Projects Vs Competitive Programming
A lot of questions about this is being asked by beginners and intermediate level programmers. Also, those who are preparing for their placements have this question in their mind, what is given more weightage when it comes to interviews? Whether we should concentrate more on competitive programming or projects? There are many misconceptions about programming abilities of competitive programmers. Some regard them as having “worst coding style” which is not quite true. It is believed that their only aim is to solve the problems and most of the time, their codes are not readable. Let us unveil the truth!
So, in this article I am going to express my views and also some facts regarding these questions.
Let it be any company, the first round is always a coding round in which within the time bound you are required to solve problems. If you succeed in that then you are eligible to proceed to the next round. The experience of this first round will be different for everyone. Some students wouldn’t have qualified this round due to various reasons such as they aren’t habitual to attending time-bound tests, or they get trapped by the evil called over-confidence. It is very important to prepare correctly for the round considering all the hurdles that you would need to face.
Let us consider a scenario wherein a student Bob has done various courses in the process of learning a programming language. But when it comes to solving problems in platforms such as LeetCode or Codeforces, he finds it extremely difficult to solve them. Also, he loses his confidence at an early stage.It was even more dis-heartening when he was rejected in the first of the interview itself. So, what is it that he should have done before and how can he improve himself? The first and the foremost thing that he should do is to practically implement the things that he learnt in the course and start practicing on platforms like HackerRank and HackerEarth and start participating in contests so that he gets used to time-bound tests. Then slowly he must move onto platforms such as LeetCode and Codeforces.
Now, what about the one who clears the first round, but has his Project section in his resume` to be empty or has done only some basic projects such as a simple Calculator App, or a simple Bank Management System mini project? Let us try to understand this situation. Again, let us raise the question pertaining to the topic, Are projects and competitive programming equally important? How are these compared based on the companies ? Consider a person, who has a higher rank and rating on coding platforms, then his chance of referral getting accepted by a HR is more than a normal programmer. But, the importance of projects is realized only in the aforementioned situation.
Therefore, it is to be noted that, if you are a great competitive programmer with high rating and rank on reputed coding platforms, then it is enough if you have intermediate level projects on your resume`. But, if you are a medium level competitive programmer, then it becomes really important to showcase some great projects on your resume`. Also, one more important point that is to be noted here is that start-ups generally prefer projects than the competitive programming based skills. I have heard rejection stories of many people who were rejected only because they had fewer projects on their resume`even though they were extremely good at competitive programming.
So, keeping these points in mind, prepare for your interviews. All the best! Hope this article was really helpful.
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With that being said, thanks for reading my article and Happy Coding!
