Why I hate programming competitions
An essay on why being good at programming competitions doesn’t make you a good programmer.
Almost all programming competitions have the same format. A number of relatively short problems are posed to the contestants. They have to come up with algorithms and working code that implements those algorithms. The test of the resulting code is whether it works at all, and if so, how fast it is. There is a time limit which is generally quite short. And that’s all.
Update (2006-07-19 11:31): fixed missing link. Oops.
