Every few months the same argument comes back around: does competitive programming make you a better engineer, or does it just make you good at competitive programming? People who did it defend it. People who did not point out, correctly, that nobody has ever shipped a segment tree to production.
I have been on both sides of that line, so here is my honest accounting.
In 2021 my team won the ACM-ICPC Asia Topi regional as national champions and qualified for the ICPC World Finals. That is roughly as far as that track goes. Then I went and built things people actually use: XR platforms, a cross-platform C# SDK that had to behave identically on three operating systems, AR systems for fire response, and now AI voice agents that answer real phones for real businesses at 2am.
Four habits came with me almost untouched. Two I had to actively unlearn before I was useful on a real team.
The short answer is yes, it helped, but not for the reason people usually give. I have not written a segment tree since university. It helped because contests train a specific relationship with a hard problem, and that relationship turns out to be the rare thing.
