I dabbled in competitive programming a bit (~20 years ago) and can confirm this. Since everyone was talking about leetcode recently, I went and did a couple que

I dabbled in competitive programming a bit (~20 years ago) and can confirm this. Since everyone was talking about leetcode recently, I went and did a couple questions there. Smart people with some CS background but without specific training can reasonably expect to find medium challenging but not impossible. Hard usually requires some specific knowledge of the tricks to do those types of questions -- and these tricks are rarely used outside of specific niches. Solving leetcode type problems are generally kind of fun for me (might be considered an "acquired taste"), but I don't believe all programmers/software engineers need to grind them to become good... I've personally never really applied those competitive programming skills in my 10+ years career (outside of interviewing...) Those who have done so are probably in the minority (and I suspect, probably over-engineered the solution a bit).