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China’s impressive standing up of the 93 petaflops Sunway TaihuLight atop the Top500 list in June ruffled more than a few feathers in the west. Here’s yet more fodder for stirring up geo-computational acumen nervousness – a report by HackerRank, a blog that posts coding challenges, indicates the U.S. would place 28th in a Coding Olympics while China, Russia, and Poland would take gold, silver, and bronze.
An article in The Washington Post today (Which Country Would Win in the Programming Olympics?) cites the study on HackerRank that suggests the U.S. programmer community isn’t keeping pace with the rest of the world. As always, such rankings must be weighed with a grain or two of salt. That said, the post article notes:
“The study compiled the results of 1.4 million coding challenges by about 300,000 developers completed on the website HackerRank, a free coding practice website that doubles as a developer recruiting ground for companies such as Facebook and Airbnb. After breaking down the results by country, HackerRank found that U.S. coders landed in 28th place.”
“I don’t think it’s that surprising,” said Vivek Ravisankar, co-founder and chief executive of HackerRank. “In my opinion, the U.S.’s position here mirrors a lot of the other world ranking reports, such as STEM education performance or even other international coding competitions,” according to the article.
The Washington Post account goes on to say, “The study falls in line with other rankings that capture the skill sets of coders by country. Last year’s Pew Research Center analysis of STEM test scores revealed that American students fell in the middle of the pack, underperforming compared to students in Singapore and South Korea. At this year’s International Olympiad in Informatics, a UN-sponsored competition of computing skills, the list of winners told the same story. Chinese, Russian and Eastern European contestants dominated, while the highest scoring American coder came in 15th place.”
Here’s a link to the Washington Post article by Karen Turner: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/08/30/who-would-win-the-coding-olympics/
Here’s a link to the HackerRank study: http://blog.hackerrank.com/which-country-would-win-in-the-programming-olympics/
