Do You Want to Go to College? Are You Good At Writing Codeforces Rounds?
If so, then read on ahead! You will learn how quick and easy it is to go to college with the help of Codeforces!
College is Expensive.
The cost of MIT, a prestigious American university, is 53,790 USD per year. Even though scholarship is usually available, the average American student ends college with 37,000 USD in student debt! [Source] Student loan is also very pricey, with the average loan charging 5.8% interest per year. [Source]
However, Codeforces pays its problem setters big money! For a combined, Div 1+2 round, you can earn an average of approximately 400 USD. [Source]
Time Breakdown To Make a Round
Per Problem:
5hr to create idea, propose statement and solution, discuss with coordinator
1hr to write and revise statement, pictures, notes section
1hr to write and revise tutorial
1hr to write validator, checker, validator tests, checker tests
2hr to write model, alternative, and fake solutions
3hr to write generators for actually good test cases
2hr to make unexpected edits, changes from tester feedback
Per Contest:
8 problems per div1+div2 round.
50hr to come up with problem ideas that get rejected by coordinator.
30hr to discuss feedback with testers and coordinator, create announcement, editorial blog, answer clarifications during round, and any miscellaneous work.
Total Time To Write a Complete Round: 200 hours Assuming you work full time just problem setting (40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year), you should be able to write 10 high quality rounds a year!
Yearly Profit From Writing Codeforces Rounds: 4000 USD
How long will it take to pay off your student loan? Well, just run this quick python program to find out!
debt = 37000
year = 0
while debt > 0:
interest = 0.058*debt
debt -= (4000-interest)
year += 1
print(year) #we get an answer of 14!
Conclusion: It Will Take 14 Years to Pay Off Student Loan Debt Via Codeforces
This of course assumes that you don't have to pay any other expenses, and problemset as a full time job. On the bright side, imagine what your rating would be after those 14 years...
Warning: This is satire. Please don't actually write 140 Codeforces rounds to pay for college. Unless you want top contributor spot.
thank you. i have always wanted to pursue coding but i did not want to wander into ml or other scary researching projects. i am glad to know that there is a much more stable method of income that also fulfills one of my other greatest dreams: to be able to make other people lose braincells trying solve a problem i made. i now know what would be a good career path that does not make cp skills completely obsolete. thanks for the great article and insight.
hello i want money for college but i no good at cp. is there still way for me to make money from writing problem? i think having div 100 contest is very good idea. that way i make lots money by writing problem. codeforces please consider div 100 contest. i think i finally get to college this way.
Thank you for this so much! I always wanted to pay off my overwhelming and massive student debt! Now I know I can earn money for the hard coding challenges I come up with only to discover the very solution is on math overflow! It's really incredible what you're doing here, helping teenagers who have nothing else to do but code find false hope for a career as a problem setter! I have always wanted to make a seventh a teacher's salary working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year and you have given me a reason to wallow in self-deprecation. Thank you!
No problem!
Sigh. Clickbait blogs like these just clog up recent actions and top which should contain higher quality material. While some blogs are humorous and are worth a laugh, I didn't find anything funny in this blog. With all the false and ridiculous underlying assumptions, I just found it to be very useless and pointless. However judging by upvotes a lot of people would beg to differ. Sometimes I really don't know what the community is thinking.
Ha, wot higher quality material.
It's not like people write blogs with new and exciting techniques hourly to fill up the recent blogs, and this is pushing them out. It's lucky if you get a few good blogs monthly. The fact is, reading recent submission is meant to be a fun cp-related time waste, not studying for cp. As long as it's cp related, and cool techniques do get their time, I don't care wot's on recent.
Perhaps, but I'd rather see blogs like this on top rather than this blog. Obviously people will have different opinions but was this blog that interesting? I just don't like clickbait stuff in general, not to mention clickbait stuff which covers other more reading-worthy topics.
I was surprised that blog didn't stay on longer, but I always just favorite the blogs I think will be useful to read later if I don't read right away, and don't expect to be using time well on recent blogs. As long as you saw that blog, and put it in your favorites or read it, recent actions did its job with the interesting technique right?
Fair enough, I see your point about recent actions. What I was trying to say was that people should probably at least produce decent quality content (if you're going to be silly) with non-clickbait titles so others don't waste their time reading pointless blogs.
Instead you can send linear algebra problems to codechef to get more money for less effort!
Maybe this is an useful alternative: https://www.study.eu/article/study-in-germany-for-free-what-you-need-to-know
Why not just skip college and live from writing CF rounds? That would reduce the demand for college education and thus reduce tuition fees ;)