I don't think I've ever been quick enough to figure on the leaderboard. I'm not a competitive person so that aspect of it doesn't really appeal to me and I've been able to totally ignore it every year without it really intruding on me or causing me any stress related problems.

You're imaging a scenario which doesn't really exist with this "ignorant recruiter" situation. Why not just worry about that if / when it really does become a problem...?

We can look at a myriad of potential stress factors that come out of the design of so many every day items. We'd be overrun with worries if let them dominate our mind.

Just chill out and try to ignore the competitive aspect, its not that difficult

Talk about dismissive and unnecessarily condescending. Consider arguing against ideas, not tone.

Since only the first 100 get points, it's really easy to ignore the leaderboard. Odds are against you when (at least in the early days) 30-50k people are competing.

I generally agree with the sentiment and the leaderboards themselves feel very silly.

Advent of Code for me has always been about creativity, learning new languages, some fun with co-workers. Occasionally after finding the simplest solution, I'll try and work out algorithms with better performance, or even read papers on the underlying fundamental computer science problem involved. But I try to write the code as I would in the day job, and so I always use the example inputs to write unit tests and I always try to refactor stuff to be readable. I'd much rather see code I could imagine working with in real life on someone's GitHub profile than something absurdly terse.

All that said, the puzzles this year have been pretty simple and do seem slightly more optimised to people on speedruns than some years previously, so it's not been that stimulating so far.