I’ve worked with people who led competitive programming competitions and they couldn’t produce working code in a real project. The entire project was held up by them over and over because they couldn’t figure out APIs or write anything maintainable. They were wizards at leetcode but I’d prefer having somebody who could code. Managers are just lazy and imagine these people to be magical because of how intense their brains can work at niche problems, but it’s not magic at all and isn’t even on topic. Ask some design questions
