I really admire the names in the "—>Top Rated" section on the right side of the page. But to see that their is no Indian in those names hurts a little. I know India has a strong mathematical heritage and it should have been reflected in the particularly new paradigm of Computer Science also, but sadly it doesn't. So, what do you guys think are some reasons that Indians don't have any coders in not only Top 10 but also none in Top 100? I didn't particularly research on this topic but here are some reasons I can think of.
- Most of the people who start CP is because of Jobs. I don't think there is anything wrong with it but this type of motivation won't take anyone far. Indians become Candidate Master or Master and stop CP completely after getting a job.
- Due to almost 0 coding culture in high schools. Well a typical Indian starts coding in college(most people in 2nd year to be honest) and considering they have 3-4 years to do CP, I don't think many people can become a "RED" in this span.
- Late arrival of CP hype in India. Not many knew about CP some years ago. Indians have drastically increased in CF community in-turn leading to high participation in current contests. This might help in changing the current scenario of "RED" coders.(Also a side-effect that cheating has increased due to this)
These reasons are really crude, but anyways, what do you guys think?
As someone who is not from India, I want to add some things just so you know who you are comparing yourself with.
I think no other country has CP hype like this (maybe the hype arrived early in India?). Here, few people outside Olympiad circles know that competitive programming even exists. As far as I can see, a large portion of CS students in India take up competitive programming. This is immense popularity.
We also have almost 0 coding culture in high schools. Do other countries have coding culture in high schools? In Estonia, there are about 3 high schools that teach programming. Most who started competitive programming in high school are self-taught to some degree.
Again, not from India. I don't want to guess what the reason is. But I think it is important to clear up expectations or maybe misconceptions about the rest of the world.
Ahh right, I was interested in knowing the reasons behind this scenario and won't say my given reasons are accurate in any way. Anyways, there's no denying the fact that Estonia has more % of RED coders than India, (1/61 >> 12/33000).
To be honest Estonia is a bad country to compare with because it is so small and the statistics are determined by the actions of only a few people (btw there is another GM in Estonia who has not set his country). It is better to compare to countries like Poland and Russia.
It is also interesting to note that most West European countries also have fewer grandmasters than East European, even though the west is more developed than the east. It may be about culture or values, I don't really know.
Anyways I definitely think your first point could be a culprit.
As you said zero coding culture in school, but I guess there are few other reasons too, but from recent events I could say that there is this mentality of people or opinion of them, might be they are right and I am wrong, there is friend of mine who wanted to become red he is currently master rated, so he consulted with many people from IITs,so everyone said why there is need of becoming red, you have worked so hard to enter IIT now why this hard work for nothing, Instead you could focus on dev and get a kickstart in companies you will join, so from childhood in india,goals of people are very much motivated by money rather than their own interest. Hence, there are only small percentage of people who actually focus on Olympiad or any mathematical culture, even if some are capable in college to become red they are not motivated to do so. So either there is lack of motivation among the intelligents or lack of intelligence among highly motivated. But due to this culture indians have dominated IT Industry they are everywhere working at low salary stealing foreigners job.
I thought you were a Candidate Master.do you have another id?
If you observe it's the middle income countries who generally perform the best in CP. Both developed countries and developing countries don't perform that well.
What do all these top competitive coders from Estonia end up doing in life ? Wise being the only decacorn, Kristo Käärmann seem to have created all the jobs there. Indians can't imagine an entire country with 1.3 million people, here in India that many people I cross on my way to school every day :D
It's a bit silly to say that Wise "created all the jobs there" and in general narrow-minded to brush aside all companies that are not literally worth 10 billion dollars. In fact I only know one person who works at Wise. There will always be 10 "boring" companies for every unicorn. And multiple unicorns for every Wise.
In any case, Kristo Käärmann, Martin Villig, Jaan Tallinn etc. are/were not competitive programmers, at least not with any significant results. And I wouldn't expect them to be. I think most people who are good at competitive programming are more likely to want to solve technical challenges, not lead a company. My generation is too early to judge, but looking at for example old IOI medalists and ICPC finalists, I see a mix of academics and software engineers.
that's just my exaggerated way of saying, seems like you took it literally
Do other countries have coding culture in high schools?
I think some larger countries definitely have a decent coding culture in highschool, at least more so than other places. Even many average public schools in the US have some sort of a coding club, though not necessarily on competitive programming. I don't know the situation in India, but my guess is places like the US and especially China have a much larger programming contest popularity in highschool than India relative to population (not to say it's very known among the population as a whole, but is a respectably sized niche).
India should statistically have more reds as it has a much higher population of cpers, but you can see few people starting in highschool in India while some of the best people from the US are still in highschool currently (though of course, it is harder for me to know who in India is from highschool). It is also obvious that highschoolers have more time to spend on useless hobbies, which is why many of the new red's (at least from US) are in highschool. Hopefully programming and cp can become more popular in highschool among more places tho.
I think no other country has CP hype like thisWhat you think is entirely wrong.
a large portion of CS students in India take up competitive programmingI can assure you that this is not a large portion of CS students in India.
We also have almost 0 coding culture in high schoolsNo disrespect for you country. This blog is written based on comparison with countries like Russia, China and USA where coding is introduced in schools. If you are saying people in every country has no coding experience in high schools then who are participating in IOI.
Some other Indians on this platform have written that it is almost everyone. How do I know who to trust?
You have no idea what large part of CS students in India means. Many of my friends are good at maths and still don't do CP. Less than 5-10% who are studying CS in India does CP.
Hmmm man I don't think I agree with that 5-10% part.
I don't have stats to back this up, but my instinct is that the percent of US college students studying CS who have competed in >= 3 codeforces contests is way less than 5%, probably even less than 1% of CS college students. Even if it's just 5% of CS students in India, that's still very popular in comparison.
This is definitely not true. The number is much more than 5-10%.
no way I still believe that number (5-10%) is good estimate. Just a guesstimate approx. 20-30k students pursue CS/IT from engineering colleges every year. And only 2000-3000 people actually get themselves truly involved into cp (not including those who aim for DSA from sources like GFG and Leetcode)
India produces around 1 million engineers annually, for approximation lets consider 1/30 engineering students are from cs background, that gives us 33333 students per year from CS, on cf 33560 people are registered from India.
We can say that many people have not set their country, but that wont affect much also people from other specialization do cp as well.So we can clearly see what proportion of people have atleast tried to do cp.
There are much more Indian participants on cc but I am not going to consider that since anyone who wanna do cp seriously will register on cf XD.
Trust govt data:
I think it was very clear from the context that we were talking about the percentage of CS students who do competitive programming. I very much doubt that any kind of government data exists for that. The percentage of people who can write code is totally orthogonal.
What's your definition of "do" ? is one contest enough to fulfill the definition of your "do" ? do you include people who did OJ but didn't participate in CP ? do you include offline contests which happens in every college and college authority sometimes mandates 100% CS people to participate in those ? do you include people who practice from careercup, glassdoor, geeksforgeeks, Crack_the_coding_interview_by_Gayle_Laakmann_McDowell solely with pen and paper?
If you include all these catagories then probably answer would be close to 100%.
Not necessarily, it would be a subset of this.
I am not sure but most probably cause in other countries people do CP cause they like it and here in India people do it cause they think have to do it. And during high school, people in other countries self-study for clearing some entrance exams (I am not sure abt this tho) but here in India they opt for some coaching institute and allot a lot of time to that instead of figuring out what to do.
And very few best students from India take up cp as in the students who were ranked top 100 in India in JEE exams. I don't think even 5% of them take up cp because they already have proved themselves by becoming top in such a difficult exam. They take the research route during university when they are introduced to CS and don't care about going for another stupid(maybe) competition.
JEE is stupid, competitive programming isn't.
Lmao, calling the world's toughest entrance exam "stupid" clearly shows your mentality.
And thinking JEE is actually world's toughest entrance exam is ignorance XD
It is one of the toughest. Definitely not the toughest.
Yeah I agree on that
it is a very tough exam(maybe one of the toughest for a HIGH SCHOOL student)for sure but we should remember that there is nothing in it's syllabus that actually goes beyond hs level pcm and it isn't supposed to. our coaching institutions coupled with hs teachers scared of teaching the "JEE level knowledge" plants this idea into our head that its the absolute toughest we'll ever have to do. On the other hand STEM students in USA (and several other countries which might not have similar infra) spend time seeking out their passions and doing stuff in that specific area be it science fairs, comp prog, research with a college prof, taking college courses, science summer schools, entrepreneurship or tons of other things. Note all the things I mention make you focus your interests on a single specific sub area of STEM and hence it is much tougher than anything JEE could ever throw at you.
Hence these students automatically become "more capable, "more original" and lots of other things which we as Indians simply can't unless we let go of following conventional paths set out for us and explore stuff beyond it
"There's nothing that goes beyond Hs knowledge"
Have you seen the JEE Advanced papers from 2016 onwards?
mmm (a) the main point was to say there's much more than jee to do and (b) yes indeed i have and if you compare any of the pcm questions though tricky, they require no new concept or knowledge which can't be inferred from taught syllabus. They are just 'tricky' Don't belive me? go to any coaching agencies jee adv breakdown and they'll give you the exact concept from ncert where the question came from :)
Worshipping JEE as an entrance exam for computer science clearly shows your mentality.
