It looks like it wasn't "being good at programming competitions" that was negatively correlated with job performance.
It was "participated in programming competitions".
And there are some more "how to interpret machine learning models" caveats in that blog post.
It seems to me the biggest factor in explaining this is that the people who are just below the hiring line but participate in competitions get a bump over the line. Since there are more people just below the line than above it, the "participates" group is bottom-heavy, producing the correlation.
I do a lot of interviews, and it seems to me that lots of people with experience perform below how they "should", because they're not practiced at solving problems from scratch, they work all day on modifying larger systems. Programming competitions would fix that for them, as would most open-source hobby projects.
It looks like it wasn't "being good at programming competitions" that was negatively correlated with job performance.
It was "participated in programming competitions".
And there are some more "how to interpret machine learning models" caveats in that blog post.
It seems to me the biggest factor in explaining this is that the people who are just below the hiring line but participate in competitions get a bump over the line. Since there are more people just below the line than above it, the "participates" group is bottom-heavy, producing the correlation.
I do a lot of interviews, and it seems to me that lots of people with experience perform below how they "should", because they're not practiced at solving problems from scratch, they work all day on modifying larger systems. Programming competitions would fix that for them, as would most open-source hobby projects.