sw_enthusiast's blog

By sw_enthusiast, history, 6 years ago, In English

Hello everyone, I'm relatively new to community and CP in general. As I can see most of competitors are in their early 20s and I'm courious about your future career/professional plans/goals and how you can think CP can help you to achieve those goals.

To start I'll give you my background, I'm 32 years old, working as software engineer/architect for more than 12 years. In next years I'm looking forward to start my own software business. I do CP for fun.

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6 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -47 Vote: I do not like it

get the yellow color

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6 years ago, # |
Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +67 Vote: I do not like it

I got into the CP world around a year and a half ago, a couple of months after getting rejected by a big 4 company at a campus recruitment week. I started solving a couple of "interview" problems at LeetCode (which I do not consider as CP) and I came across with a professor at my campus who was teaching an elective called "Competitive Programming". This was around the end of the spring semester, and since I had no internship that summer I spent around 6 to 8 hours everyday reading the elective material and solving problems. Quickly I fell in love with it and in the next semester I got an offer for an internship by the same company that rejected me a year ago (actually I got two big 4 offers). This year I got another one (from one of the big 4 I didn't get last year) and this will be my final internship. I'm 22 and I owe everything to CP. It gave me the confidence in myself that I was lacking two years ago (even though i'm still div 2 :))

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    6 years ago, # ^ |
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    Kinda depends on which country you are in. If you are in a country where there are a lot of talents, you won't stand a chance.

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      6 years ago, # ^ |
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      Do big companies recruit based on local relative performance? I thought they would mostly accept based on global relative performance.

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        6 years ago, # ^ |
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        I don't think I'm qualified to answer this, but I applied for two of the companies I mentioned online and had an online interviewing process, just like everyone who applies online for an internship, so I would like to think this was mostly "global relative performance" as opposed to campus recruiting.

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      6 years ago, # ^ |
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      I somewhat agree. In my country it is really common to attend a public highschool ("free", like the one I went to) where we were never introduced to programming, so maybe it is true that (as farmersrice says below) "local relative performance" comes into play, I think it is because of opportunities some people had and the "level" they achieved based on this. I know I would not stand a chance in many countries, but at least i'm putting a lot of effort given the opportunities I had (and the ones I've enabled). Back in highschool I had a part time job, as well as for all the years before I got the offers in order to pay for my college tuition. Because of this I was never a participant in the IOI, for example. Its not an excuse of course, people who have prepared all their lives should get what they deserve.