Mark Zuckerberg's TopCoder profile

http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=276132

by Peteris • 15 years ago

93 40 15 years ago

seles• 15 years ago

Hmm, at first glance, his rating is pretty low. But he made a total of $124. I am guessing this is because he was an early adopter of topcoder and they gave out prizes easier back then. I think this probably is the real Zuckerberg because of the usage was so long ago (2002).

I have not looked further at his code for more clues, but it would probably be interesting to delve deeper.

ralfd• 15 years ago

In 2002 he was 17/18 years old.

morazow• 15 years ago

In early years there was SRM each week and prizes were high.

mthreat• 15 years ago

In the early days it was pretty easy to make money. I paid my rent from TopCoder earnings for a few months in 2001.

mquander• 15 years ago

I could understand this post if Zuckerberg had like a 2200 rating, or if he did an SRM last month at 4 in the morning, but what on Earth are we supposed to take away from this?

code_devil• 15 years ago

It may not have much meaning today. But, 50+ years from now, it could well be a part of history related to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

synnik• 15 years ago

I'll buy that IF you can tell me what innovations in 1961 were affecting the general public, and who was driving them.

I rather suspect cultural memory is short-term.

gnaritas2• 15 years ago

I doubt in 50 years anyone will know who Zuck is; he's really not that relevant historically. Steve Jobs will be known, Zuck, not from anything he's done yet. Facebook is not original or world changing, it's simply popular. It wasn't the first nor will it be the last social network.

sebkomianos• 15 years ago

I joined TopCoder a couple of months ago but never really got how it works. Am I supposed to try all the challenges/quizes/exercises? Should I give past competitions a try?

Is it a significant measurement of how good a developer you are (in other words, do employers look at it)?

alexdias2• 15 years ago

A few words in regard to the algoritm competition: you should give past competitions a try in order to get some practice. Your rating is determined by your performance in live challenges.

I'm not sure if employers look at it. Of course, if you get into the higher ratings, it's a nice thing to have on your resume. It also depends on the employer as well, I remember for instance one of the founders of LikeALittle was a TopCoder India champion, so for a startup like that, TopCoder experience might be something that they find interesting.

mattgreenrocks• 15 years ago

Wouldn't it be more productive to create things for resume items?

sukuriant• 15 years ago

When I was still in college, the BEST general-purpose training I ever received was in my ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) training, and the contests that followed. Topcoder was one of the methods we used to train for the contests, among Usaco, old ICPC contests, Project Euler, UVa (another set of contest problems). Some people used SPOJ and other such places.

From the years I was on the team, if I improved at anything, it was the ability to look at a problem, and solve it. I've gotten to use little bits of it in the year and a half I've been working, but it was more the experience I found profitable and would encourage anyone to do the same.

Disclaimer: I was on the UCF programming team for 5 years.

boxysean• 15 years ago

Practicing at all of these contests you mentioned basically guaranteed all my future steps (employment, school). It's not everything but it's a lot that you won't be able to do past college.

If you're in school and have the opportunity to participate in a club or practice by yourself, I definitely recommend it.

sltkr2• 15 years ago

I think the most fun way to get into TopCoder is to just start competing in live events, which (for the algorithm matches) usually occur three times a month (though some might be at impractical times).

You'll probably screw up the first few times you participate; that's pretty normal, so don't let that get you down!

Of course you can do the archived problems for practice, but starting with live matches is much more exciting.

zobzu• 15 years ago

topcoder doesnt mean much its just a mind game like so many others you might succeed or fail - if you fail you can learn from your error and understand the problem better the next time. Like everything else. Beside, everyone thinks successful persons are necessarily very smart in all kind of ways.

that's of course not true. it takes some smarts, yeah, some luck, some proper timing, and usually faith in yourself/ The smart part is probably a small one in fact.

egor83• 15 years ago

topcoder doesnt mean much its just a mind game

TC is a place to learn and practice algorithm development skills, which is MUCH more than just a game.

It's not necessary in any programming job, but there are places where this kind of knowledge is really needed - from what I know, Google is one of the examples.

So if you like maths/algorithms, TC is a very useful place.

wslh• 15 years ago

"...if you fail you can learn from your error and understand the problem better the next time."

Or just hire someone who understand the problem while you understand the goal :-)

sltkr2• 15 years ago

Too bad his last match is so long ago that his solutions aren't available any more. I would have liked to see what kind of code he wrote!

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

The apocrypha from early facebook employees is "not great". Then again, the same was said of Larry and Sergei. Just goes to show that you only need to be "good enough" to ship a popular product, and have the wherewithal to hire better coders once you need to scale.

cosminro4• 15 years ago

Adam D'Angelo's (former FaceBook CTO) TopCoder profile:

dangelo Algorithm Rating: 2351 Total Earnings: $3,082.50 School: California Institute of Technology http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=26098...

swah• 15 years ago

And Quora founder.

FrancescoRizzi2• 15 years ago

The one thing to take away from this profile? He figured out how to improve his rating fairly quickly. This U shape is fairly common, but (especially back then), I don't think it would be that common to get on a stable upward trend within 2 months

cosminro4• 15 years ago

That rating is pretty low. Your average guy that gets hired at Google or Facebook is >1500 in rating probably.

FrancescoRizzi2• 15 years ago

Well yeah - I didn't mean to say he reached high rating... actually he seems to have lost interest quite fast. But he seemed to get to the upward trend part fairly fast... then again, i went back and checked my own and I seemed to have taken about the same amount of time to get on an upward trend - there were farther dips later on so maybe Mark's span at TC is too short to draw conclusions

rwg• 15 years ago

I'm not convinced that ratings from TopCoder's algorithm competitions are an accurate predictor of a participant's programming ability, except perhaps at the extremely low end.

This was me nine years ago, fresh out of college with a B.Sc. in Computer Science from a small state university:

http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=27128...

A rating of 1529 or 1679 is "above average" (click the "Rating Distribution" button above the graph), but to be honest, I was a complete crap programmer at the time. I doubt I would have survived as a programmer (or even been considered for a programming position) at Google or similar back then. The same holds true now.

I hope that either the ratings distribution is artificially skewed towards the low end (maybe all the good programmers are too busy making lots of money to bother with TopCoder?) or the ratings really don't correspond with programming ability.

Mark Zuckerberg's TopCoder profile

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