Norvig’s claim that programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job

I saw a bunch of tweets over the weekend about Peter Norvig claiming there’s a negative correlation between being good at programming competitions and being good at the job. There were some decent Hacker News comments on it. Norvig’s statement is obviously not true if we’re drawing samples from the general population – most people can’t code. It doesn’t necessarily even have to do with time allocation as this commenter alluded to: Being a champion at something requires excruciating narrow focus...

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