China And Russia, Not The United States, Have The Best Software Developers
Oddly, this makes a lot of sense.
The United States is home to many of the most recognizable tech brands in the world. But it may not have the best software developers.
According to a recent study by code-based challenge and recruitment platform HackerRank, China and Russia boast the most talented developers over a number of programming disciplines. Chinese developers are extremely proficient at challenges based on mathematics, functional programming and data structure and Russian developers crush algorithms.
Across all the posted challenges accepted and completed by developers, China had an average success rate of 100%, said HackerRank in a blog post. Russia was only slightly behind with 99.9%. Seven out of the top 10 countries in HackerRank are from Europe. Japan and Taiwan rounded out the top of the developer chart, which was limited to the 50 countries with the most developers that signed up to HackerRank challenges.
The U.S. and India—which provide the majority of the 1.5 million developers in the HackerRank community—are a long way back, ranking at 28th and 31st out of the top 50 countries analyzed, HackerRank said. Average scores for those two countries were 78% and 76%, respectively—an indication that the home-grown developer community in the U.S. will have to play catch-up … at least when it comes to completing HackerRank challenges.
HackerRank has been providing developers with automatic programming challenges since 2008. The aim of its founders—two software engineers who worked at Amazon and IBM—was to provide companies with a ready-made talent pool for potential recruitment. At the same time, developers can hone and practice required skills in over 15 domains and more than 35 programming languages.
Why Developers Maintain A Focus On Algorithms
The most popular domain is building algorithms, with 40% of all developers completing these tests. The domain includes challenges in sorting data, dynamic programming and logic-based tasks. One reason why this domain is so successful is that developers can choose whatever programming language they wanted to complete the set challenges, HackerRank said.
“Algorithms are also crucial for coding interviews, so it could explain why more coders would practice algorithm challenges,” said HackerRank’s Ritika Trikha, in the blog post.
Java and data structures challenges were completed by around 9% of all developers. Distributed systems and security placed at the bottom of the list. Artificial intelligence scraped into the top 10 with a 2.9% completion rate, despite it being a relatively new field and not available to many programmers outside of big technology companies like Google and Microsoft.
See also: Here Are The Programming Languages Developers Complain About Most
Chinese developers ruled in three of 15 challenge domains. According to HackerRank, this can be attributed to a culture of competitive programming in the Far East—a culture that encourages young developers to test their skills on an international stage.
“In universities and colleges, education resources are relatively fewer in comparison with many other countries, so students have less choices in their paths to programming,” said HackerRank’s Shimi Zhang. “Many great students end up obsessed with competitive programming since it’s one of the few paths. China even has a big population of students who started programming in middle school and high school. They’re trying to solve some hard challenges only few people in this world can solve.”
Europe Is A Software Developer Powerhouse
The remaining HackerRank challenge domains are split between the Asia-Pacific region and the European Union, the study said.
The best developers working in popular programming languages such as Java and C++ are based in Europe. Poland and France are the best, respectively, in those categories. Japan ranked at the top for artificial intelligence. Switzerland claims the best database developers and Ukraine is the best place to find security software developers.
The U.S. technology industry has been a big player in attempting to change immigration policy. It’s no wonder why. A recent report by The App Association said that there are now more than 223,000 unfilled software developers positions in the U.S., with demand for talent far exceeding supply.
“Every day, developers around the world compete with each other to become the next (Bill) Gates or (Donald) Knuth,” said Trikha. “If we held a hacking Olympics today, our data suggests that China would win the gold, Russia would take home a silver, and Poland would nab the bronze. Though they certainly deserve credit for making a showing, the United States and India have some work ahead of them before they make it into the top 25.”
Image: “Programmer,” by Flickr user Irena Safarova, Creative Commons
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