[le_dominator]

This may be slightly tangential , but the report indicated that 80% of the entrants to the competition were between the ages of 18 and 24 years old.

After heading over to topcoder.com I found it curious that this site is yet another in a long string of businesses that offers up "contests" with "prizes" for doing work.

In the design community this is known as spec work and the reaction to it ranges from being highly frowned upon to pitchforks-and-torches style anger.

No!Spec (http://www.no-spec.com) is the industry's main sounding board against these types of "competitions", so I won't rehash those points here.

The article's implied "gee-whiz these are wonderkids!" approach to the entrants didn't sit too well with me. The fact that entrants were largely between 18 and 24 years old seems more to do with a lack of professional experience (evidenced by partaking in spec work), than some magic ability of younger people to be able to do compelling work in technology.

I think it's more probable that those grizzled old guys with beards are too busy getting paid for their labor to partake in a lottery, hence the skewed demographics. Also, it would be natural to see more entrants win in countries where the US dollar exchange rate benefits taking a risk of getting no money. It isn't indicative of a lack of talent inside the US.

Disclosure: I'm in my late 20's.

[paulbaumgart]

Thanks for pointing this out. That's a perspective on these types of competitions I've never considered, but it seems like you're exactly right:

"TopCoder also sells software licenses to use the growing body of components that have been developed in competition. Finally, TopCoder acts as an outsourcing center, allowing companies to farm out custom design and development tasks to TopCoder competitors."

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopCoder#TopCoder_as_a_business )

Sounds pretty sleazy to me.

[jacquesm]

There are good counterexamples though, for instance the netflix prize. Another decent way to go about it would be to open source the result of such a contest.

[joshhart]

They are referring mainly to the algorithm's competition, which is dominated by current competitors in the IOI and ICPC.

There are indeed design and development competitions, but for the most part, Topcoder isn't what you think it is.

[socratees]

I can't disagree with you. But we can't dismiss the fact that the world's more competetive place that it was before. And the quality of education in the US esp. maths/science should to be on par with the quality of education in developing countries.

[pmorici]

The entrants are between the ages of 18 and 24 because this competition is targeted toward college age students.

[jacquesm]

It is targeted towards college age students because they haven't developed enough antennae yet to warn them when they're being used.