It is not just for computer science though. It is for whatever field of Engineering you want to study in the best universities of India. Computer Science just seem to be the most popular choice for obvious reasons.
It isn't a good test/indicator of potential or skill in computer science. I don't know how relevant it is to other fields of engineering.
But almost everyone who get CS in top IITs(of course the general quota) have done tremendously well if you look at the alumni. How are you going to judge then who should get the CS seats when the majority of the bright students don't have resources or know anything about CS.
CP is also very very different from actual CS so its not an indicator aswell if someone will do well in CS research etc. Its all about testing analytical skills same as JEE(maybe chemistry is an exception).
It is possible to do very well in JEE with a lot of rote learning and memorization. It isn't necessarily a test of problem solving skills or analytical skills. However if you look at the top 5 or 6 IITs, then yes, getting a rank in top 500 or 1000 does require good problem solving skills, and so these people are likely to be good at computer science.
Though, apart from a few IITs, NITs, IIITs etc. at the very top, I think the correlation between JEE rank and problem solving skills/computer science skill/ability/potential fades away quickly. You could have someone in a tier-3 college with good CS skill or someone in a tier-1 college not so good at CS.
The thing is, why should someone have to study Physics and Chemistry if they don't like it? Unfortunately there aren't many alternatives to JEE because of our population, but that doesn't mean JEE isn't stupid (IMO). Universities in some countries provide admissions to students on the basis of olympiad performance, but in India there are only 3-4 universities that do this. Maybe this number should be increased.
I agree with the fact that there should be alternative for guys who are privileged enough to know cp from a young age but because of our population, it is very difficult.
And you first line is incorrect, apart from chemistry there isn't any rote learning and memorization involved. In fact, Physics is a very very good means to judge someone's understanding capabilty (even more than cp) if you are getting admission in a supposedly "Engineering" colleges. CP has nothing to do with someone being good at CS research.
Yes, you don't need to do competitive programming to work in or study CS, but it definitely is more closely related to CS than physics is. And you're wrong, many students memorize a lot of stuff, formulae, equations etc. in physics without having a clear understanding of how it all works. And many of them are also able to get good ranks by doing this.
Not really true if you've seen JEE Advanced physics problems. Mains, yes. But isn't it true in cp aswell? I mean upto 2100 rating you don't have to that smart or something, just solve lots of problems till that level and you will start seeing same patterns in contests aswell. After that, the top people keep on going, same for top rankers in JEE. So, it is just other competitions like JEE. It might be that you are better at cp that pcm so you hate it which is understandable.
Observing and applying patterns, vs rote learning and memorization, two different things. I don't think people can get to 2100 by memorizing any patterns, techniques, or algorithms.
Im curious. Can anyone defend the inclusion of chemistry as a subject in JEE? Literally all the problems I have with with the entire system of engineering entrances can be traced back to the fact that chemistry is involved.
True having chemistry as a general subject does not make sense at all, also when we consider the hell that is called inorganic XD. Maybe it is done to create exposure to that subject :shrug: Chemistry feel too specialized subject for a general exam.
Not many schools in India have access to computer education, leave alone computer science. How would a student from, say, Murshidabad, fair against a child from Kolkata in this context? JEE is good in giving children equal oppurtunities (mind you, JEE, NOT coaching institutes).
And the top 500 rankers in JEE Advanced, who go on to select CS, do become the best competitive programmers in the country. The best in this country currently is Hanit banga, an IIT Delhi alumni.
Your next point?
Well said
Then maybe there should be more focus on setting up computer labs in schools than on setting up thousands of NTA centres with computers. And regarding your second point, I agree (look at my reply to codecodemore above).
*IIIT Delhi, and he was already good at competitive programming before he entered college: https://www.iarcs.org.in/inoi/2016/inoi2016/results_inoi2016.php#qualify
Umm... Hanit Banga is from IIIT Delhi and not IIT Delhi. Which just goes on to show that JEE is not a good measure of how good one is in competitive programming. Also, CS isn't just about competitive programming.
His profile says IIIT-Delhi not IIT-Delhi.
I absolutely agree to with you!!! Was doing preparation for nonsense shit for 2 fkin years 😢
lol i thought the same
honestly i think that the biggest problem is that people simply arent motivated enough to do cp in India. In high school most STEM students are racing to get into IITs mostly not because they're into science but because of peer pressure, parental pressure, and direction-less goals of simply getting a "high package" from their jobs. Most people who get into the top CS batches of these esteemed institutions got in on 0 ability in CS (they didn't do CP, independent projects, research or anything of the sorts but really just got a good score on an over-glorified HS syllabus based PCM exam) and in most cases 0 genuine interest in the field.
When you look at students in CS(or virtually any other STEM field) at MIT, Harvard, or any of the best places in US on the other hand they've usually already done something concrete in their respective interests and also know how to convey their achievements to society. Without lack of curiosity in our Indian society (mostly killed by coaching institutes and other factors) people simply don't see the point of doing tricky puzzles for increasing their own aptitude unless there's some superficial "reward" attached to it
Really hope that our country's esteemed institutes change evaluation methods for acceptance and that we as a collective can inculcate more general values of being curios and unafraid of failure rather than just sticking to the conventional "paths" (read JEE exam prep) already carved out.
Have you heard of something called "awareness"? Kids in USA are aware of CP, hence they do it. In our country, not many are aware.
I remember coming to college and finding out mostly all the stuff can be learnt online. Had I known this before, I would have my JEE and been in an IIT instead of where I am now. But the point is, such awareness is not there among all students.
One more point, I have observed is that kids in other countries actually have a passion to do stuff, like robotics or ML, where as here in India if you leave our children, they'll play the entire day.
well im still in high school and i started doing cp, kaggle, and lots of independent ai stuff. Even got to do an internship with an IIT-D prof who I seeked out and got interested in me all by my own.
I guess the thing is just about whether you can break out of the chain of peer pressure and societal expectations they put around you and just say 'NO, JEE is not meant for me, I want do stuff cause I like it not cause I simply wanna get into uni and trust me there's lots better things to do than JEE to get into much better unis so please mind you own business and let me do my thing'.
Sure people (even the smart ones) will make fun of you and say you're doing shit for not doing JEE but that doesn't make them right, you just need to remember that people around you just don't know stuff and if you can you should help them explore more. I'm sure this would increase "awareness"
I can bet that you are living in a metropolitan city, and you actually have (I'm taking a big gamble here regarding the downvotes, but I'll be honest) qutie rich parents (in the Indian context, of course.) Likewise, you go to an extremely affluent school , and this is the reason why you don't WANT to take part in JEE. Well, good for you, and may you achieve success wherever you go, but the entire population of India isn't exactly like you, so please keep this in mind.
yes i recognise that India is a large developing country with a standardised exam required for the masses which remains accessible and don't deny that i am extremely lucky to be from privilege.
But then again none of the things i mentioned requires resources if you have the will to explore and stop sticking to convention. Vast majority of JEE aspirants spend copious amounts of money to get into and pay fees for top coaching places. Example: Olympiads require no "privilege" if you have the will to study through it and gain deeper knowledge, and this is still "tougher" and deeper insight into a sub field than JEE. Science fairs like ISEF, Microsoft, etc specifically promote students of all backgrounds and there's 10s of 1000s who do it because their schools(don't read posh private but ALL be it KV or Birla Vidyalaya) kept their students motivated and the students had will to do something more. Internships with profs/entrepreneurship probably the toughest things on the list inherently has outreaching and gaining funds on yourself in the definition. ayush sharma got into MIT through this even whilst coming from an underprivileged background and the point isn't that only 1 kid could do it but that only 1 had the perseverance. and finally the topic of thread cp, kaggle, etc : These are inherently self selected groups as pointed by many and if you have a basic computer (which if you can spend money on coaching for you def should think about buying) you can start accomplishing wonders.
Yes there's more risk for those less fortunate in being unconventional but that doesn't mean there's 0 risk for me or anyone who sets their own path. If you believe in yourself your "socio-economic" background can't stop you :)
In my college there is no ciding culture :)
This may change, as i see many school kids becoming red now, which was rare 5 years back.
For example kshitij_sodani is now rank 2 in india and if im not wrong he must be 14-15, so you never know, maybe in near future there can be LGMs as well
also, T1duS, Everule are all school kids and all have been red (i know a few more)
Nice username!
In Chinese senior-highs , the five competions(MO,PhO,BiO,ChO,OI) can be so important for them. Leaders of the schools pay much attention to these competitions , but this is only limited in the eastern regions. Almost all of Chinese masters (Red names and Black-red names) come from those regions . I live in a western province , and in this region we put little resource into competitions. It can be so hard for us to get some achievements in the NOI (National Olympics of Information) , so that fewer and fewer students in our region study for competitions. As for coding culture , not so good in China , especially in some backward regions . Maybe you guys didn't know the "Strengthing Basical Subjects Plan" —— a policy on university admissions , made it more difficult to get rewards from competitions and lessened the students' enthusiasm to competition studying. Whether the environment of CPs in China will be better or worse still remains to be seen.
A photo in addition:
(The characters “强基” means the "Strengthing Basical Subjects Plan" )
Translation: 'Strengthing Basical Subjects Plan trap inside. Please do not approach.'
