No. Being great at competitive programming can't hurt you and if you manage to win some competition that might be an extra thing to list on your resume. But as a front-end engineer you're not likely going to have to figure out how to implement too many radically complex algorithms under intensive time pressure.<p>As a front-end engineer, the biggest thing that would help you is probably knowing enough about many of the common web technologies that you'll conceivably use and interact with so you'll be able to pick the easiest and simplest ways to solve problems. You also have to be good at confidently communicating with everybody from backend developers to designers to business guys and understand enough about what they're saying in order to advise them when one of their ideas wouldn't be a good idea to implement and have possible alternative solutions ready for them.