Job Title: Computer programmer Employers: Corporations and government agencies Openings: Online job listings, word of mouth Salary Cap: About $170,000 Number of Jobs: About 900,000

At the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas this past May, Tomek Czajka was hunched over his computer, tapping madly away at his keyboard before a crowd of more than 200 spectators.

As one of the 10 finalists in the algorithm challenge of the TopCoder Open (yes, there is such a thing), Czajka was trying to write a program to solve a deceptively simple problem—given a chessboard of a certain size and snakes of various lengths, how could you cover the board with the minimum number of snakes? Certainly no other Open,  such as those for tennis or golf, could be as riveting.

Czajka, who is Polish, held the lead through the early part of the final round, but at the last minute had to issue a successful challenge to a Russian competitor to win (points are awarded based on speed, the elegance of one’s code, and finding mistakes or weaknesses in your competitors’ code).

Czajka walked away with a $15,000 check, and it wasn’t the first time the 27-year-old had pulled off such a lucrative win. Over the past five years, he’s earned more than $130,000 by winning several TopCoder competitions in various categories. Hardly the jackpot earnings Tiger Woods pulls down in golf, but it went a long way toward paying his student bills.

Being a TopCoder champ can have additional upsides. His victories helped land his gig at Google working on systems infrastructure. When he applied for a job last year after graduating from a master’s program at Purdue University, his interviewers already knew about him from his TopCoder victories.

Like many top programmers today, Czajka started young, with videogames. Growing up in the small town of Stalowa Wola, outside Warsaw, Czajka grew disappointed with the selection of games on his father’s computer and began programming his own when he was just 11 years old.

But as Czajka’s interest in mathematics and programming grew, his interest in writing games waned, and he opted to study computer science and math at the University of Warsaw. “I like to work on how to solve algorithms,” he says. “I work with tasks and figure out how to solve them efficiently.”

TopCoder came on his radar as an undergrad at Warsaw University, and though online competitions started in 2001, he wasn’t eligible as an international participant until 2003—and he won that year handily. Thereafter, he competed online as he finished his computer science studies.

At Google, where programmers and engineers are allowed to allocate 20 percent of their time to a project that interests them personally, Czajka also works on developing a platform for the Google Code Jam programming competition that had been run for the company by the TopCoder organization, but which Google is now planning to host itself.

“There is a lot of pleasure coming from designing an abstract system, and then watching it behave exactly as you envisioned it,” Czajka says. After all, he figures, since he’s personally gotten so much out of these coding competitions, why not spread the wealth?

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