Actually, this photo was probably taken outside a construction site and that sign was originally a warning for people to stay away from a (real)hole. That was a Chinese pun.
Lack of Introduction to Mathematical competitions in school is i guess the major culprit. If india also starts having mathematical circles like those which are in Russia, then there may be possibilities of LGM. But seeing the current mindset of typical Indian parents and lack of a good education system, it seems hard in near future.
Lack of Introduction to Mathematical competitions in school
He is talking about the environment. There is no competitive environment for anything other than exams.The olympiads exposes young students to that environment and all the fun and competition that comes with it.But no one even hears about these competitions.
Why do you think India is so dominant in other sports and even chess.Its because chess is played in large numbers since middle school but no one even hears about olympiads.
engineering prep exams are hard man. many early starters do prepare for mathematical competitions in 8-9-10, but again they arent able to give their 100% as they need to give equal efforts to Physics and chem too. thats hardly manageable for a normal student anyway but upon that the extensive writing and long answer based school curriculum is also needed to be handled as skipping grades is almost impossible here even for the elite class of students.
In Russia, there are such circles only in the big cities, most cities don't have such opportunities:(
the number of red Indians (no pun intended) is increasing at around 2 per division 1 contest :P. In the last Deltix round I guess 3 new Indians broke into red rating?
After 5 years, when there will be 10s of Indian IGMs, the only thing that you will regret is writing such blog posts and not practicing and not being able to join the party xD
I will put in enough effort,I will surpass you.
Its simple and its related to IQ. Example: china has highest number of red coder (180+) because average IQ in china is 106. On the other hand India has only 15 red coder although number of people practicing cp is mush higher than China. Average IQ in India is 81
Don't think average country IQ really plays a role here -- when you're primarily looking at a pool of bright high schoolers and motivated college students who do CP, it's very hard to say that as a whole they're representative of the intelligence of their country.
wtf are you even talking about. Many students in china start CP from middle school ( like djq_cpp ).They start CP from a very young age because it allows students to bypass the college entrance exams and get into top universities. Some students even have coaches to train them.
Your claim about "avg iq" is also total bs.
NOTE : I am not Chinese so please correct me if I'm wrong in the first point
Please do not say tough words like these , since that can be disrespectful to Indians.
I think average IQ is related to education systme. Indian education system is one of the worst education system in the world.
Here's my thoughts on the issue: my understanding is that in India a lot of people don't start CP until they reach college (I'm assuming that high school cp culture isn't very large there, although I may be very wrong, but considering the amount of people that start CP in India because of job prospects in college, it's a reasonable assumption).
In contrast, a lot of the top kids from China/Russia/United States started CP in middle school or early high school, and had a ton of time to practice and improve. College is more time intensive and as you have to juggle more responsibilities, you might have less time to just focus on a hobby like CP.
Just my 2 cents, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Don't worry, India is going to completely dominate in future.
lmao
Because no Anime TV channel in India.
..
But it's better than many anime in its own way :)
Because Indians worship cows, and bulls get angry when someone is red.
hope they are better at USACO
XD
I find this comment hilarious because those 'facts' are both myths :P
Well, almost 95% people in India who do cp come to know about it in college/university.At this time the need for job is much more than excelling in the sport. Yhis is why people dont even care to know what is red coder or how to get it.
True bro that's the actual reason
This whole blog feels like a Deja vu. I feel like I've seen the same argument and the same people replying to the same argument with a similar argument so many times at this point.
Why So less "RED" coders in India?Why not
haha
https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/86164 Why is by blog downvoted and your upvoted? I’m so confused.
rating?
no idea tbh
Answer is simple, because you aren't
I ll try my best:) thank you
The main reason- IIT-JEE and the immense "Multiple Choice Question" culture. When I started preparing for the mathematical Olympiad in late high school, I was absolutely fascinated that math was not about calculations but rigorous proofs and logical arguments. Now compare this with JEE math- probably the most boring math syllabus of all time; add to this the MCQ culture. Students here are concerned about how to get the final answer, not the process of arriving at the final answer. Even the proofs given in the textbooks are supposed to be memorized so that we can reproduce the exact proof for school exams. What does all of this lead to? Students coming to college and studying CS because they want to get a job. Memorizing algorithms without caring what is the proof of the algorithm. One may be able to crack coding interviews like this but CP? Hell no.
Second reason, which people don't properly point out anywhere, is fake "Olympiads" being conducted in India. Every Indian must have given the so called "International Informatics Olympiad" and "International Mathematics Olympiad" during their school days; the organizations conducting these tests just slightly changed the name of the actual, real Olympiad, got away unharmed, and advertised their tests so heavily all around the country, that I got to know about the real "International Mathematical Olympiad" so late in my pre-final year of high school. Had I known about the existence of the real Olympiads earlier, I would have prepared much better. Hence, high schoolers here don't even know that the IOI exists, so preparing for the IOI is out of question(Indian performance in IPHO and ICHO is pretty nice because of huge overlap of their syllabi with the syllabus of IIT-JEE).
I concluded some things after reading some of the Indian blogs:
1- Indians have bad sense of humour and they can't handle jokes/puns.
2- Even though they pretend not to be racist, they the most racist community here
3- They envy each and every country, which is performing better than them, even though they can't compete with them.
4- Most of them are freeloaders and take code forces for granted and start discussing any political scenario of their country.
5- They make useless blogs and are bad at arguments and debate and retort with abuse very often if they are being suppressed in argument.
6- They make useless stupid blogs and pretty much look down upon anyone having low rating than them.
Tell me if I'm correct.
As an Indian, I second that. The correct terminology is "problems" and not "questions", but when somebody points that out to an Indian, they get offended and start debating with non-sensical arguments.
Although not sure about some points. Not all Indian blogs are useless. Just today I was reading an Indian blog on sum over subsets DP, an Indian also made some editorials to CSES Problemset. Many genuine Indian competitive programmers are actively contributing to the community, it's just that the overwhelming amount of non-serious Indians who have made a CF account just for the sake of it make all of us look bad.
yes, they should use their own CP websites (like TOPCODER or CODECHEF) forum for such kind of discussion.
You can't just say CF is your own site, if literally half of the community is Indian:/.
PS- I am glad you think TOPCODER is ours but please update yourself.
I really feel you should give Indians another chance, downright looking down on a country is arrogant and you should stop it. Even if you feel something might be true, don't make it real by writing it down and making it real for yourself. Looking down on us and saying we look down on everybody is nonsensical, don't you think? Try to be more generous and don't spread hate please:)
Well, that's what I exactly think, even though there is nothing racist in my comment, but you're making it out look like racist, I just summarised what I felt after reading Recent Actions spammed with tons of Indian blogs,now you just start playing victim and make me a hate spreader and racist, irony is strong here.
I am not trying to show you as anything, I am sorry if you feel that way. The comment was provoking but I won't argue further. Have a nice day:)
That's it son. Kill em with Kindness.
The same reasons we are not good at the Olympics.
I just wanted to point out that there is a fair amount of renowned Indian algorithmic researchers. State there is certainly better than one would expect extrapolating based on CP performance.
Just curious, are these Indians living in India, or are you referring to India born people or maybe people whose parents were born in India but the children themselves grew up in USA etc?
I am not exactly sure, I am mainly repeating what I have heard before. From the top of my head, examples I can give include famous AKS primality test authored by Agrawal, Kayal, Saxena, algorithm for the maximum flow known in Poland as "algorithm of three Hindi guys" authored by Malhotra, Kumar, Maheshwari and some renowned Indian researchers I've heard of include Saket Saurabh or Kunal Dutta, but for sure there are much more. Both seem to originate from The Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, where there will probably be much more of good examples. Maybe xorfire can shed some more light (if he ever sees this mention :P)
adding kosaraju algorithm(but the fact is most of the Indian which succedes has left their nationality or lives in another country.
This is not that specific to Indians I guess. In research world many scientists work in various institutes across the globe throughout the years
AKS primality test originated from IIT Kanpur. (Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur)
"both" referred to Saket and Kunal :D
And you have used to zero time in CP
There's no real awareness about programming in Indian Schools. I was lucky to have introduced to programming [basic C++] in high-school. Due to current pandemic, my younger brother (age — 13 yrs) got the chance of seeing what I really meant when I tell my parents There's a contest today.
He instantly got hooked and with only math and some knowledge of Scratch(they teach in school), he attempted ZIO [Indian OI stage 1] and to my surprise even qualified for INOI (My first and only INOI attempt was when I was 17 yrs old).
Here's list of qualified students for INOI-21.
piyushcool26 [Colour change incoming in....well idk, I am happy as long as he is giving his best]
That's so cute, he is doing CP in 13 years of age. Give him my best, I hope the younger generation likes CP for the fun of it and don't care about silly factors like Jobs and CV.
Obv this guy is in school maybe in 10th std. Kshitij_sodani
Actually most of the coders stop doing competitive programming after getting job. And many of us are doing competitive programming to show achievement(rating) in our resume.
I'm tired of seeing this blog in the homepage
Because most Indians pursue CP just to get jobs, not as an actual hobby or something. Honestly, most are doing it for jobs. Once they land a job they leave it. Landing a job doesn't require you to be a Grandmaster or LGM, most companies are good with Expert or specialist.
yeah That's true because, most of the student do cp only for jobs/interest no one want to make career in cp(me included) and main reasons........... 1.College only focus on pen-paper cs(my college included) 2.If you tell any Indians I'm doing cp , he/she was like you are doing hacking/just cs.
most of the people don't have any idea about cp.... so....
