Sunday, October 23, 2016

Does ACM-ICPC or IOI success correlate with industry success?

As Cosmin Negruseri and Kartik Ayyar mention, programming contests measure a certain set of skills: being able to think quickly, being able to correctly turn your thoughts into code, and knowing algorithms and data structures.

Industry success, on the other hand, depends on a whole lot of other factors. When was the last time you heard some project succeeded because an engineer used the right data structure? In my experience, the more complex algorithms and data structures are rarely used, since they tend to be difficult to implement and debug.

I remember seeing a related answer on Quora which said programming contests measure ability to solve a well defined problem within minutes. Software engineering is solving a poorly-defined and changing problem over many months. Industry success broadly will require even more skills, and the higher up the ladder you climb, the more irrelevant your programming skills are going to be.


Read other answers by Vijay Chidambaram on Quora: Read more answers on Quora.

from Quora http://ift.tt/2eGEqfS

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