No, programming competitions don't produce bad engineers
A couple of times a year, someone finds this video by Peter Norvig and makes a blog post saying "Being good at programming competitions correlates negatively with being good on the job," and people jump to all kinds of conclusions about it. What it's actually about In the mid-'00s, a team at Google built a machine learning model to figure out what features of Google employees predicted good performance at Google. Each feature ended up with a positive or negative score, and the one for participation in programming competitions was negative. What can we conclude from that? Not much. Hire the highest jumpers I just bought a minor league basketball team, so I need players. It's expensive to pay scouts; so I'll use scouts to hire only half my team. Jumping high is important, so I'll look at a list of the highest jumpers in the U.S. and hire them. High jumpers suck On my team, the people who can jump the highest are going to be the worst players.