So you've competed at the highest level of programming competitions, but you also seem to be doing work on Upwork [1]? That seems pretty unusual...
We never won anything, so I would not dare claim we competed at a highest level. As far as I remember, most of our preparation was about "recognition" -- how to tell if a greedy approach is optimal, or how to recognize if a dynamic approach fits. And of course, how to write a program quickly and not forget any corner cases.
I remember having daydreams back then of memorizing a max-flow algorithm or potentially even a linear programming solver and then quickly retyping it at a competition. Flows and LPs indeed solve a lot of stuff (LPs are P-complete). I admit I never did that, and it wouldn't be a winning strategy there anyway.
PS: Oh, and contrary to the poster above, most of my friends from the university days would be and indeed were great hires, judging by their jobs at Google, Microsoft and elsewhere. Some others, such as the actual ICPC winners from our university, ended up pursuing academic careers -- but I dare not say they would have a bad time in the industry.
Yes, I was part of a USA team in an international competition. I won our region.
For what it’s worth, competitive programming isn’t like sports. The playing field isn’t that good, and the amount of work it takes to make it past regionals and to an international competition is waaaay less than any sport or even something like chess I suspect.
I think it helped to have some background in time-constrained thinking from high school math contests, but I was never particularly good at those, either.
That said, sometimes the field really is weak. I finished in the top 1000 on the first Distributed Code Jam and got a t-shirt just because... less than 1000 qualifying contestants were willing to even figure out the novel setup and compete. (Actually I did badly.)
Identifying root applicable algorithms and reproducing them quickly is what you study when competing in programming competitions.