- It makes you habitual to pushing bug free code as there is a penalty you give in every wrong submission.
- You have to make sure that you get the submission done is shortest possible time, you learn to execute with speed.
- You have great debugging skills
- Edit (Edge cases as well)
You obviously have to fix your bugs to validate the answer, and you obviously lose time when you didn't make it right the first time and have to debug your code, but when it comes to ranking, the only thing that mattered is the time it takes to get a right answer.
But I agree that competitive programming can be a great exercise. Not just for the algorithm, but also for everything around the algorithm. For instance, you don't have time to waste parsing a list of integers. You have to get these parts right the first time almost without thinking, so that you can focus on the hard parts, like the algorithm. For example, if you are not confident that you parsed the input data correctly, you will lose time trying to figure out if you algorithm was wrong or if you fed it the wrong data.
> and you obviously lose time when you didn't make it right the first time and have to debug your code, but when it comes to ranking, the only thing that mattered is the time it takes to get a right answer
It seems possible this might be ICPC as well... I mean there is a time penalty, but it's still consistent with the literal wording of the description quoted above.
The ICPC rules state "20 penalty minutes for every previously rejected run for that problem that was not rejected due to Compilation Error". The quote you referenced claimed "the only thing that mattered is the time it takes to get a right answer". Clearly the only thing that matters is not the time it takes to get a right answer: someone who gets the right answer with 1 failed submission and 30 minutes will end up behind someone else who gets the right answer with 0 failed submissions and 40 minutes.
In software development you also have test cases where your code should pass so you have in CP
this series is a good start:
IPSC ( https://ipsc.ksp.sk/ ) used to be my favorite until they stopped organizing it :'( - but you can still play with the problems and see how you would rank :)
I would advise against reading a bunch of materials first before you do your first contest -- a lot of those stuff are niche and probably doesn't feel different from leetcode grinding, so only do as much as you feel motivated to read and practice.