I'm someone who would probably suck at programming competitions. I also suck at office politics. Yet my code is decent, maintainable, performs well, and is sai

I'm someone who would probably suck at programming competitions. I also suck at office politics. Yet my code is decent, maintainable, performs well, and is said by those who review it to be high quality (including well respected and competent team leads who are also hands-on coders and architects of large systems). And I have made, just my own contribution though it's in a context where other people also contribute, probably hundreds of millions of dollars for companies I have worked for. By creating creative, effective solutions to real-world problems. In some cases my not being hung up on algorithms like some colleagues has led to me see solutions that they were blind to. Not better algorithms, but completely out of the box solutions. And these solutions have worked well, and made it into products used daily by hundreds of millions of people, with price markups attributable directly to the solution. All this is to say that from the admittedly biased perspective of a non-competition winner, my experience tends to validate the implied corollary of this headline.