[exdsq]

“ but I would like to hire someone who are good at solving problems (of any kind) and can detect the edge cases very well and without deep math or competitive programming knowledge, it's not possible at all these days.”

You shouldn’t be so opinionated before you’ve entered the work place. If you find, after a few years of experience, that this is true then fine.

[ovebepari]

My point is competitive programming or math competitions isn't a field specific skill. It teaches you various ways to solve various (life) problems in general. Brute forcing, divide and conquer, backtracking, recursion/Induction can be applied to anything.

I'm not opinionated. If there is any other way of proving that someone is good at these tactics, I'd love to work with them.

[exdsq]

> deep math or competitive programming knowledge

I think I read too much into deep. Certainly I'd expect any non-junior dev I work with to understand those concepts! But I wouldn't assume someone who published several papers on knot theory is any better at development that someone who hacked together a couple startup side-businesses, except in very very specific domains.