Feel I have to disagree on this one. Firstly, most programming competitions I've been to have this kind of problem description as well, just check Kattis problems for instance.

But secondly, while the problems in the beginning are trivial, you still have a huge advantage if you can immediately start programming without having to think, or having to look up a function in the stdlib. (Spoilers:) I probably wasted a minute today thinking about the solution of making a list for elves, and creating a new element whenever I saw an empty line. While a pro probably immediately did a split on "\n\n", summed and was done.