Alt/Throwaway account here for privacy reasons. My main account is red.
TL;DR: I am not cut out to be a researcher. Asking for help.
It has always been a no-brainer for me that I would end up in a research job. However, after I made it last fall, I realized how different it is from CP and anything I had previously experienced at the university. The research requires analyzing and generating ideas for a particular problem for months. However, I would always encounter an obstacle in the first hour, which made me unable to move forward.
I believe the common knowledge of the research being the default career path must change. My understanding is that this view is reinforced by survivorship bias, where the CP community stops hearing about research dropouts, making the successful not realize how high the dropout rate is and universally label the doubters as having imposter syndrome (which is 100% real but overused).
I would like to raise points to discuss:
Are there jobs which value transferrable CP skills such as problem-solving under pressure? I thought about the aviation industry or, more generally, jobs which evaluate employees based on their reactions to emergencies.
Do you know anyone who successfully transitioned to some role mentioned above?
Is there any interest in a support group?
Pinging this because the original post didn't appear on the blog bar.
manager
TBH seeing a red coder ask for what options he/she has. I'm scared.
Hello, I'm top-3 in this game that has nothing to do with the real world. I'm pretty sure I will be bad in any real job and have no idea what to do with my life.
Nah you probably do just fine in real job. Have you tried for software engineer job?
This might turn out fine, but I wouldn't want to trade one evil for another. Moreover, if I ask for reassurance during an interview, that would be a red flag.
I didn't get your point. What reassurance?
If 3rd top gamer will be bad in a real job, then that real job needs to improve his skills.
A wise LGM said once ('when I was yellow, I thought that getting red was impossible. When I was red, I thought that getting to onsites was impossible... And so on')
I'm pretty sure it works the same with a real job. You'd be an amazing engineer if you were willing to
PS sorry for any misquoted words, I couldn't find the exact comment
agree! I've noticed smart people are often humble/modest
same
nevermind actually
Is research the default career path? I thought the default career path for CPers is a software engineer.
Wish you luck, hope you will get some answers (because I would love to know too).
There are much more job opportunities for SE than in CS, for better salary on average, so it's probably more common (but might be different with LGM or reds). I think he meant research as the default choice because it correlates the strongest with CP (I can't find the data for programming but there are a lot of notable mathematician among notable mathematicians (one can check on Wikipedia)). Anyway, if it wasn't for the war, I would say you have nothing to worry about in finding a good job. Sure, there are people who know a lot and have made all sorts of apps (some of the most impressive CF related apps are from cyan) or worked in various fields, but your skill set will most certainly be appreciated in ML, computer vision (that's where I work, and I'm miles behind you, but still slightly ahead of most people), finances etc... The only advice I think I'm competent to give you is that you might need to slightly adjust your communication. Your comments are helpful 99% of the time but when you write something like this (https://codeforces.me/blog/entry/62744) where you shame people by name, say you're worth 10000 cyans it could be a problem at workplace. I'm not saying you should lie or never tell uncomfortable truth, but the way you say it is important. Your boss might be a moron, but is a moron which could fire you so you should just politely disagree with him/her and calmly explain what you think should be done better.
Why don't you apply to HFTs such as jane street, they test the your mathematical ability, and also offer very hefty packages, just need to learn few other cs topics, but it should be really easy for a person as smart as you.
have you checked out quant jobs?
These are fundamentally research jobs now after markets were automated. However, I would be interested if there still were some (heavily regulated) markets where the bulk of the job is still manual.
Are you sure you're not giving up too easily? Certainly the realization that research work is different from CP must have been quite distressing, but it's only been 6-9 months since last fall. Surely you didn't get to be red right away when you started doing CP many years ago. I can't imagine that your colleagues, who presumably are cut out to be researchers, are exceptional. Do they have advanced degrees such as MSc or PhD where they developed their research skills? What's to say you can't become good at research in 2-5 years? You've got the brains and the discipline.
Even when solving CP problems you can be stuck for hours, if not days, until you find the right idea. Is your expectation to find a job where you rarely if ever encounter such obstacles? The real world might not have many interesting problems that are solvable in under an hour.
That being said, I'm very curious to read other replies to your questions.
Not everyone can
Hi, Anonymous Grandmaster! I was in a roughly similar situation a couple years ago. I was wondering if I would be any good at a 'real' job, I got into programming from maths and I had little knowledge about computers until joining university. I was wondering if I chose the right degree as I didn't really enjoy my university curriculum. It was not like competitive programming, and I was curious if I'm going to have to do boring stuff forever.
But actually, there are plenty of jobs that require strong analytical skills and working under pressure. Finance industry is the best example. Imagine the thrilling feel when you're deploying some code, and it's a brand new model that's starting to make money... Or consulting — hell yeah, they have really tough deadlines and long working hours. Many of these jobs require excellent programming skills these days, especially those that require you to iterate quickly processing lots of data. High-frequency trading is another thing, if you're really keen on low-level optimization then you may be happy in an HFT role. You'll certainly be good at squeezing those 10 more nanoseconds if you have a solid understanding of C/C++ or low-level progrmaming and strong competitive programming skills.
Software engineering can be interesting, too. The real-world puzzles are kinda cooler than random mathy challenges. You need to think about readability, scalability, maintainability of your code and time/memory tradeoffs, for example. If you're doing front-end, maybe you need to think about consistency of your website/design and its accessibility. You maybe need to worry about concurrency issues as well. These things never come up in competitive programming, but actually it's a lot of fun trying to write the best code in many possible aspects, rather than just 'do some boring work in a most obvious way'. Then, there is a whole new world of different architectures your application could be using. There's way more to it than it seems!
Last but not least, work style can be reasonably fun, too. If you fancy working under pressure, then working in a startup may be a thing for you. It's very satisfying to work in a fast-paced agile environment when you're doing new tasks everyday. I find it totally more satisfying than working in a researchy environment (and I've worked in both but working in research was totally not my cup of tea).
To sum up, the future is much brighter than you think. Don't worry about impostor syndrome, you will pick up all these things in no time. I've learnt front-end development in React + Typescript in around a month in my new role and I feel reasonably comfortable working with web apps, even though I have never done any frontend before. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW BAD MOST OF THE APPLICANTS TO TECH COMPANIES ARE.
If you'd like to chat, DM me from your main account and I'd love to help you with some more tangible suggestions.