When I was in high school, being good at programming contests meant picking up a bunch of habits that you'd never use at work -- memorizing the same twenty #inc

When I was in high school, being good at programming contests meant picking up a bunch of habits that you'd never use at work -- memorizing the same twenty #include lines that include every conceivable STL data struct you'd need; using single letter variable names; no comments whatsoever. If you and the next person come up with the solution at the same time, you might lose simply because the other person could type faster. You have to un-learn these habits for industry. Just about anyone can get exposure to a set of representative coding questions (see: the USACO training robot, or Cracking the Coding Interview), but training for these contests means spending XX hours a year under a time limit trying to write code from memory (because you don't have time to look things up in the manual).