Hector Quintanilla, Founder at DigitalAgeEducation.com

Answered 7h ago

“Stop dreaming! You’ve got to have your feet on the ground!”

“You will never be able to make a profit!”

“You are wrong, you’ve got to do it like I’m telling you!”

“You can’t do that without any previous experience!”

“The economy will collapse soon!”

“You’re a terrible student, you will never make it in life!”

To answer your question, what thing secretly destroys people’s careers?

I was exposed to constant negativity and a defeated mindset from close family and friends. Incredibly these are who loved me and wanted the best for my life.

Sadly, such exposure led to fear and unimaginable insecurities in my life. I can honestly say that this influence almost destroyed my future and my career.

We’re social creatures and influence each other much more than we can even comprehend.

If you become friends with a people who go to the gym — you will most likely go to the gym.If your friends are all going to a bar to get drunk, you will likely start going to the bar and get drunk.If your friends vote a certain way, you will be more likely to change your vote that way.Even traits like music, art, food and wine will change in just a few week’s time because of the influence of the people you spend most time with.

Choose your friends wisely. They will influence your career in a very significant way.

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Bohdan Pryshchenko, Software Engineer at Google (2018-present)

Answered 17h ago

Some of them do. There are multiple possible reasons/situations for it to happen.

There are people who believe that their achievements are awesome and worth putting on CV, and their achievements are going to improve their chances to get interview call or offer (no matter if it is actually true or not).There are people putting such things on CV because they want to describe their interests/hobbies/skills accurately, and competitive programming is something that matters a lot for them.There are people who don’t have anything else to put there. For a lot of new grads it may be the case - either you put competitive programming there, or you simply leave it empty. It may be also affected by one of the options above - maybe they were mainly focused on competitive programming because they enjoyed it a lot, or because they believed that they should do it to get an edge over other students.

My CV prior to joining Google was pretty much like this: I don’t have any industry experience, and the only thing that I did seriously during my studies was competitive programming. I would still put it on my CV even now - both because it seems to be a good choice to describe my interests and skills (though I’m not doing it actively nowadays, but it is still one of the hobbies that I enjoy) and because my achievements there are still more impressive than my (not yet significant) industry experience&achievements.

Things like that on your CV probably say following about you: you are good at something that has almost nothing in common with your future job. It doesn’t really make you more attractive candidate right away, but it may imply that you have skills which are valuable for your future employer because they are broader than “remembering a lot of tricks used to do well in ICPC”. Trivial example may be something like “being passionate about programming”. Maybe you have it, maybe not, maybe this employer doesn’t even know about such competitions or have some biases against them - it varies.

I’d personally be interested in candidate who’s doing well in competitive programming even though I think that such activity has nothing to do with software engineering. Check this answer: David Seidman's answer to Aside from the impressive college or past employers that a candidate has, what make's an otherwise unimpressive job candidate's resume standout? What should it highlight? World-level success in anything is usually a good sign.

Now if your CV says things like “Top 10% in CF div2 round 3 times” or “Qualified for ICPC Regionals 2016”, and you are even putting it at the very top - my impression would probably be “OK, they have nothing else to put there; and they aren’t good at CP either”. But it may be different for different employers, and I’m not an expert to say how exactly it is going to be perceived on average. I’m not even a recruiter :)

Finally, here is an example of a resume with some competitive programming on it: Tomek Czajka - Resume.

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