[gizmondo]

But their hiring practices are pretty similar (perhaps except Netflix, don't know anything about them).

In one of my interview rounds at google I was under huge time pressure, despite coming up with an optimal solution in seconds. That was an outlier as the interviewer was not aware of this solution, so explaining it took a long time. But still.

The valuable part from the competitive coding background is not the coding, but "inventing" solutions. In quotes because it's mostly a pattern-matching process. And it's a _huge_ advantage.

Personally I'm perfectly happy with the current process, as I took about half a year to become good at it, and the payoff is nice. :) But I'm convinced that's what this process selects for first and foremost - amount of preparation.