I used to spend some time on TopCoder and got to be fairly good but not at the top "red" level... There is some transfer to improved code quality but I think i

I used to spend some time on TopCoder and got to be fairly good but not at the top "red" level... There is some transfer to improved code quality but I think it's generally not something that made a huge difference to what I do as a developer. There are plenty of people who can do really hard algorithms but may need more time or research. Real life doesn't always present you with the same canned problems that are used in competition and you're not operating under the same constraint. A competition problem typically starts from an algorithm, somewhat like a comp-sci exam question. As a competitor you need to quickly recognize the algorithm and then quickly write an implementation. I'm sure a lot of the best competitive people would draw a blank when presented with a problem that isn't a well known algorithm and certainly wouldn't be able to solve it within the time constraints. Basically it's a game. What I'd say is that outstanding performance in programming competition probably correlated to some degree with intelligence. Intelligence correlates to some degree with being a good software developer.