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Competitive coding competitions are useful because they force you to exercise some valuable real-world skills: shipping technical solutions on a schedule while prioritising problems of unknown size in order of your own team's abilities.

Under the clock, you push yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of and usually learn something about algorithms. This sounds a lot like startups.

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> shipping technical solutions on a schedule I strongly disagree. Competitive programming (CP) simply requires you to solve, more often than not, mathematical problems and puzzles. The main focus is on getting the solution as quickly as possible with no regard for the code quality or maintenance.

> The main focus is on getting the solution as quickly as possible with no regard for the code quality or maintenance.

That sounds like a startup to me.

You face the same problems though. Bad codes are hard to debug and a simple mistake can cause you big time penalty. Some solutions get too complex to implement in time if you write bad codes.

So no, it doesn't promote writing bad codes.

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