Let me preface this by saying that above all else, your soft skills are important. Learn to interview. Read Cracking the Coding Interview. Practice your people

Let me preface this by saying that above all else, your soft skills are important. Learn to interview. Read Cracking the Coding Interview. Practice your people skills. It's likely that your friends who "were able to get those internships inspite of having almost no software development experience just because they are good at competitive programming" are really good at the soft skills in addition to being good problem solvers. Assuming that your soft skills are up to task... It really depends on how many side projects you already have, either open sourced on GitHub or tangibly published (such as iOS apps on the App Store, for example). You're best served by having a balance of tools in your skill set. If you already have side projects that you're proud of, getting better at "competitive programming" (which is really just getting better at solving problems in certain domains quickly) will make you a better candidate overall. Companies like Google want junior devs and interns to be problem solvers that they can mold into senior developers. That's what "competitive programming" tests for. However, if you have the soft skills and the pedigree of presentable projects to demonstrate, you can make it work.