Where to look for the best programmers

There are more than a few factors that make us think American programmers are the best in the entire world, one of them is called Bill Gates. It turns out that if programming were a category, the United States would not take home as many Olympic gold medals as usual. HackerRank, a platform gathering engineers from all around the globe, decided to examine their data to see which country is number one at programming.

Regularly posting thousands of so-called challenges for developers who desire to improve their coding skills, HackerRank was able to gather the results of 1.4 million tests and rank about 300,000 developers based on their accuracy and speed. These challenges, offered by the biggest free coding practice website, could have been participated in 15 different domains; with algorithms, java and data structures being the most popular ones. Which countries made it to the top, you wonder?

In order to find out, HackerRank used so-called z-score, finding the average and then converting the scores into a 1-100 scale for easy interpretation, placing the United States – which contributed the biggest number of developers – at 28th and India, which is known as the fastest-growing concentration of programmers even behind the USA, at 30th. Vivek Ravisankar, co-founder and chief executive of HackerRank admits he is not at all surprised to see these results. Are you?

It is high time to reveal which country made it to the top!

10: Italy

The University of Napoli Federico II

Considering the fact that Apple itself has decided to build a university there with 9 month-long courses, Italy looks to be in the right place. As it is ranked second in both tutorials and databases, investing in Italian programmers sounds reasonable.

9: Czech Republic

Czech National Library of Technology in Prague

The Czech Republic dominated the shell scripting challenges, ranking second in mathematics at the same time.

8: France

National Centre for Space Studies’ Facility in Toulouse

In 2014 France joined a small number of countries offering programming classes in elementary schools, therefore it should not surprise us at all to see France do well in C++ challenges.

7: Taiwan

National Chiao Tung University’s College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Taiwan

Ranking second in data structures, fourth in databases and fifth in functional programming, Taiwanese developers seem to be comprehensive enough to deserve the 7th spot.

6: Japan

Tokyo University of Technology

Japan mastered the Artificial Intelligence challenges, ranking fifth in mathematics and data structures at the same time. The very fact that Japanese scientists from the University of Tokyo have recently saved a woman’s life using AI leaves us without any doubts.

5: Hungary

University of Technology and Economics in Budapest

Hungary was one of the first countries offering programming classes in both primary and secondary schools, ranking first in tutorials and third in Java, C++ and Shell challenges.

4: Switzerland

SwissTech Convention Center

The homeland of Pascal, one of the first computer programming languages, is Switzerland. The same country that, according to HackerRank’s study, never gives up, scoring in the top five in nine of fifteen challenges.

3: Poland

University of Technology in Gdańsk

Poland scored in the top five in six out of fifteen challenges with the impressive first place in Java, the most popular and preferred language amongst HackerRank’s users. It managed to beat Switzerland, making it to the top 3.

2: Russia

the best programmers from Russia Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg

Ruling in algorithms, the most popular challenge on the platform, Russia taking the second place does not surprise anyone.

1: China

Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Science Centre

China is the only country that ranked first place in three challenges; data structures, mathematics and functional programming. Did anyone not see this coming?

It turns out that living in Bill Gates’ homeland is no longer enough and investing in other countries may be more beneficial than ever. Beware, other companies are thinking the same!