[noisenotsignal]

It makes sense why someone who is good at LC via pattern recognition might not be as good at competitive programming. However, it’s not clear why the reverse would be true. Surely someone good at solving unencountered algorithmic problems would be good at LC?

[favre49]

You're right, it's true - if you're good at competitive coding you'll be good at LC. But that's incidental. You don't even need to be a Div 1 competitor on (say) Codeforces to be great at LC - the bar is incredibly low. Just being average is more than good enough at interviews. Serious competitive programmers aim to solve problems much harder than Leetcode. Just look at some older ICPC and Codejam problems.

There are some people who basically just do competitive programming to be good for interviews, but they don't get very far - not even to div 1. They reach whatever bar is necessary to clear an interview and quit immediately. The people who seriously compete to go for ICPC World Finals or to get far in CodeJam, they aren't really concerned with interviews.

[rfoo]

That's right. I'm an okay-ish competitive programmer (around 2400 on Codeforces). I haven't played competitive programming for years (though being semi-active in the community, for problem setting etc) and last I tried I can still randomly draw a LeetCode hard, consistently solve in 10-15 minutes max.

The problem is LeetCode is SO BORING for anyone ever tried competitive programming so people usually won't do it at all.

[peyton]

It’s super weird seeing people who maybe aren’t into puzzles use pattern matching strategies they developed by practicing leetcode.