an interesting thing about programming competitions (in general, and icpc in particular) is that they select for winning hacker teams, not winning hackers. if your three-person icpc team is even epsilon more productive than you would be on your own, then you will beat any single-hacker team that consists of someone just like you. icpc is especially team-focused because you only have one terminal, so you can't just each hack away on different problems.

so selecting for programming-contest winners might be a good way to find super-coders who don't have diminished team capabilities.