I've never been any good at programming competitions, so to caress my ego I should join the crowd claiming that the results are meaningless. However, my experience is that people who perform well in programming contests tend also to do extremely well as software engineers. Perhaps I've just seen not big enough sample, but I don't think so.
I'm not saying people who do well in programming contests aren't smart, just that there are also smart people who don't do well in programming contests, e.g. because they don't spend time practicing the weird sort of programming you need to be able to do.
In order for your observation to have weight, you would really need a number of examples of people who couldn't cut it in a competition doing poorly as software engineers.
