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by catears 1910 days ago
I started programming at gymnasium and through uni. Throughout uni I did a lot of Competitive Programming. Most programs in CP are written and discarded within hours of each other. You also pretty much only use the standard library and no third-party tools. You never interact with the hardware of the system that the program runs on. Maybe reading files from the filesystem (depending on judge software) but definitely no networking. No threading or parallelism. No CI/CD. No Docker, K8s. No build systems. No project management & other "soft knowledge". No "Does it work on IE8?"-stuff.

Essentially you become an expert in writing 100-200 lines of code that reads data from standard input and prints data to standard output. Useful for CP, not so much in the real world. After doing CP as a hobby for a few years at uni I realized this and instantly looked to my peers. What were they doing? One guy was building something similar to IFTTT in golang. Another one was building his own window manager for Linux. Some were really good with constructing websites. But what except solve toy computer science questions could I do?

I don't come with any specific advice, but the way you described being down in the dumps felt very similar to my experience. I think that kind of experience is quite common and normal... Maybe more people have had such a moment than not? I hope you manage to find a way were you get to do what you love.
2 comments
decebalus1 1910 days ago
> Essentially you become an expert in writing 100-200 lines of code that reads data from standard input and prints data to standard output. Useful for CP, not so much in the real world.

Skills from CP transfer very well to the current FAANG interview coding olympics. Add some soft skills and you can easily land a job where you can learn the rest of the things you're listing there, while getting paid. So I wouldn't say there's not much use in the real world.

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mgerullis 1910 days ago
For context: The word "gymnasium" outside of Germany refers to a place where you do sports, inside of Germany it describes the "highest" out of the three typical types of secondary schools.
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