Same condition in Bangladesh. We have none in top 200. In our country, teenagers can't have computer because their parents think that they'll go bad. :'(
why do you bother couldn't you just keep coding like rest of us
aww...did I bother you? sorry
no but i feel this blog feed was a lot helpul before all this indian issues started coming and being covered in it . we will get better at it just give it some time and relax
replying during contest?
PS — I am also replying now, because I can't do D, XD
A lot of indians who could be red if they practice don't practice because they cheat.
I am surprised that nobody pointed out the obvious bugaboo. Stop calling bugaboos "questions".
I see so many guys with JEE trauma here...
congratulations becoming specialist though DioHERO
Thank you:)
because indians are less smart
nice one, haha
not OK
Says a grey indian, you're just making my point for me, go bring a red from your country to say this...
As his ICPC teammate, I 100% approve of this comment!
abbey lodu jaha khata hai wahi hagta hai demoralizer
I am an Indian and irrespective of the fact that I am a pupil , I am proud enough to write the name of my country in my profile section, unlike you. I am sure we are better than your country (whichever it may be) at hundreds of different activities and sports other than CP.
I guess it's because of our lack of actual passion for STEM. Most indian students do something because it will benefit their career in some way, not because they think it would be fun. Our society is responsible for this, When we're in high school we're forced into coaching institutes to get into the top colleges, and when we get to college we're forced to hunt for jobs. And the rat race doesn't end there.
Unfortunately, there isn't a way to prevent this because JEE is one of the only things in India that gives people career opportunities, even for fields that are unrelated to engineering, like computer science, and you can't possibly tell me that JEE is a measure of someone's programming acumen.
There are too few people who actually have an interest in STEM regardless of anything "career-related", because people don't have the right idea of what a good STEM student is supposed to be. They think that a student who spends time to rote memorising everything for hours is a "brilliant" student.
As a person who did a lot of olympiads as a child and even won few of them, I was disappointed that people didn't appreciate it enough, but I've come to acceptance with the fact that there's nothing I can do about it.
I've been a hobbyist programmer for 2 years, since I was 14, and I discovered Codeforces only a few months ago, and I started solving problems only about a month ago. It's hard to balance it out with school and JEE preparation though.
Sometimes, because of my environment, I question whether I'm doing this because I want to or I'm following the rat race that college students do.
Yes these are common questions which we dont clearly know the answer to , I have been hunting for many years.
PS: My comment is not meant to be sarcastic as some others are hinting. I am indeed looking for correct explanation of these. Trollers stay away. People who have genuinely thought of some scientifically backed explanation can comment.
Hmm, maybe JEE isn't so great after all. Looking at you, parents who pressure their kids into doing JEE!
Don't search up average Indian IQ
Better search number of CEOs of Indian origin in American companies
Don't search up who actually innovated, founded those companies, and owns the stocks. Also don't search up average Indian IQ
Dont search up how those "innovative" founders performed when they tried JEE advanced.
Don't search up the number of Indians that pooped their pants in the JEE advanced because they think a hard standardized exam has anything to do with the average population's intelligence. Also don't search up average Indian IQ
don't search up what kind of disease a person has who writes the word IQ 10 times in 10 minutes, let alone his "IQ"
Don't search up the original topic of the post and I'm just answering it for you but you're getting mad. Don't search up why you're getting mad
don't search up how easy SAT is, motherfuckers literally give the easiest exam in the world and think that they are smart. When i was in 7th standard, i got full marks in SAT mock test on khan academy. completed the maths section in just 35 minutes.
professors from MIT will also shit their pants while solving problems from JEE. infact MIT's solution for a jee advance problem was incorrect and it is hilarious. Literally professors ? lol. what are they studying then ? literally any top ranker would crush that problem. (i am talking about the famous chimney problem from jee advance)
Bruh, as an Indian myself, you have to admit that Indians are not very innovative in that regard (just the way the system is), which is very important for the progress of technology and humanity. JEE isn't everything, but it does prove that you're willing to work hard.
Totally disagree, I believe, Indians have only one problem ie "most Indians lack rich parents". And few who does create their own so called "IQ" using it. On one hand there are people who aced in all exams from school to JEE but yet moderately successful in career. At the same time there people who could barely pass school exams , college exams in India, studied in tier three colleges in India, but later are able to somehow match the 1st boy of their school ie the IITian by paying for an American masters because he had a richer parent. Someone like Sundar Pichai will be the the 1st category while some like Satya Nadella will be the 2nd category. In modern time this merit gap matching phenomenon using money have become wider. Money creates the sweetest music, Money gives the highest IQ, Money builds the smartest innovations. Increase GDP per capita 32x to match US IQ will automatically match (if not exceed) US. Today IIT Bombay gets $50M and Harvard gets $2B. Match the capital IITB will also rank the same (if not exceed).
I my opinion JEE!=cp nor is it comparable to other things you mentioned.I clearly saw a big difference before and after joining a coaching for JEE.JEE is too much overrated in India. Usually people who do 5-6 years of coaching get top IITs top branches is what can be clearly seen. Same is the case for cp where children in countries like Europe and China in high school start cp when there is not much academic/financial pressure and gets too good at it eventually. But tbh I don't think there's much brain storming in JEE as it mostly depends on your speed and practice.
That's true for everything in life. Anything you put 20K hours of dedicated practice you become a master at it. One good point you made is western countries don't have so much pressure of entrance exam, hence they can focus on their passion from young age. And hence it results in more socioeconomic boosting outcomes.
Btw did you clear JEE advanced ? It's okay to call something as overrated after clearing it or else it ends up being a sour grapes comment.
As someone who did JEE and Olympiads as a kid and was decently successful at them, I believe I have some opinions that hold some value for these questions. At the risk of being heavily downvoted, here we go:
JEE is not the toughest exam across all exams — it is one of the toughest exams widely accessible to people at a much larger scale (still not the toughest though, if you consider mean problem difficulty vs tail problem difficulty — the hardest Gaokao problems ever are harder than the hardest JEE problems ever, speaking from experience in having solved a few of those exams). So for the rest of the points, I would omit the "JEE is the toughest exam" part.
Contests like Olympiads are much harder, though some would argue they're not hard enough either and point to examples like the intellectual dilution of Olympiads like the IPhO/IOAA — which a lot of top JEE rankers get gold at simply because they studied a bit more than the usual JEE physics.
The situation is very different in subjects that JEE doesn't require, like Olympiad math, competitive programming, perhaps even Olympiad chemistry, and so on. As a personal example, even though I knew how to write code in grade 11, I did not do informatics Olympiads just because I was occupied with math/physics/astrophysics Olympiads even though strong MOers do well at OI too (not to claim that I would have done better, really, the people that are the best among the country at something are really good at what they do, and it is hard to beat them without dedicated hard work and sometimes talent). A lot of the smart people around me did the same, so I believe it is also an exposure issue.
There is also another point that one must take into account when defining "toughness". As a hyperbole, a contest with a tight time limit but full of harder than average problems is incomparable to a contest that gives you a month to solve one problem, simply because they measure different skills. However, they are both hard. People preparing for these contests will obviously optimize for different skill sets. There's a whole debate among the math Olympiad community on Olympiads vs research (do strong researchers do good on Olympiad problems? do strong MOers make better researchers?), but I believe it is also applicable to the JEE vs Olympiads debate.
Though almost every country's education system is suboptimal in terms of performance, I would say finding quality education is much harder in India, due to usual educational institutions having the vast population to cater to, and regressing to the bottom 5% in order to cater to as many people as possible. It is profitable to cater to these people instead of the small population of people who are (and can be made) capable of advanced reasoning. This population is decreasing due to the feedback loop generated from this phenomenon, and even when the top 50% (as a gross underestimate in my opinion) of people are perfectly capable of strong reasoning skills (or math for example) if taught in childhood, such systems in place keep them from developing their complete potential.
In a nutshell, in my opinion, the main culprit is wanting to cater to the bottom 5% of people and having a tierless education system in school that is deteriorating the top talent of the country, and this is aggravated by the large population and people involved in education wanting to profit off of it as much as possible. I don't see the education policies changing any time soon.
With other countries like China, there is a much stronger focus on advanced education, and that is one of the reasons I suspect China is much better at Olympiads (using it as a metric) than India. I was fortunate enough to have rejected the slow pace of usual schooling back when I was a kid, since I liked reading books, and ended up finishing grade 12 math without external support about half a decade before I was supposed to be doing it in school, while being enrolled in a regular school too, and I believe most people are inherently capable of that, but are limited by people who force their ideas of optimal learning on them.
I don't know where to start here. There's quite a lot of talent in India in these domains — a professor at my alma mater is sometimes called the father of extreme classification, and you would probably know about ISRO.
