Comment by sigbottle

Well I come from the competitive programming sphere, and I would say that IOI is harder than ICPC.

When you don't know that many things, that's when creativity shines, and there are some truly genuinely shocking IOI problems.

ICPC (well, in recent years they've gotten slightly better) is pretty well known as a knowledge-heavy implementation contest. Many teams get the experience that they mind-solved a lot more problems but couldn't implement them in time. Typing up the maxflow template for the 25th time for a series of collegiate-level but ultimately standard reductions isn't that inspiring.

My favorite problems are those you can derive from basic techniques but come up with scaffolding that is truly elegant. I've set some of them myself, which have stumped some famous people you may know :)

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I guess my point is that I can see people feeling about Putnam the same way.