As an ICPC competitor, I don't even find these tales all that cautionary. It's a well known fact that those who do best in standardized tests do not excel the m

As an ICPC competitor, I don't even find these tales all that cautionary. It's a well known fact that those who do best in standardized tests do not excel the most in the workforce. Programming contests are no different. And to be fair, I'm not really sure that I even agree that going off to go work at Microsoft or IBM is all that bad. You're still solving problems, they're just different problems. The claim, I guess, is that they aren't algorithmic problems. But the majority of algorithm-based ICPC problems are combinations or heuristics of already defined algorithms. Ad-hoc problems are where true problem solvers flourish.