The issue in India is, in my opinion, the lack of (in terms that I didn't know until my final year of uni) tier 1 institutions. There's a ton of great research happening at the top IITs — as an isolated example that I was involved with, the professor I did my thesis with (on the same research topic, too) recently published a fundamental result in the field of online optimization pertaining to prophet inequalities, which is quite a hard problem to work on. As a historically important figure, Lov Grover is an alumnus of the same uni. In terms of entrepreneurship, India is top 3 among the countries with the largest number of unicorns (and incidentally, a large chunk of those came from my alma mater). However, the same can't be said about the research/innovation quality of second-or-lower tier universities. The quality drops drastically as you go from tier 1 to tier 2. Even the priorities of students change a lot — there are still people in IITs that want to do research in the future, or have entrepreneurial ambitions. The fraction of such people (or even the absolute numbers) drop when going from tier 1 to tier 2.
One thing that we must keep in mind is that IITs are perceived to be a panacea for the middle class by most Indians (at least the ones that know about IITs anyway). You'd find almost everyone at IIT joins because of the supposedly great pay packages that come with the brand recognition (and given that the most persevering smartest people make it to IITs, this only makes hiring easier for companies and sends the brand recognition into a positive feedback loop). Almost no one thinks "hey, I've heard IITs have the best research culture in India, I want to go and do research there," though this is not really true for the entrepreneurship culture — a lot of people are starting to join them for the entrepreneurship opportunities. The sole motivation for a lot of people is to get brand recognition and a fat salary that provides them with a better social status and a more "comfortable" life financially.
For the next couple of questions, this is a very major factor, and I'll give some other factors for the questions you asked.
Firstly, there is a bias due to the late start of research culture in India — for most part of the 20th century, India was struggling to get back on its feet and the IITs were started to make this transition faster and better, compared to the US engaging in development of things as advanced as the atomic bomb — there's no comparison between those.
And with the shift away from fundamental sciences and towards CS these days, it is not surprising that we don't have Nobel laureates.
Secondly, no matter how many people say IITs are a research institutions, if you take into account the talent among IITians by the program they have, it is the BTech programs that have the best talent, and the few MTech/PhDs I have interacted with during my bachelor's degree were sadly not good enough for my standards. Part of the reason why is that most of these people come from tier 2 institutions, with research aspirants from the BTech programs opting for research positions outside India due to research funding, a seemingly better standard of living (which I don't think is true if you have a decent job). Some of these people are driven by the motivation of having a degree from an IIT (for the brand value).
There are, however, quite a few professors that I interacted with who are internationally renowned in their own fields, mostly computer science though.
Not an IIT/CSE example, but Raj Reddy who won the Turing Award did his BE from the University of Madras.
Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena from IITK were awarded the Gödel Prize, the Fulkerson Prize and the Clay Research Award for their AKS primality testing algorithm.
Vijay Vazirani was a professor at IIT Delhi for some time, and advised people like Naveen Garg, who is quite renowned in his field of research.
There are quite a few other examples of IIT CSE people going on to achieve significant research results, with one of them being Lov Grover's work on quantum algorithms which is believed to be a major milestone in quantum algorithms.
Again, as I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, IITs are primarily undergraduate institutions. When you're comparing research outputs of IITs with other universities, you're primarily comparing them with the likes of MIT, Stanford and CalTech, which have a very strong history (that goes back literal centuries) of foundational research. And a culture of foundational research is what gets you prizes anyway. Compared to these giants, IITs lack in research volume and funding, but given the inputs they're getting, I'd say their research output is world-class.
Good answer @nor (wish there was full name on your profile to credit), First person who has actually looked to scrutinise with full seriousness.
It essentially boils down to what I already said that Indians have only one problem ie "most Indians lack rich parents". You increase GDP per capita 32x to match US everything else will match automatically(if not exceed).
Statistically speaking, perhaps that will help. But I feel the issue is awareness more than lack of funds, though better funds are probably vaguely correlated with awareness anyway. Almost all the people I met at Olympiad camps were from middle class families, the same as me. There were only a small fraction who came from significantly rich families, but when that happened, they were involved in Olympiads from a noticeably younger age than their middle class counterparts, so you might be onto something here. As they say, you can't do research on an empty stomach.
Singapore and South Korea are prime examples of that statistics. In 1940s these countries used to be as poor as India. Now they are at par with US.
I would still put Olympiads in league of JEE and they can be achieved from middle class ie Indian middle class. I feel India can perform quite well in olympiad if they just take away the need to clear JEE for IITs and open up significant percent of admission based on olympiads like how MIT or few other premier institutes do.
By rich I meant typically how a western young middle class programmer is, in west most people in tech also have both their parents as programmers which is almost impossible to find in Indian middle class. So awareness comes from your family background and family friends right.
i think awareness comes with benefits. Unless you started very young (like in class 7 or 8), it is very hard to reasonably prepare for olympaids because at the end of the day, even if you do exceptionally well, you wont be getting much opportunities (within the country); and it makes much more sense to focus on JEE/other competitive exams instead, because they are a lot more reliable.
I think if (more) IIT's had specific seats allocated for olympiad go'ers/medallists and people who reached training camp, we would have way better performances in olympiads. It's not that the talent is absent rather there is no motivation.
A couple of IITs have admission through international Olympiads without the JEE, I believe that more IITs following suit would help too.
As in my other comment on why Indians tend to do CP for jobs more than other reasons, the usefulness of Olympiads definitely factors in, but the bottleneck is definitely the awareness (lots of college students know about CP, not many school students know about Olympiads). A lot of people at IMOTC in my year had MIT admissions as their motivation for doing Olympiads, so Olympiads are not really useless in that sense either.
Personal example again: I got to know about Olympiads in grade 9 and started doing them seriously in grade 10, but still managed to get decent results in olympiads for multiple subjects (making it to the camp and/or the team and getting good results in alternative/standard international olympiads for the subjects). It is not impossible if the education system doesn't artificially water down your aptitude.
I am saying awareness will come with benefits. Why do a lot of people know about CP in college? Because it is used as a parameter in the hiring process by many companies.
For a vast majority of the country, MIT admissions is not even a benefit when they cannot (afford to) live outside. I am curious to know which IITs have admission through (other) international olympiads since i am not much aware about that. For IOI/IOITC, there is only IIT-GN as far as i am aware of (and CMI and IIITH in non IITs).
Also yeah, definitely more would be helpful :).
IITB has a BS course in math that you can get in if you do really well on the MO selection pipeline, though I am not very sure about the details. I had an automatic CMI admit from IMOTC iirc (though it didn't really mean much at that point since I was not in my final year of school).
EDIT: it seems that IITK has a similar way of getting in.
As I said that number has to be significant to make students feel that by focusing on olympiads they are not risking their career. Something like 10%+ ie 1738 out of 17,385 seats. To make 1738 seats, you might need to go beyond training camp level. Something like people qualified for atleast two out of INMO, INPHO, INCHO, ICO, INAO should be welcome for any branch in IITs like JEE.
Just explicitly pointing out that the two are closely interrelated
As as undergrad at IITB vs grad at Stanford, I felt like at IIT I was the main driver behind my research projects, which required a huge amount of energy and effort every step of the way — and my professors had to help shape me into a researcher in the field directly (and then I graduated in a year and they had to start again with someone else to get research output). In comparison, at Stanford postdocs and senior grad students are strong independent researchers, and they can help guide your research direction/you often work with them (and the professors are free to focus on higher-order thoughts about fundamental research).
I was fortunate to have had a similar experience with helpful professors, my thesis advisor being one of them, but I did feel that it (shaping me into a researcher) was probably detrimental to his own research. I'm glad that he was able to publish the groundbreaking work that he did a year later, given how hard such situations are. I'm sure you know who I am talking about.
Having postdocs and senior grad students as strong independent researchers who can help you wade through your research journey is definitely a thing that helps in maximizing overall output, and sadly it is hard in India given how abysmal the grad research culture is, owing primarily to (largely true) stereotypes about funding and so on pushing bright students away from Indian research institutions. I feel this is definitely something that must be worked upon if research is to be pushed forward, and a PR facelift is much required too.
On the other hand, there's always the option of industry research, though, which seems like a very popular choice for people who want to stay in India — I know a few people who opted for this over going to the US for a masters/PhD degreee.
Good point. Also people doing masters and phds in IITs may be academically good student in India's rote learning system but surely they are not as analytical as undergrads in IITs. Ideally it should be reverse, you would need more analytical people for research and more hard working sloggers for undergrad kind of jobs. IIT masters and phds are more like DU undergrads where you would need 100% in boards to get in yet they are no where close to as analytical as IIT undergrads.
In India most of in red or yellow here are from IIT but undergrads, it would be interesting to find who is the highest rated among IIT masters or phd.
By the way IISc was established as foundational research institution well ahead of IITs. Apart from CV Raman IISc didn't produce any other nobel laureates either. In fact after independence people thought IISc will now be able to produce many more nobel laureates following the footsteps of CV Raman but exactly the opposite has happened.
Indians are talented just that we are used to cramming in schools and even in colleges. That kind of decreases the actual potential. We are accustomed to looking for standard formulas we need to apply and get the answer rather than thinking out of the box.Our education is to blame here.
I agree 100% with this!!
The culture of rote learning builds hard working ability which western don't posses. Indians are said to have most hard working ability is US tech industry. Hard working has value in regular jobs. An Indians easily work 14-15 hours without getting tired, whereas a western guy becomes restless and is eager to rush home as soon as its 7-8 hours in office, Hard working makes you a very good employee in 9-5 jobs but the things above probably needs more creativity and less long hours of slogging.
