Hi! If this ends up being a commonly made point or inappropriate to post, please let me know by downvoting this. ↵
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Something I've noticed recently is that when a contest isn't very good or has some annoying error in it, people tend to downvote it and criticize it a ton. This makes some sense — it encourages people to constantly be pushing their contest-writing ability, and it's pretty upsetting if I feel like my rating dropped because of the authors and not because of me. However, this still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I think Codeforces contests are really hard to prepare and are usually decently high quality, so I'm sort of sad that some authors can spend all this effort writing a not thattt bad contest, only for it to be criticized to oblivion.↵
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I've helped prepare a few rounds, and I think they were also considered decent quality. But, had we not had a great coordinator pushing us to write good problems, they easily could have been awful. I think on the first contest my group wrote, we had something like **70** rejected problems and 6ish accepted. This probably isn't far off from what we have for the more recent contests, except that we have learned to reject problems ourselves before sending them off. It's not too uncommon for contests to take 4 months — 1 year to write, even if they have massive teams of people working on them, and there's usually an extra month or two added for preparing and testing everything. There's also typically pretty little in it for the problem writers other than seeing people enjoy their problems — you can sometimes get a bit of money, especially if a round is sponsored, but I don't think the total amount the authors split even ends up being enough to file taxes. ↵
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Meanwhile, look at any ICPC contest, and you'll find at least a problem or two that's an ugly implementation bash or standard and would NEVER show up in a Codeforces contest. There are also tons of mistakes — in UKIEPC, for example, there were so many errors that the winning team had to be announced several days after the contest ended. I'm sure you get tons of standard and sort of boring questions in most countries' IOI selection tests as well, since writing many non-standard questions is tricky. If you look at the grand scheme of coding contests, Codeforce seems decently better than almost everything else.↵
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Contests here are usually quite high quality, and take a lot of work. While it's totally valid to be angry at some boring problem or an incorrect test case, try to keep in mind the amount of work people put in, and how difficult it is to get them right on the first try.WAt the end of the day, we're all just here to enjoy fun coding problems :))
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Something I've noticed recently is that when a contest isn't very good or has some annoying error in it, people tend to downvote it and criticize it a ton. This makes some sense — it encourages people to constantly be pushing their contest-writing ability, and it's pretty upsetting if I feel like my rating dropped because of the authors and not because of me. However, this still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I think Codeforces contests are really hard to prepare and are usually decently high quality, so I'm sort of sad that some authors can spend all this effort writing a not thattt bad contest, only for it to be criticized to oblivion.↵
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I've helped prepare a few rounds, and I think they were also considered decent quality. But, had we not had a great coordinator pushing us to write good problems, they easily could have been awful. I think on the first contest my group wrote, we had something like **70** rejected problems and 6ish accepted. This probably isn't far off from what we have for the more recent contests, except that we have learned to reject problems ourselves before sending them off. It's not too uncommon for contests to take 4 months — 1 year to write, even if they have massive teams of people working on them, and there's usually an extra month or two added for preparing and testing everything. There's also typically pretty little in it for the problem writers other than seeing people enjoy their problems — you can sometimes get a bit of money, especially if a round is sponsored, but I don't think the total amount the authors split even ends up being enough to file taxes. ↵
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Meanwhile, look at any ICPC contest, and you'll find at least a problem or two that's an ugly implementation bash or standard and would NEVER show up in a Codeforces contest. There are also tons of mistakes — in UKIEPC, for example, there were so many errors that the winning team had to be announced several days after the contest ended. I'm sure you get tons of standard and sort of boring questions in most countries' IOI selection tests as well, since writing many non-standard questions is tricky. If you look at the grand scheme of coding contests, Codeforce seems decently better than almost everything else.↵
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Contests here are usually quite high quality, and take a lot of work. While it's totally valid to be angry at some boring problem or an incorrect test case, try to keep in mind the amount of work people put in, and how difficult it is to get them right on the first try.
