[yodsanklai]

I see in the comments that some people conflate competitive programming and technical interviews. Technical interviews (at least in companies such as facebook and google) are usually much easier than competitive programming problems. The problem you find on leetcode for interview preparation would be considered beginner problems in competitions such as google code jam.

[blocked_again]

> Technical interviews (at least in companies such as facebook and google) are usually much easier than competitive programming problems.

Probably. But if you are a student outside U.S where the opportunities are an order of magnitude less the only way to even land an interview with these companies is by doing competitive programming. Google selects students through APAC test in Asia where you have to be top n% in the leaderboard to even get an interview. Doing leetcode and all would not take you anywhere in these contests as you are competing with hardcore student programmers who have been practicing competitive programming their entire University life in search of an escape from the middle class. All the persons I know of in my country who works at Google or Facebook got their job through competitive programming.

[bjourne]

> All the persons I know of in my country who works at Google or Facebook got their job through competitive programming.

Are any of them bad developers?

[blocked_again]

The general trend is that students do either competitive programming or development. Most students who do competitive program hardly work on any personal projects or open source as it is of almost zero value when it comes to campus placements. Companies like Flipkart, Morgan Stanely, Goldman, Amazon, Cisco etc conducts a competitive programming test as the first round in Universities. The remaining rounds are mostly data structures and algorithm/DBMS questions taken from GeeksForGeeks. Very few companies ask questions about development, personal projects, open source contributions etc. If a student does only development and hardly do any competitive programming it is very difficult for them to pass the first round.

[RedGreenCode]

Most people who are doing competitive programming aren't good at the harder problems. For example, there are >2500 people listed on the TopCoder Top Ranked Algorithm Competitors page (https://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank), but only the top 115 or so are Red, and only about 415 more are Yellow.

A programming contest, even if you just do the easy problems, can be a more enjoyable way to practice for interviews than reading a book or even going through online puzzles like those on LeetCode.