[lawn]

I was in a team with a very talented competitive programmer guy. He came up with solutions for some pretty tough problems I couldn't wrap my head around.

Fantastic programmer right?

The other 99% except hardcore algorithmic optimizations, like structuring code, creating simple code, naming variables, splitting code into classes/functions and refactoring? No clue about any of that. All he produced was "read-only" and had many glaring problems.

It wasn't only during competitions either, he used the same style for assignments. Turns out he got shafted by the assistants and then he copied answers from another student (yes he got caught).

[blackflame7000]

At my first company, there was this one file in the solution that we called DaVinci.cpp because it was over 20000 lines long and written by one developer who had long since retired. The thing is, the code was complex and worked so no one ever refactored it.

[jogjayr]

> The other 99% except hardcore algorithmic optimizations, like structuring code, creating simple code, naming variables, splitting code into classes/functions and refactoring? No clue about any of that.

So...you're saying a student wrote code like...a student? Color me shocked.

You can coach talented programmers to write neat code, design classes, and name their variables right. It's part of turning a junior engineer into a senior engineer. It's far harder to teach someone how to solve programming problems.