this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Programmer Humor
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What is this meme about? "Competition", "Leaderboard", "Waiting for the timer to hit 0:00"? I am so confused.
Competitive programming.
Usually multiple algorithmic problems that are released to public at the same time and the fastest people to submit a correct solution get more points.
A fun one I still like to participate in is advent of code, which is a yearly christmas themed one with two problems released a day during advent.
If you want to seriously compete in competitive programming, you need to learn and memorize different problem types and the solutions to those. A bit like you start learning patterns in chess.
For practicing, the CSES Problem Set is a gold mine for practice problems. Theres also a list of competitive programming books on the site.
That sounds exhausting. Maybe I am showing my age, but after 15 years as a software developer (now DevOps engineer) I feel absolutely no desire to spend my free time competing against others. Maybe I would've felt different about this back in the days.
That being said, this meme still applies to regular software developers. I know plenty of people who match each of the shown stereotypes.
Advent of Code is fun even without seriously competing (which, at least globally or in bigger communities is basically impossible unless you're actually a proper competitive programmer). There's no stakes and you can just do the challenges you feel like doing :)
It's about coding competitions, and without me being directly involved in the scene (the closest I get to it are silly competitions regarding indy-games or decompiling old games or whatever) I did make personal acquaintance with every of those stereotypes, and it's so true.
It's about how I applied to an associate engineer position, made it through 3 rounds of interviews, then got rejected only to find out they hired a senior engineer with over a decade of experience at AWS. /rant
It's about the feeling when people are a milion times more skilled in your field