Ask yourself if it is really worth sacrificing our true potential for the 'advantages' rote culture brings.
Also, that is extremely racist and untrue.
I don't think India would have produced so many CEOs without it. Nor would it have so many spelling bee winners. So it's unfair to say rote learning skills is not true skills and critical thinking skills is the true skills. Every skills have their own place.
Bruh, spelling is not rote. It's primarily pattern recognition: being able to map sounds to their spellings. Also, everyone can rote. It's also obsolete now since we carry phones with all the world's information in our pockets :/
Agree to disagree, this has been going on for too long.
totally disagree. ok lets end this thread anyway.
That's true because, most of the student do cp only for jobs/interest no one want to make career in cp(me included) and main reasons........... 1.College only focus on pen-paper cs(my college included) 2.If you tell any Indians I'm doing cp , he/she was like you are doing hacking/just cs.
most of the people don't have any idea about cp.... so....
That's true because, most of the student do cp only for jobs/interest no one want to make career in cp(me included) and main reasons........... 1.College only focus on pen-paper cs(my college included) 2.If you tell any Indians I'm doing cp , he/she was like you are doing hacking/just cs.
most of the people don't have any idea about cp.... so....
because they go to usa
All these companies have Indian or Indian origin CEOs:
These people "work" as CEOs for these companies. They are not the OWNERs.
Yes. So what's the point ?
Becoming owner of anything means you spend money to get done all the hard-work that you are supposed to do if you had to build it alone. And being externally appointed CEO means you are actually alone because you can't use money to get all your work done by someone else, you have to put in the hard work yourself to climb to the top.
They are too an Employee but an Employee to kick other Employee.
Yes Employees are the real heart and soul of companies. They are the real champs. While entrepreneurs are useless people sitting on pile of cash, Having money is their only skill (ie if you can call that a skill). Employees have the real skills, employee do the real work, entrepreneurs only takes credit due to his power of money.
Not sure about your country but In India we respect and value employees and their hard-work way more than people with cash. No one cares who the son of Ambani is but every one loves a fisherman's son who became the director at ISRO and later the President of India.
That's why these people in above list are held way more highly than billionaire entrepreneurship like Ambanis, Adanis or Birlas. Even within software tech industry very few people know Vinod Khosla or Shiv Nadar but everyone knows Satya Nadella or Sundar Pichai.
Kind of feel bad commenting on this post again, but wanted to clarify that generational wealth and entrepreneurial wealth are orthogonal concepts, though they might be highly correlated in the real world. Managing both kinds of things are different skills. I agree that with a large amount of capital, it becomes easier to do a lot of things that couldn't have thought of doing, and thus getting to that point on your own from scratch is an achievement too — the people who manage to do that are also called entrepreneurs. There are people who work hard even after getting generational wealth to expand their business. It is ridiculous (in my opinion) to invalidate the hard work someone is doing on any grounds — for example, just because they already have money. Most real world metrics are quite ruthless in terms of input/output, and it is in general impossible to compare the efforts put in by different people just in terms of these metrics. Making money is not just skill, you must have the luck to be in the right place at the right time with the right ideas and/or the right connections in the right scenario. For example, having the courage to put your money into something risky that you believe in is also a skill. It might be becoming harder to become rich over time too, but where you start at is just a matter of being assigned the correct family at birth. The world might seem unfair, but you get what you get.
Vinod Khosla, Shiv Nadar, Gautam Adani, Dhirubhai Ambani all the full names that I mentioned above have "entrepreneurial wealth" not generational wealth as you call it. Do you know Gautam Adani started with a capital way lesser than Elon Musk ? But still hardly anyone in India idolizes him . Whereas in western culture it is exactly the opposite, in west no one cares who Andy Jassy or Tim Cook are but everyone knows Musk and Jobs. My comment was not about fairness but about difference or as you may call orthogonality of cultures. By the way my comment was response to @B_Consistent's comment and not yours.
As a Chinese, I think it is necessary to say a few words to our Indian friends.
As far as I know, India's education system still faces some challenges, including insufficient infrastructure and inconsistent quality. Compared to some highly competitive countries, India may not invest as many resources in nurturing talent for algorithm competitions.
Obviously, India already has many excellent schools, but they may not have been participating in algorithm competitions for as long. I believe these issues will be resolved soon.
Algorithm competitions require a solid foundation in mathematics and computer science, as well as good problem-solving abilities. This type of training usually requires systematic teaching and guidance, and a lack of specialized training may affect competition performance.
This situation is evident in China as well. Some training institutions may claim to offer comprehensive training but only cover topics superficially, causing learning progress to stagnate.
The quality of instructors is crucial. I am not familiar with the teachers in India. In China, we have many excellent teachers and coaches. Moreover, in recent years, learning algorithm competitions in China has started as early as the third or fourth grade (around 10 years old).
In certain cultural and social environments, algorithm competitions may not receive sufficient attention and promotion compared to other fields. This may lead to a lack of mechanisms and environments that inspire and cultivate talent for algorithm competitions.
I believe that in places like Kolkata, the popularity of algorithm competitions may be higher than in other areas. However, in some other places, many people may not have even heard of algorithm competitions. This may result in India's overall strength not being as good as that of other countries.
Regardless of the reasons, India still needs to work harder in this field. I believe that India will make rapid progress in a few years.
This is so not true, you can take my word because I have won almost all the offline algorithm competitions Kolkata. I believe Delhi in India (due to presence of IIT Delhi) has the highest algorithm culture in India
As we are very peaceful people, we don't like the color of blood
but you seem to like the color of stool , Just kidding.
(EDIT: poeple who are downvoting probably haven't got the humour, I said because YPK is yellow)
The main reason is the fucking annoying universities.
Just interchange JEE with ICPC, and here you go
JEE coaching is a billion dollar business controlled by the Coaching Mafia. These people will make sure that IITs don't recognize CP or Olympiads.
Are you sure? Some (prominent) JEE coaching institutes promote Olympiads in quite a few subjects and train their students for them. I agree that quite a few JEE coaching institutes are in it just for the money (most of those in metropolitan cities, for example), but there are a few that genuinely care about the growth of their top talent instead of just milking them for advertising purposes. The people at the top in these better institutes try to get the best teachers (whether with monetary motivations or otherwise) and often succeed at that, and the best teachers are those who want their students to succeed and are willing to put in effort for that — regardless of where they are at, such teachers will try to help their students to succeed since teaching/mentoring is an inherently human task.
Because of people like you.
....
MikeMirzayanov can you please delete this shitpost. Tired of seeing this again and again.
Try For an Expert you will get the answer.IMO Rating is an Exponential curve or like Mountain Hiking.It is challenging to reach base camp but it is even challenging to reach summet(terminology may not be correct Note: I'm not a sportive person) I mean steapness in 1400 — 1500 wont be same as 1900-2000 and I guess it might not be same as 2600-2700
JEE Failures on their way to write negative things about JEE -:.
I mean what are you guys trying to prove? Rote learning? I am pretty sure, you cannot even clear JEE mains through rote learning let alone jee advance. The physics and maths section is pretty tough. Talking about chemistry, It is just our level, this is why we feel smarter when we go to a foreign country. Why can't you learn chemistry ? it is based on experiments and facts. By this logic gaokao also has Chinese literature ? we can cram literature right ? it means that gaokao is easy ?
I would never believe the fact that you can clear JEE by cramming stuffs. It is hilarious.
But this fella from IIT Roorkee has different opinion https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/91311#comment-1070773
Actually by schools i meant from class 1 to 12 board. JEE is definetely a hard exam and in physics and math u need to have good underdtanding of stuff. But u see only 5000 people give this exam seroiusly. And even in my college it's about rote learning (atleast in my branch). that's what I meant
Sassy satyam343 XD XD
You're the salty JEE defender. Stop defending the exam with your life, it's just an exam. Yeah, just rote learning isn't enough (fucking obviously), but any other olympiad requires a lot more logical reasoning and intelligence :/ you didn't prove anything
I never said that JEE is tougher than Olympiads.
Talking about logical reasoning and intelligence. I am sure that JEE significantly improves your intelligence.
I have been programming since the age of 13 and my thinking ability improved a lot when I started solving problems for JEE. This is just my experience.
It is conspicuous that degrading the country has become a fashion.
I was not even trying to prove anything. I said what I had to say. "Salty"? You are expecting a lot from JEE that is it.
I have seen tons of students who topped the matriculation examinations but failed to clear even JEE mains. "logical reasoning and intelligence" you say.
SAT is also pretty easy, in fact when I was in 7th class I scored full marks in a Khan Academy mock test in just 35 minutes. Why don't you criticise that?
Do you want to clear easy exams? Be confident man, accept challenges.
Wowww sirrrr orz orz orz you are so consistent at solving DIV-2 A 😍 !😍 !!😍 !😍 !
I am sure this must be because you are orz orz orz orz geniosity at JEE MAINS 😱 😱 😱 !!! (toughest exam in da world !!)
For once I agree with you
Hey, it's not about being a 'noob' or whether I've cleared JEE mains. The point I was trying to make is that we shouldn't degrade any country or the exams it conducts. Every exam has its level of difficulty and purpose. JEE is known for its rigour, and it certainly challenges the logical reasoning and intelligence of students.
