Interesting. My only anecdatum runs directly counter to Norvig's hypothesis. Some years ago, in my last job, we hired into my group a former TopCoder winner.

Interesting. My only anecdatum runs directly counter to Norvig's hypothesis. Some years ago, in my last job, we hired into my group a former TopCoder winner. He turned out to be the most careful, patient programmer I have ever met. It would seem to take him a long time to get things done, and sometimes I got a little frustrated with this. But he worked for us for about two years, and wrote a significant though not massive amount of code; and to my knowledge, he never shipped a bug. Not one. I think tedsanders has the right answer.