If anything a candidate caring too much about that is a warning flag. Competitive programming is a very different thing from writing software which is actually intended to be useful, and the approaches used for winning competitions are very bad for code that isn't going to be thrown away immediately afterwards.
Interesting curiosity, but it says nothing about their ability to function in a real world software engineering organization - so we're going to be coding on the interview anyways. The interview is really not just about the coding skill itself, that's actually the much less important part of it.
optimizing for people who do competitive programming means you optimize for education culture where repetitive practicing of a routine is important in contrast to education cultures where careful thought and planning and critical thinking matters more.
in other words it benefits cultures heavily into all kinds of olympiads from age 5 on… i will not elaborate further as you know what i mean.
I honestly can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not, so forgive me if it is. But no, I don’t really see how it would translate to being a high performing employee. Probably most of all, I don’t have the relevant context to know what sort of an achievement or skill any ranking could represent. I’ve never heard of this before this comment, so if you were like… 6th in the world or something, it’s hard to consider it impressive when 99.999% of the population has never even considered competing in it.
