Recently, I have noticed a very dangerous trend among people in their early years of engineering: wasting so much time on competitive programming and buying courses worth thousands of rupees from LinkedIn influencers in the hopes that it will get them jobs at companies like Google. Honestly, I don't blame the students; these people have brainwashed students into thinking that DSA/CP is all it takes to get into FAANG or other high-paying companies.

Here's the truth: your CP skills are mostly worthless (especially if you are not from Tier 1 colleges) unless you perform at the highest level, like at least reaching the ICPC Asia West finals. Recruiters don't care if you are an Expert or Specialist on Codeforces. Even someone with zero knowledge of CP can now become a Candidate Master using GPT. If you are smart enough to perform at that level (ICPC), you won't need anyone spoon-feeding you basic stuff like segment trees or binary lifting. You will be smart enough to learn it yourself by going through proper resources like USACO.

So, if your goal is to get a job, you are better off doing good original projects in your area of expertise and maintaining at least an 8.5+ CGPA instead of learning how segment trees work or how to do digit DP. Most recruiters don't care about that stuff.

I would like to go through the code of a few Master+ users after contests. Contestants that writes code that are easy to understand without any templates and other similar modifications. Any recommendations?

Is there any advantage in solving questions in a non-standard order in normal div2? In div4, div3 and div2 edu it's obvious that we gotta go from easy to hard as it reduces time penalty. But in normal div2 it's hard to tell. For example score for a 1500 question decays way faster than that of 1000 or 500 rated ones. So I am assuming there is some benefit in attempting those first?