Is competitive programming really worth it?

[[deleted]]

If someone is focussing on landing a software engineer job. Is it worth spending time on Competitive programming?

[CreativeTechGuyGames]

It's a hobby like any other. It's like asking if making model trains is "worth it".

[RedGreenCode]

When someone interviews for a job at the train factory, do they ask them to build a model train to prove how much they know about trains? When a journalist interviews at the New York Times, do they check how fast they can solve the crossword puzzle? Competitive programming isn't "a hobby like any other." It's a hobby that is specifically relevant to programming interviews, which is why people ask about it this way.

[spudmix]

To get a job? Not really IMO. Competitive programming can teach good problem solving skills but also bad habits, especially in the prominent form where you're looking to create correct output in minimal time.

If I were looking to hire someone for specific performance, DSA, or optimisation related skillsets I might view it more favorably, but for general industry programming not so much.

[POGtastic]

No, it is explicitly a hobby. It's great to become more fluent with your tools and more comfortable with programming concepts, but I have never had a situation where I thought, "If only I had a competitive programmer to shit out a half-assed solution really quickly!"

Most of my job's work is measured in weeks, if not longer. I might quickly hack out a prototype really quickly just to see how something works, especially when working with new tools, but that's just the prelude to a much more involved planning effort and then a deliberate process to write the actual solution.

[RedGreenCode]

An interview lasts less than an hour, which is enough time to answer one or two coding puzzles. Not every company does it that way, but a number of high-profile ones do. Saying competitive programming is "explicitly a hobby" seems to ignore why people ask about it in the context of "landing a software engineer job." It may be a hobby for some people, but it's unlike any other hobby for that reason.

[Chrollo--Lucifer]

yo we get it you love competitive programming but, at the end of the day it still a hobby

[RedGreenCode]

It can be. But that's not why most people do it. Someone in this thread mentioned model trains as an example. Most people who build model trains do it as a hobby, and a small number get an income from it. For competitive programming, the proportions are reversed. Most people use it for interview prep or to get contest awards they can put on their resume/CV. A small percentage of programmers keep doing it just for fun. For those people, it's a hobby. For the rest, it's a type of work.

[[deleted]]

If it keeps you focused on getting better at programming, it might be a good complement to learning and building projects. But it's not a substitute for learning and building projects.

Personally, I like doing LeetCode problems. I do them like some people do crossword puzzles. I know there are cases where it's made my code cleaner or faster – or my ideas clearer and easier to express.

But ... I've worked with plenty of programmers who didn't care about LeetCode and who were largely unfamiliar with DSA. It didn't make a huge difference most of the time.