Funnily enough, I was at a programming competition that started just after your post. I'm not sure how relevant it is for work, but its fun. I think people gen

Funnily enough, I was at a programming competition that started just after your post. I'm not sure how relevant it is for work, but its fun. I think people generally grow to the level of competency their environment demands of them. If you need to work on your problem solving at work, you can just work hard at trying to solve more problems at work and self-study in whatever way you like. One angle though: its fun to work on this stuff. If you want a job where you can do more fancy problem solving and less plumbing, who knows, maybe somebody would hire you for winning one of these?