Yes I am an idiot, but my main account is slightly better than this, slightly.
I created this account when I was in 8th grade, what would you expect from an 8th grader who knew nothing about programming and did not have a mathematical background?
At least i am still doing CP.
But it is obvious that you are a troll, and all of the SAT praisers are upvoting you. nvm. Just try jee mains kiddo. and yeah, you need to learn a lot of theory for it unlike SAT where you learn percentage and stuffs.
Give me some time, I am currently in 11th grade, and I have to study a lot. I hardly find time to code. I also do development. I am currently making a Discord bot. I have got a lot of things to do man. But I will certainly reach GM.
upd: removed "brother" from the para, I don't want to get downvoted for that.
You'd be lucky to reach pupil, not even talking about gm
I already said that I am an idiot. you did not have to curse me.
BTW I crossed specialist when I was in 10th grade, and that too without any mathematical background, through sheer hard work. You don't have to believe it. talking about GM? we will see.
I also topped the matriculation examinations, It is pretty tough to maintain academics and CP. Again, I have got a lot of things to do.
Thanks for the motivation .
Yeah, I’m from India in 10th grade. I started competitive programming 3 months ago. Stop complaining about your background and/or using your age to defend being bad.
I don’t want to degrade JEE, but you’re doing the same exact thing?! You’re degrading people who don’t necessarily want to do JEE
PS: people can have an opinion against JEE without being ‘JEE failures’, you need to realise that people can choose different paths for their lives :/
"defend being bad", you just proved that you are in 10th grade.
I come from a city called "Arrah" in "Bihar". So you are not supposed to talk about my background to be really honest.
I am not degrading anyone, but in my opinion there is no chance that you are good at maths or physics but you could not clear JEE, it doesn't make any sense. it seems like you are making an "excuse".
I can also say that I could beat Magnus Carlsen in a game of chess, if i really wanted to, i just did not learn chess because i had a different path. it makes 0 sense. life is all about decisions.
Look at this guy, he wants to get into research but he cleared JEE,
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/keen-on-research-jee-topper-from-bengaluru-picks-iisc-over-iit-bombay-computer-science/articleshow/94870108.cms
I would never trust a lawyer who could not clear CLAT, I would never trust a doctor who could not clear NEET.
This is just my opinion.
What do you mean by ‘you just proved you are in 10th’? Yeah, I am, but how is that related to my comment on you not using age as an excuse?
Bruh, but I’m not saying i could beat Magnus. In this analogy, I’m the one who doesn’t really wanna play him, but do something else, and you’re the one who’s calling me dumb and a failure if I don’t beat him. Isn’t that degrading?
I’m not saying anything of the sorts of ‘oh I could definitely clear JEE if I attempted it’, all I’m asking is that you stop bugging people about it. There are tons of people who choose IBDP after 10th, or ISC instead of integrated PACE with HSC. You simply cannot tell me that those people (50% in my school) are dumb who are making the wrong decisions and JEE is the only option (because it’s clearly not).
By the way, any college in the top 80%île of American colleges is better than any IIT in India. IIT is the best college, but only in India and for engineering.
JEE is easier than SAT.
Nice joke. You know anything about JEE. Leave it.
Here is a better reply : The 10th board exam (final exam) in India is way tougher than SAT. I don't think an average American high schooler can even pass 10th standard in India.
Indian exams are so easy. I took a JEE practice test and scored 100%. Didn't miss a single question. I scored a 940/1600 on the SAT though so clearly the SAT is the harder test.
OK so lets do this, how about you come and join me on a discord call and solve some previous year problems from JEE and i will solve previous year problems from SAT?
I am ready for this.
mf stop bragging 940/1600 in sat ? lol and 100% in jee nice joke. If i remember correctly i scored 1570 / 1600 when i was in 9th grade.
The JEE is a big time easy test. Never taken an easier test in my life.
"reading section"? How about you take a test on "Sanskrit" and "Hindi" then ? I can certainly demolish the reading section of SAT without any practice, but you will fail miserably.
"Go try taking an SAT reading section and see how easy it is." Correct your grammar kiddo.
"an SAT"? indians speak better english than Americans fr.
High school kids have JEE exam so for avoiding distraction they don't even use smartphones even in 2023 so obviously they don't do CP and many don't even know about CP. In India in max cases CP is meant to be done in order stand out in job coding rounds tho its sad :(
this is an exaggeration.
For most people, maybe, but for quite a few people, no. I didn't have a smartphone until after JEE, only a laptop. And I reduced my laptop usage to practically 0 during the latter part of JEE preparation (using it only to participate in relevant online Olympiads). I know at least 11 people other than me in top 100 in JEE Advanced in my year who did not use a smartphone either. I doubt that the situation has changed a few years after that, given that most successful JEE participants tend to prefer tried and tested things over things that might be a distraction. Note that I use the word successful here to refer to top few, let's say 200, JEE Advanced ranks, so stats might differ if you use a different definition.
Not really its abt whole country not for a specific region
Renauga is going to be RED soon!!!
Could someone please explain the benefits of competitive programming beyond its use for jobs.
When we got introduced to CP(~20 years back) we didn't even know it has any connection with jobs whatsoever, only later in life I came to know that most people are joining CP for jobs.
To get jobs in large tech companies it may help somewhat but as far as doing those jobs is concerned I didn't find algorithms learnt via CP useful for the kind of jobs people do after BTech in India(depending on country and role things may be different). To make learnings from CP useful you must get a Phd as well. You can check Peter Norvig's research article on how CP has negative correlation with SDE jobs. Even my experience of evaluating hundreds of competitive programmers in industry suggest something similar. You can google there are many similar studies which would offend diehard competitive coders. In industry it is not uncommon to find a grey coder perform better than a red coder in SDE role. (people who are downvoting can message me if want to meet a few of them)
But one thing I would like to add to Peter Norvig's research is that for Phd kind of roles in industry (which is only 15% of total number of employees of FAANG) the correlation is positive, I have almost never seen a grey coder Phd perform better than a red coder Phd or a Novices Kaggler perform better than any Grandmaster Kaggler .
I find it quite sad that Peter Norvig's claim is being quoted even after he retracted it. In the comment I linked, there is a link to his retraction, and my comment below it explains a reason why the correlation might have seemed to exist in the first place.
Of course, performance as an SDE should be uncorrelated with Codeforces rating beyond a certain point — the challenges you would face as an SDE are different from the challenges you would face while competing on Codeforces. Problem solving, however, is much more correlated, no matter the domain, and conditioned on being registered on Codeforces and doing SWE both (to be able to compare things), all people I know who are really good at software architecture/similar parts of software engineering are at least Div 1.
Also, just as was pointed out in the linked comment, the person who you replied to most likely meant the use of competitive programming as a factor in the selection process of jobs, or the fact that practicing competitive programming increases your chances at getting hired at a software engineering job.
You can google there are dozens of such researches. Ofter Peter Norvig is quoted as he is the most well known among them. You don't have to go by any people's claims, stats don't lie, go by stats .
I believe Problem solving in its domain is more correlated than DS problem. Why not ask problems in physics then ? For SDE roles I have never been fan of DS problems, I prefer hiring people who solved painful problems of people in his area of work than in DS. People like Jon Skeet solved C# problems of hundreds of developers and are way more valuable than people like tourist or Benq in SDE. The point is a yellow or red are way more overqualified for SDE jobs which is why someone like tourist or Benq would get extremely bored with programming aspects of SDE roles. I am not sure if they would ever join a SDE role.
Secondly Problem solving is extremely overrated in itself, in fact I feel the better problem solving skills you have the worser you perform in SDE roles. Most SDE job is more about patience, perseverance, exhaustiveness , ability to deal and remember large codebases, about your softskills etc. Reusability, readability and refactorablity of code is way more valued than Time complexity and Memory complexity (which is exactly opposite of Phd kind of roles)
In first few years we tried to weigh higher on DS kills but realised most of these people even though might have high CF/CC/TC rating but lack patience, hardly addressed 1-2 customer problems, hardly fixes 1-2 bugs in entire week whereas someone not rated anywhere solved dozens of customer issues and closed tens of bugs in the same period. I don't want to be generalizing much but this is the kind of the trend we found in our 10+ years of hiring experience. After some experimentation we realised,
I never said we don't like testing problem solving skills but those are not DS problems, those are problems which we have been brainstorming for months and have not found a good solutions yet.
I would like to know what has been your hiring experience if any?
Regarding stats, yes, my linked comment advocates for using the right stats and drawing only correct conclusions from them, rather than handwaving and drawing random incorrect conclusions. It is because of this that most "pop-science" studies that use statistics are fundamentally flawed, including studies by software engineers who like to pretend that they are smart at everything. Unfortunately, humans are prone to biases, so we need rigor, which is what these studies lack.
I believe you misunderstood the point I was making about problem solving. If someone has good "general" problem solving skills, they tend to be better at anything that involves problem solving, and they tend to learn faster too (speaking from experience) — this is what I was implying. Of course, solving problems in their own field being more correlated makes more sense, but unless you have any experience with the very specific field of work, how do you test that? The large variety of things that come under SDE is probably so large that the correlation among skill in different tasks in SDE diminishes quite a bit even within the purview of SDE as a whole.
