Vincent E. Pacheco Blog
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
What sucks about competitive programming?
It's extremely exhausting and quite frustrating.
Although the below video:
will be one of my fondest memories of programming contests, these seconds of glory are few and far between. I spent a good 40% of that contest poring over my code, trying to debug strange bugs that I couldn't see. Another 40% of that contest was spent reading problems, drawing pictures, thinking up solutions to original problems I had never seen before.
Especially in the United States, there's little glory to be had in doing programming contests. I've invested thousands of hours into them, solving problem after problem, writing line of code after line of code, for what? My peers, meanwhile, are off doing amazing things: some are doing ground-breaking research with professors, others are finding new passions that they only could have discovered at Stanford... the list goes on. I'll be retiring from competitive programming after World Finals this year, in part because
I want to live a more normal life
.
It's very easy to get hooked on competitive programming, and to care too much. I fell into that trap last year, preparing for the 2012 ACM-ICPC World Finals. It's very easy to burn yourself out, and lose that drive. That, in part, contributed to my decision to retire in a few months.
I look back at the past 6 years and wonder how life would be different if I spent less time doing competitive programming. Maybe I would have participated in more hackathons at Stanford - learned programming skills that are more applicable to pursuing a career in computer science. Maybe I wouldn't be writing this Quora answer right now, instead participating in some social dancing event. Although I wouldn't give up on competitive programming completely, I sometimes still wish I had spent only as much time as my peers practicing, instead of investing thousands of my own hours into these contests.
Read other related questions on
Quora
:
Why are there so many questions about boot camps, and competitive programming and hackathons on Quora?
What companies value competitive programming?
Are programming competitions wasteful?
Read more answers on Quora.
from Quora http://ift.tt/29rSzP2
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