rabaiBomkarBittalBang's blog

By rabaiBomkarBittalBang, history, 17 months ago, In English

Hi! If this ends up being a commonly made point or inappropriate to post, please let me know by downvoting this.

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.

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.

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.

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. At the end of the day, we're all just here to enjoy fun coding problems :))

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17 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +26 Vote: I do not like it

Auto comment: topic has been updated by rabaiBomkarBittalBang (previous revision, new revision, compare).

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17 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +187 Vote: I do not like it

Thank you — I've had the same thing on my mind for a while now and I'm happy to see someone posting about this.

My opinion: CF rounds are a privilege. Sponsors, authors, testers, and coordinators combined put in hundreds — or even thousands — of hours of work into creating every contest (not to mention the effort and money that goes into maintaining the CF website), and we get to enjoy the results of that labor for free. Sometimes authors make mistakes, this is inevitable for humans, but downvoting a round just for that reason is like throwing away a collection of gifts just because one was broken during shipping. It's a sign of ungratefulness. Participating in an imperfect round, in the worst case, maybe you lose a few hours of time and some internet points. That's no excuse for being ungrateful, especially considering how much effort everyone involved put into creating that contest.

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    17 months ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +106 Vote: I do not like it

    Wholeheartedly agree, making rounds is a huge amount of work and most people who downvote/comment mean stuff have no idea how much thankless effort it takes; I would bet most of them cannot come up with a single problem idea that is interesting. There is almost no incentive for authors to make CF (or really, any other) rounds; the financial incentive is a fringe benefit in most cases (I'm pretty sure I've not gotten money for something I've prepared for a competition due to some delay at least once, and I could not care less; I very much appreciated the positive response from contestants and the staff).

    I highly respect frequent authors because they put their hard work into making artistic problems that other people can enjoy, and authors (and specially almost every coordinator) know that the quality of their problems reflect on what they consider artistic, so they take this process quite seriously.

    TL;DR: Criticism is well and good, but I strongly prefer having rounds (even when I lose rating in them) to not having rounds. Thank you to all staff/coordinators/authors/testers for doing an amazing job consistently!

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    17 months ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +25 Vote: I do not like it

    That's why I always upvote round announcement blogs with negative contribution.

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17 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +19 Vote: I do not like it

I wish i will be one of the problem setters in the coming years:}