I'm not convinced that ratings from TopCoder's algorithm competitions are an accurate predictor of a participant's programming ability, except perhaps at the extremely low end.
This was me nine years ago, fresh out of college with a B.Sc. in Computer Science from a small state university:
A rating of 1529 or 1679 is "above average" (click the "Rating Distribution" button above the graph), but to be honest, I was a complete crap programmer at the time. I doubt I would have survived as a programmer (or even been considered for a programming position) at Google or similar back then. The same holds true now.
I hope that either the ratings distribution is artificially skewed towards the low end (maybe all the good programmers are too busy making lots of money to bother with TopCoder?) or the ratings really don't correspond with programming ability.
2002 is quite a while back, the problems have steadily increased in difficulty, try and look at a div 1 set now.
Also the competition is much tougher as back then I think the site was mostly open to people from the US while now you can see US is 6th in the rankings http://www.topcoder.com/stat?c=country_avg_rating
That said as my experience goes (referred 23 inters who did internships at Google and 9 who got a full time offer), >1500 rating is pretty good at least for whiteboard coding and algorithms questions. That's not enough of course, huge gaps in other areas won't help you. But 1500 rating is a great start.
Well yeah - I didn't mean to say he reached high rating... actually he seems to have lost interest quite fast. But he seemed to get to the upward trend part fairly fast... then again, i went back and checked my own and I seemed to have taken about the same amount of time to get on an upward trend - there were farther dips later on so maybe Mark's span at TC is too short to draw conclusions
This was me nine years ago, fresh out of college with a B.Sc. in Computer Science from a small state university:
http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=27128...
A rating of 1529 or 1679 is "above average" (click the "Rating Distribution" button above the graph), but to be honest, I was a complete crap programmer at the time. I doubt I would have survived as a programmer (or even been considered for a programming position) at Google or similar back then. The same holds true now.
I hope that either the ratings distribution is artificially skewed towards the low end (maybe all the good programmers are too busy making lots of money to bother with TopCoder?) or the ratings really don't correspond with programming ability.