I finished my UG last year from India, but participated in several OPC's( Online prog contests) winning a few. I also represented my Univ in IBM-ICPC(Inter collegiate prog contest).. all of these were wonderful experiences.Trying out such problems really helps ... and increases your understanding of algorithm complexity and related literature... Google Summer of code during the last year of Univ was also fun.. albeit a different kind of experience...nonetheless taught me a lot. Both me,and my teammate during these code contests who was also a high performer in TC and currently work at different startups. I genuinely believe these experiences definitely made us better hackers.

I won the solo division for the Rails Rumble a few months ago. For me, the most valuable part of the competition was how inspirational it turned out to be. Seeing how much was accomplished under severe constraints (48 hours, max 4 people per team) shed new light on all my other development efforts.

I imagine that people who do well at such competitions would be better hires, but that would be due to other factors - passion for coding, good time management skills, etc. I doubt it's a major difference, though.

My old lead-hacker was in a few.

Got disqualified in one too because they didn't believe he had built the stuff himself in the allotted timeframe :-(

I've had that problem too. There was a competition, possibly in 2004, to win an old BBC Micro by writing a program on a BBC Micro. I wrote a program to draw a spinning tetrahedron with back face culling. I was disqualified because they thought that I'd memorised a type-it-in listing from an old magazine. I also won the 1996 IOCCC Best Layout.

All I do is constantly think about the next project-euler challenge (www.projecteuler.net).

...Religiously.

Would Google Summer of Code count? I participated in the first one with Mambo/Joomla, but was fairly disappointed.

Why were you disappointed?

I've played around with Top Coder. Good scores mean you know your algorithms very well, and are really fluent with your language of choice.

That said, I'd be just as inclined to hire someone who had an impressive side-project or two on their website.

I was a finalist in The Daily WTF programming contest:

http://dennisferron.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-contest-i-didn...

yep pyweek.org mostly

Ditto with pyweek and also LD48.