Knowledge olympiad

E.g. International Mathematical Olympiad, International Physics Olympiad, competitive programming, etc.

Events that trick young kids into thinking that they are making progress, but only serve to distract them from what really matters, which is to dominate a state of the art as fast as possible, contact researches in the area, and publish truly novel results.

Financially backed by high schools trying to make ads showing how they will turn your kids into geniuses (but also passionate teachers who fell into this hellish system), or companies who hire machines rather than entrepreneurs.

The most triggering thing possible is when programming competitions don't release their benchmarks as open source software afterwards: at least like that they might help someone to solve their real world problems. Maybe.

Some irrelevant people highlight that knowledge Olympiads can have good effects, because they are "an opportunity to meet university teachers and their research organizations". Ciro's argument is just that there are much more efficient ways to achieve those goals.

As an alternative way to get into university, this is not 100% horrible however, e.g. the University of São Paulo accepted students from olympiads in 2019 and then again 2023: jornal.usp.br/institucional/usp-oferece-200-vagas-em-mais-de-100-cursos-de-graduacao-para-alunos-participantes-de-olimpiadas-do-conhecimento/?a

Resources to study for knowledge olympiads:

Hackathons are useless.

If you have a useful project, why would you ever restrict its development to a specific timeframe and with a specific set of contributors?

Just put your project on GitHub and promote it to try and get users and contributors instead!

Instead of announcing organizing hackathons, people should just curate forums where people with similar interests can talk to one another instead, to find new projects that might interest one another.

Restricting intensive development to a few days tends to produce crappy code and not reach real goals.

A waste of time like the rest of the knowledge olympiads.

To be fair, this is one of the least worse ones.

If your kids are about to starve, fine, do it.

But otherwise, Ciro Santilli will not, ever, spend his time drilling programmer competition problems to join a company, life is too short for that.

Life is too short for that. Companies must either notice that you can make amazing open source software projects or contributions, and hire you for that, or they must fuck off.

Companies must either notice that you can make amazing projects or contributions, and hire you for that, or they must fuck off.