"An acm day is a day at which you do nothing but pracitce, typically spending 16 hours in practice and sleeping/eating/doing other stuff in 8 hours. For sure, this is not reasonable for our daily lives, but we need to define such a day as it is suitable for feeling progressive."<p>I don't get it. If it is agreed upon that this acm day is not reasonable or practical, why do we still need to define it and why is it 'suitable for feeling progressive' ?
Competitive coding competitions are useful because they force you to exercise some valuable real-world skills: shipping technical solutions on a schedule while prioritising problems of unknown size in order of your own team's abilities.<p>Under the clock, you push yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of and usually learn something about algorithms. This sounds a lot like startups.
I'm curious; what's the point of competitive programming? It strikes me as opposite to our actual goal of programming in collaboration/the metrics applied do not seem to further the
general quality of our work and output.
Can anyone here explain why is competitive coding used so much in the hiring process. I think while basic things like asymptotic complexity or binary search are sometimes used in real world, I am still to see a problem which uses advanced competitive coding knowledge. Why base so much on a test that is almost surely never used. I am generally good at competitive coding, and I think I will be on the gaining side once I graduate, but still.