Does being good at kaggke competions negatively correlates with actual job performance?
- Convincing them to spend great effort into changing their data collection and labelling practices.
- Explaining why a particular technique was used and why it is correct.
- Explaining why they can't expect magic from 'big data'.
- Making models that are robust and easily maintained, vs fragile spaghetti.
But I don't think being good at kaggle implies being bad at data science soft skills. Technical skills are probably weakly correlated -- that's my prior, it would be good to see a study.
I did find a paper examining the performance of TopCoder participants: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09755-0