[theycallhimtom]

I'm 13th on the TopCoder list (1st in US). I'm not sure that the list matters as much as you think. I can solve algorithms problems (those similar to what you see on TC) very quickly, but they just don't come up that frequently at my job. That skill does make job interviews a joke.

The main difference is that I have spent a lot of time working on writing code quickly and correctly. Every time I competed in TC I would read the code of the best people and try to figure out why their code was so much simpler than mine. Now I think I can write clean code faster than most.

The downside is that I have spent a ton of time working on 50-200 line projects. Throw me into a 500k line code base and I'm no longer world class.

Getting to where I am is mostly a product of spending a ton of time in college practicing for programming contests. In college I saw a very strong correlation between time spent programming outside of class and programming skill.