DEV Community

Discussion on: HackerRank Is Teaching You to Write Terrible Code

Collapse
 
brunooliveira profile image
Bruno Oliveira

Wow, thank you so much for your reply! :) (I assume you're also far more experienced than me, so this is a great perspective)
I agree with what you say indeed, junior devs or people just "going at it for the job", even if they're good at algorithms, can definitely pick up very bad habits from that scaffolding code that lies there.
Unfortunately competitive programming is literally a competition so writing unsafe, sluggish but blazingly fast I/O routines and taking some dubious shortcuts it's the norm there (top competitors using C/C++ would have hundreds of lines amongst macros and custom I/O routines just to shave off ms on reading and processing input) and unfortunately some junior devs can definitely approach those platforms completely misguided and start their career with the left foot there... Ultimately experience and long exposure to production code will fix all of these quirks but I agree it's a big problem with more and more companies "outsourcing" code challenges on these platforms nowadays. Thanks a lot for your reply