Do people think these kinds of competitions provide a good correlation with what makes an good developer for a software company? I feel like solving a well-defined problem in a limited amount of time is a very different task than, say, architecting a system that will be worked on for years by a team of people, or refining a vague set of business requirements into something that can actually be built, or finding an unreproducible concurrency bug in 1000s of lines of someone else's undocumented code.
By no means I meant that every Chinese developer is incapable of solving problems. I'm talking about my average experience at work.
ACM competitions are in no way indicative of the overall picture. I went to a few of these competitions myself and got my ass kicked by some younger Asian kids. ACM finals represent the top of the top fastest thinking developers you can find. When you have a billion people, you will produce some brilliant ones regardless of how broken the education system is. Plus I bet that
1) Almost none of the finalists went to average schools.
2) All of the finalists practiced solving ACM Archive Problemset day and night (unlike the rest of the students), and probably skipped a lot of the regular classes.
2) All of the finalists practiced solving ACM Archive Problemset day and night (unlike the rest of the students), and probably skipped a lot of the regular classes.
Both times I attended ICPC world finals our team had only practiced once a week for 3-6 hours, but we were much worse than many teams that did not qualify from more competitive regions. The people who are the best at these things really do spend a lot of time practicing, though. The kid who beat Neal Wu at IOI practices 3-4 hours a day.
http://cm.baylor.edu/ICPCFinalResults2010
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_International_Collegiate_Pr...