Peter Norvig, director of research at google, made some observations on this topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/44kpzk/peter_norvig_being_good

Peter Norvig, director of research at google, made some observations on this topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/44kpzk/peter_norvig_being_good_at_programming/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/44kpzk/peter_n... I was somewhat involved in the programming Olympiads in high school and to a lesser degree icpc style programming in college. And later when I founded my own startup - I thought these competitive programmer types would be great hires. But in reality it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. Real world software engineering is about readabiliy, maintenance, extensibility, etc - the actual data structure and algorithm work is typically minimal (which these competitive programmers relish on) and even then you’d probably want to delegate to some battle tested open source library. Of course I don’t want to hold having a competitive programming background against the candidate but no longer prioritize that skill set.