Not to say that I am even potentially capable of competing at the world level, but the exact premise the author describes happened to me. I won multiple contes

Not to say that I am even potentially capable of competing at the world level, but the exact premise the author describes happened to me. I won multiple contests at the university level, finished one spot away from going to the world finals at the region level, but after this performance got me noticed and a job at one of the listed companies, I spend no further time on the contests (granted in order to compete at the regional and/or world level again I would have had to have gone to grad school, which I had no plans of doing). When I was actively working on improving my performance in the contests, I had to spend quite a bit of time practicing, and the practice is such a domain specific exercise that it really isn't that applicable to the real world. You are trying to optimize the following cycle: quickly read problem, identify type of problem, figure out applicable algorithm, find page in notes with that algorithm written out, try to write most concise possible code by hand, work with teammates to coordinate computer time (one computer per team!), submit, print, debug on paper, wait for feedback, if right move on, if wrong continue debugging on paper. Improving on each of these skills requires very specific practice that is often unrelated to any engineering skill. For example I saw many teams perform really badly because they couldn't manage the computer time properly. What a ridiculous skill to learn in 2013... sharing one computer between 3 people! This just isn't that useful in the real world. In the real world you have a computer of your own, most of the things you are solving aren't algorithm problems, and you are trying to write readable and maintainable code. So basically the opportunity cost of continuing to improve in the contests was improving as a professional software engineer (IE my future profession), and the glory of potentially winning one of the programming contests just wasn't worth it to me.