nor useful) if you are training to be 2800+/3000+/whatever higher rank are there. On the other hand, I find real world algorithms tend to be more "rich" and flexible, partly due to the ambiguous nature of real world work.

    • 3 years ago, # ^ | What's your position at FB and which office are you in? I'm starting work at FB London in 2 months so I'm hoping to find an interesting position.

      • 3 years ago, # ^ | I work at Menlo Park in Data Infra. From my experience, positions in infra team tends to be more algorithmic-friendly (unless you have some very specific area you can/want to specialize on).

  • 3 years ago, # ^ | Depending on how broadly you understand designing algorithms, I have it. Mostly not regular competition-like algorithms, but there are often specific constraints I have to optimise for, e.g. 100 kB of memory. Yesterday and today, I was optimising a piece of assembly: "hmm, is it better to use an IT block after the CMP or a BGT branch?", "where do pipeline delays occur?" and so on.

  • 3 years ago, # ^ | Research jobs on the field of theoretical computer science are kind of that, I think. We can publish paper by just solving CP-like problems. As you know, the CP problems related to real world are usually boring, because the real world is too complex. The real world is not fully mathematical and that is why CP is much more interesting than real world. Here, in research jobs not on IT company, you do not need to consider about the shitty real world and you can concentrate on CP-like things.

• 3 years ago, # ^ | ← Rev. 2 →   0 Hi ll931110 what do you do in Facebook? Since what age did you work there?

• 3 years ago, # ^ | This is a real good idea. Next year, I want to try for higher education. May be that time the advanced and mature CP will make my research and study more enjoyable. But for now "In the day, I work. In the night, I solve problem in my dream." ;-)

• 3 years ago, # ^ | Do you have recommendations/examples for an algorithmic academic career?