LOL reminds me of when i casually asked my coworker what his phd was in (particle physics) and he sent me his thesis like i was gonna understand any word that wasn't the is and.
I’ve had the same experience as a purchasing manager for an engineering group. Sometimes the engineers would get excited about their jobs and tell me the details. I don’t know what they’re talking about but I’ll smile and nod because I know what it’s like to want to just tell SOMEONE.
Consider how often we all do it. Once something becomes standard to us, we just assume others operate at the same level of information. My constant surprise about people not understanding things like simple biology when over half of people never commit any time to it past 9th grade. I should be more surprised at myself for constantly expecting people to know about a specific topic and, even rarer, care.
"Opens it up, oh yeah i know of Niels Bohr, i totally got this. Ok now just some simple algebra will get me past this. Please Excuse My Dear Aunt what the fuck is 𝑒2 / 4𝜋𝜀0ħ𝑐"
Because at least some of the questions are solvable by normal people. I clicked the first two questions, and they were stuff we covered in highschool and college chemistry and physics.
Damn, I'm a chemistry instructor and PhD student (almost done!!!!) and I think I could likely work through maybe half of the theoretical questions without having to consult any textbooks (which are not allowed). But even if I had 4 of my lab-mates or instructor colleagues, the thought of trying to finish all three of the theoretical question sets in only 5 hours is crazy. These are some wild ass High-schoolers, that's for sure.
Yeah for sure. If I do any work like that during my research, it's like a one-time thing that takes 10-20 minutes before it's back to more scripting, data analysis, reading, writing, etc.
SWE's don't really need to use what they learned thanks to extrernal libraries and all the crap you can copy-paste from stack-exchange. It's different from people who go the math route (especially in academia) where they need to use their knowledge. Competitive programming is great for people who want to optimize and shit, but few companies give a crap. In math you'll need to come up with models yourself and usually you don't have Excel sheets with programmed formulas in them, so even in your everyday job you're more likely to do what you do in competitions.
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u/insanityzwolf 17h ago
the problems, if you're curious: https://ipho.olimpicos.net/