I also don't think that winning competitions is a negative. I only believe that the experience doing so gives one a bigger advantage in interviewing that in actual work performance.
I also don't believe that the Google hiring committees treat competition winners specially (though of course I could be wrong there). The reason I say that is as a frequent Google interviewer, the interview scores vastly outweigh the value of the resume (to the point of it becoming ignorable). And, I personally don't look at a resume except to see what language a candidate likes to write in, and to see how long they've been out of school (depending on how long, I might ask more a designy question).
Given my anecdotal and inferred evidence, I believe the only way for a competition win to help someone get the job is to make them better at interviews.
Given the stated evidence in the article, combined with my immediately-above belief, the explanation that fits is that competitions help more with interviewing than with job performance.
Since it helps more with selection (passing the interview) than with performance (job review), there is a natural negative correlation with performance for those who were selected.
This is completely consistent with competitions helping people do better with job performance.
I also don't believe that the Google hiring committees treat competition winners specially (though of course I could be wrong there). The reason I say that is as a frequent Google interviewer, the interview scores vastly outweigh the value of the resume (to the point of it becoming ignorable). And, I personally don't look at a resume except to see what language a candidate likes to write in, and to see how long they've been out of school (depending on how long, I might ask more a designy question).
Given my anecdotal and inferred evidence, I believe the only way for a competition win to help someone get the job is to make them better at interviews.
Given the stated evidence in the article, combined with my immediately-above belief, the explanation that fits is that competitions help more with interviewing than with job performance.
Since it helps more with selection (passing the interview) than with performance (job review), there is a natural negative correlation with performance for those who were selected.
This is completely consistent with competitions helping people do better with job performance.