I have had a bad experience with an algorthmic topcoder.
The guy has a brilliant mind. But he doesn't understand the big picture or why his code would fail when integrated with big codebases.
He thinks his work is "done" when he has written his tiny little code with some queues and trees. Then he leaves it for someone else to integrate and thus really solve the problem.
The best engineers I found were the ones who took ownership of their projects and had the ethic to dig deep. Not the ones who could solve toy algo problems.
The guy has a brilliant mind. But he doesn't understand the big picture or why his code would fail when integrated with big codebases.
He thinks his work is "done" when he has written his tiny little code with some queues and trees. Then he leaves it for someone else to integrate and thus really solve the problem.
The best engineers I found were the ones who took ownership of their projects and had the ethic to dig deep. Not the ones who could solve toy algo problems.