Asking someone physics is even worse than asking an experienced frontend developer about the details of an operating system and hiring them on the basis of that. The point behind problem solving is to generalize to learning new skills better, and that is why for new hires, problem solving is something I focus on a lot. Expecting a new hire to know a ton of things about software engineering that only a very experienced hire has is too much in my opinion, and hence it is important to account for the room for growth that someone has. In jobs where you are asking for a very specific kind of thing, and you know that there is nothing more to it than that (and the hire it is quite replaceable in that sense), maybe problem solving doesn't play as much of a role. So yes, I agree with the fact that PhD roles are more suited for problem solving, while I don't agree with generalizing statement that for normal SDE roles, problem solving is more of a hindrance.
Yes, overqualified people being bored with SDE is a real thing — it even happens with people at startups who have to build systems from scratch (which sounds quite interesting compared to usual SDE jobs), and sometimes even with people who are working on cutting edge systems. Not every part of a job is glamorous, and the reason you are paid to do something is more that not everyone wants to do that thing, rather than it being hard to do.
I feel that for a large chunk of well-paying SDE jobs (talking about SDEs at quant firms or roles where there is a lot of problem solving as opposed to, let's say, more customer facing jobs), asking competitive programming questions as a first filter is a decent way to bring down the absurdly high number of applicants like in India. The ideal way is still to take a major problem you've faced in the past and look at how the candidate navigates through it, or just give them an open problem to solve — though this will take a lot of manpower to evaluate their skill.
I agree with the opinion that being "code-friendly" is a very valuable skill for SDEs, but my personal opinion is that these days SDEs actively avoid writing code that is efficient, saying "don't worry, assume the hardware is good enough" and "premature optimization is the root cause of all evil" — which is in fact why modern software is so unnecessarily slow and bloated. As an aside, the complete quote does not completely shun premature optimization as an evil, and shows that the part that is often quoted is quite literally half the story. There are also theoretical things that must be taken into account to guarantee the performance of something as simple as regex matching — this article explains how. Good design naturally lends itself to efficiency — this is a definition of good design, and not a definition of efficiency. Whenever I need to use an app to do something, let's say, book a cab, the attitude of software engineers towards efficiency hits me in the face like a brick. Anyway, this was not exactly the point I was trying to make, just an observation about the kind of nuance we must practice when talking about design. Coming back to the point about good design, it should be complemented by a broad and deep knowledge base that you develop when you study a CS degree and do practical projects and problem solving. One of these things is the ability to reason about time and memory complexity. Again, this is not the only thing that high rated people know — they have more CS knowledge in general if they have graduated and had been passionate about CS for a while, and the level of intellectual maturity that they have naturally makes their knowledge base much more broad and deep.
I don't see how this follows — in my opinion, having good practices that makes you solve problems more easily is also a problem solving skill. You might be referring to the percentage of a programmer's focus on traditional problem solving like puzzles which might have a correlation. Let's take this as a definition for the rest of this paragraph. But really, I think it is the lack of focus on other things that is the issue — these things come with experience and everyone has limited time, which is why the negative correlation might pop up. People with a clear reasoning process and an attention to detail if given enough time to learn about how to do their job better will be more organized and adapt to the process more easily, compared to someone who lacks these skills. In reality, it is hard to find people who are willing to work on their skills as much, in a SDE setting at the very least.
Talking about points that new programmers who have competitive programming experience (let's say they are cyan/blue, since I have not seen any of the following issues with a concerning abundance with anyone who is yellow+) tend to be bad at, compared to an experienced successful programmer, in my experience, they are the following:
But talking about points that new programmers who do NOT have competitive programming experience tend to be bad at, compared to an experienced successful programmer, in my experience, they are the following:
df.apply(np.sqrt)instead of the much betterdf ** 0.5ornp.sqrt(df)— the latter choices are faster and more pythonic than the former, but the former is more easily accessible as an example in even the official documentation.I could make this go on and on, but hopefully I have made my points clearer.
Expecting someone to know a ton of things about DS is more unfair. I have worked with fantastic problem solvers who have never heard of a linked list or a binary search tree.
A person does a thorough research and gives a public talk and then immediately retracts his entire talk the very next day. Isn't this hilarious ? He is employed by a large corp, he has to save his employment. We all heard of James Damore, we all know what happens if you can't retract in time. It's extremely sad that so many kids are falling for this trap which few of the big companies are setting to promote their propaganda. At the same time there are intelligent people like tourist or Benq who are able to see through this.
Logic says a person who solves 4-5 super tough algorithm problems in just 3-4 hours of contest should be easily able to fix hundreds of small bugs in a 40 hours week, ship tens of features every month, address hundreds of customer-calls every month, create hundreds of pages of software documentations every month; all these stuff would be cakewalk for him, right? Wrong, In practice we found everything don't add-up like a maths problem. Probably having the same amount of passion for something that he finds menial and tiring is more important in maximizing poductivity which is why many small groups hardly care about the so called "problem solving skills" and focuses heavily on cultural fit.
Dude, just leave codeforces already if you think CP is bs. I'm tired of old dudes like you and ssvb always bringing up these stupid comparisons between SWE and CP.
CP is fantastic . SWE is bs . Glad few young dudes like tourist or Benq got that.
You are so tired after having never solved any CP problem during your whole account lifetime, and this is supposed to be my fault?
It was more like at least 4 years after the original claim was made. Might not exactly seem relevant here, but as someone wise once said, never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.
If you're doing SDE, you're expected to know at least one programming language fluently, and most major languages have implementations of these in them. I don't see how you can avoid hearing about either of these in a DSA course in the first/second year CS curriculum either. My understanding of why companies ask DSA problems is that those are something that everyone they want to judge has done and are also somewhat meaningfully relevant to the job. There are not a lot of things common between candidates that can ensure a fair selection while also being efficient and somewhat relevant — big tech used to ask puzzles earlier, but they quickly found out that this is not relevant.
I agree. When I wrote the paragraph, I was working under an implicit assumption that people are willing to grow into their role and will do their job as they would do something interesting to them. When you think about the correlation between interest in menial/tiring work and being good at problem solving, I feel that should ideally be a bias that you correct for using other ways while hiring instead of using that as a hiring metric, because it is so subjective and the correlation is not high enough for it to be safely used as a metric while trying to avoid weeding out most suitable candidates.
There can be various reasons, 4 years later the authorities might have come across the videos and pressurised him or maybe there was change of manager who might not be aware of his older talk. It is extremely risky to leave material on internet which stays there for ever with claims which goes against the principles of your current organisations, I should say I am scared too of writing a long reply for your post explaining in detail the real motive of large organisations for spreading such propaganda. Even though I dont represent any such organisation at the moment, so technically I can speak freely but what if in 4 years time I represent any such organisation and someone pull out my post on this thread and pressurises me based on that. Just know that, these talks are not just slip of tongue that happended accdentally on one fine day, before a talk you are supposed to collect a lot of data , analyse , sometimes even do a small mock practice within internal team. Maybe if I meet you offline someday I can talk about those.
Fair enough, might be a reason — though I don't find it very probable since he talked to his colleagues in order to do the original study.
Note that, on my profile, I do not claim any affiliations with any organization either, so all of what I have said is just my opinion, which of course might be subject to change depending on my future experiences.
You will have to ask them how they are able to address customers' problems so efficiently without knowing a single word of DS. That's why I said if you want to meet a few of them let me know. My guess would be, in many case they did btech in core branches like mechanical, civil, physics etc. And as far as knowing programming language is concerned probably their high school programming skills was enough to build industry skills on top of that.
I (read we) don't expect you to remember stuff from 3rd semester of college. People who have focussed on remembering stuff from 3rd sem probably have not focussed on doing their current work properly (or current semester for students). The process I (read we) have been following of late is you are given a problem, you can solve in whatever way you want, you have full access to google, chatGPT or whatever book you want, you can call up any friend you like, we will patiently wait on the other side of the screen even if the interview lasts 20 hours or spills over to the next day. Additionally we close the call saying that if some new idea strikes you even after couple of days feel free to drop us a mail, we won't say your round it over, that idea will be considered too. Idea is to mimic your real work as much as possible. Demonstrating ability to remember stuff from 3rd semester without focusing on your current companies current work is something we are totally against.
I actually agree with Peter Norvig's both the talks. For div1 coders the correlation is negative, For div2 coders corelation might be neutral but for div3 and div4 correlation most likely will be positive. This brings me back to my original point of the fact that div1 coders are overqualified for typical SWE kind of jobs. (Instead of using the term overqualified not to offend the rest, we can call it suited for different kind of roles)
[Disclaimer — My understanding of division might not be upto date. I am going by Rating system what wikipedia mentions. ]
For algorithm heavy roles it's exactly opposite. As I said, I have never seen a Novices Kaggler Phd perform better than any Grandmaster Kaggler Phd.
Can't spell india without L
There is a simple ans to it and thats the indian education system nothing to say much those who have read in cbse icse and other schools must agree with me that 80% things we have done inside school doesnt have any use now
Sir noone cares about some spelling words. This post was written eons ago. Please leave it be sir.
I guess he took this topic into his ego. I am quite fed up with this blog.
Indians are not dedicated in making their names red rather they are dedicated to earn more doing other stuffs ;)