[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.