It depends on what position are you trying to fill: if your business have various hard and general algorithmic problems that you need someone to solve then, hir

It depends on what position are you trying to fill: if your business have various hard and general algorithmic problems that you need someone to solve then, hiring an ICPC regional champion would probably be a good thing. But this is not always the case... I wouldn't hire an Olympic medalist runner to do pizza delivery because: 1) the person will probably get really bored (and may quit or perform bad after some time), and 2) the delivered pizzas will probably be a mess inside the box. I believe programming competitions would do itself a favor changing its currently ambiguous name to algorithmic competitions. Then engineers, who are also programmers, would be ok with it and we would stop having this kind of threads every few weeks. That being said, I personally enjoy competitive programming and I do agree that the knowledge you acquire is invaluable :) and I also think that most engineers should practice with online judges now and then to be better at their jobs.