I missed a minor revolution in programming education and/or chops-earning. codewars ... exercism ... codingame

These are all based on the same great idea: gamify programming challenges ... but nicely

These are kind of "HackerRank 2.0". Nice.

Here is an idea: establish a "standard architecture" for these challenges. Maybe "RISC-V with this much memory running at this frequency..."

Literally just specification for a VM, including values that tie it to the real world (clock frequencies, memory sizes, actual architecture...)

So for "advanced" challenges, say "MD5 as fast as you can" you can literally come back with an actual number "challenge met in 35.1345s" (with arbitrary clock precision, if it comes down to it; like timing olympic swimmers...)

Further, if you are a real company (organization) that has a real challenge, it could be posted on some forum: do this as fast as possible on the standard architecture.

If "company" can represent their problem accurately on the standard architecture, they can get free help!

Or even paid help if the idea takes hold.