I am preparing for a programming contest in C++ where it is all about producing working code in a short time. An example would be to use a macro to get the minimum of two ints(but I was told that you shouldn't use macros as they are not type-safe) or using memsets to initialize arrays (but I was told that you shouldn't use memsets in C++).

This leads to the question, what kind of coding techniques exist to use at a real job?