[fatjokes]

This post really is a rant as the author forewarns, with barely any cohesion and no evidence to back up anything. I fear it has gotten upvotes simply because it's a popular opinion.

I don't think it's worth a detailed response so I'll just respond to the reductio ad absurdum in their tl;dr, that competitive programming has been taken to extremes (implicitly by employers).

This is plain untrue. Sure a lot of interviews I've been through ask for a coding exam, but in this day and age that's just a wise precaution and no company that I've heard of would hire based purely on that outcome.

I've met (interviewed) too many candidates who can sweet talk their way through any technical matter but barely know how to use a couple of for-loops. This isn't a surprise---the push toward driving down the cost of software engineering labor means that there's a massive volume of people churning through the bootcamp machine.

[Jach]

I wish it could just be blamed on the bootcamp machine, but I've interviewed enough non-junior full time candidates moving from other companies to wonder how they got into those other companies to begin with, based on their performance with my simple problem where loops aren't even needed, nor are there fancy data structures. I used to ask https://leetcode.com/problems/jump-game/description/ but stopped in part because it offered nothing more than pass-fail, in part because of too many fails. Still, it's not exactly a high level competitive programming sort of problem, and there are many ways of solving it...

[Zvez]

yeah, for some reason it is a trend to call some basic coding interview problems as something from 'competitive programming'. While in reality it is just on of the metrics of interview - make sure you can code. While some companies sometimes go too far with complexity of problems, even they rarely make decision purely on how fast you can solve the problem.

[fatjokes]

Makes sense as a trend. If you fail a "competitive programming question", then it's the employer that's absurd. If you fail a "basic coding problem", then it's you who is unqualified.