Are Chinese and Russian Developers More Skilled Than Americans? | Hacker News Reader

Are Chinese and Russian Developers More Skilled Than Americans?

infoworld.com

All evidence from prestigious algorithmic contests also indicate this. For example, the ACM ICPC world finals [0] has been dominated by Russia and China since 2000. Russians also rank highly in Topcoder [1].

American competitive programmer Nick Wu has talked about this phenomenon in several quora posts, such as [2]. Basically, Americans just don't participate as much in competitive programming, HackerRank included.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_International_Collegiate_P...

[1] https://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank

[2] https://www.quora.com/Why-were-there-no-American-competitors...

I don't think competitive academics is really a thing that has a lot of visibility in mainstream American culture. Raw competition mostly happens in athletics. Much more niche are "cerebral" games like chess. Once you get into competitive academics like Math Olympiad you're very niche.

PS: This article is a submarine for Hackerrank.

Aye-aye, USS Betteridge, surfacing for clickbait now, sir.

Haven't things like spelling bees and mathletics been quite big lately? Or is TV giving me a false impression?

Unlike getting a plurality of IITians together. ;)

In the US, ACT/SAT scores and # of acceptance letters/incentives are the closest to undergrad bragging rights/proxy for rank.

There are numerous competitions in varous academic subjects, but no official/harder national ordering/score system.

Next, in US universities, more areas than just test scores are used to build an internal student candidate evaluation packet in the acceptance filtering processes to select people using more than test scores alone.

Finally, the vast majority of US students aren't used to actual hard work... this is the real productivity / aptitude / capability killer.

This is no indication of the general quality of coders from any country. It only tells you that among coders who participate in ICPC Russians do better. There are other factors at play that might add bias to who participates in these competitions.

Once a friend remarked to me that Pakistani indie bands seem so awesome compared to Indian bands though India has a music industry that is 50x of Pakistan's music industry. After digging up more statistics I learned that India's top music talent works for bollywood instead of having independent bands. It is basically tier-1 artists from Pakistan vs Tier 2 artists from India.

It is possible that the best American coders have greater opportunities and hence they don't participate in ICPC as much.

India features no where in Math Olympiad though American-Indians feature regularly. Why ? Because India's brightest brains are busy studying for JEE and given the cut throat competition driven by scarcity of good engineering education they have no time to spare for IMO.

There's a difference between creating clean maintainable application architectures and writing quick 'n' dirty algorithms that sort data structures. We look for both of these things when hiring; sites like HackerRank just test for the latter.

Do you have any evidence to show that the two skills aren't intertwined? Because in my experience, those who have been good at developing algorithms have been just as good at working with full applications.

Only anecdotal, but the lack of evidence could be why interviewing is such a mess for software engineering roles.

I've looked at these challenges and considered trying them out, but there's an opportunity cost involved in doing them.

I'm sure they're of some value, but I prefer to spend my time that I have for professional learning either reading books or articles, learning new tools or trying out new tools and skills on low risk hobby projects.

I find I get far more value from this than trying to solve challenges I virtually never encounter in the 'real world'. But then again, maybe I'm just not the target market...

I agree. For me I have seen far more gain from learning a new tool, figuring out corner cases in my code, or coming up with miltiple ways of tackling code infrastructure issues rather than doing puzzles.

Show me a measurement that determines if the developers can write clean code, maintainable software, analyse and gather requirements plus design user interfaces and systems that add real value - then we can have a level playing field. Algorithmically the Chinese and Russians may be better, but that is a terribly one dimensional view of developer skill.

Yii2 is an example of a framework written by Chinese and Russian programmers, as far as I know, it's a pretty damn good framework compared to Symfony and Laravel. My 2 cents.

Why would an american waste time on these things? I don't know anyone that cares about these competitions or whatever they are.

The use of averages could be misleading here. It could be that the US has the same pool of skilled developers as China/Russia but also has more unskilled developers, making the average lower.

Could also be selection bias. Outsiders may only hear about, or encounter, the better ones.

The US could even have a higher skill level on average(1), and still have way fewer skilled developers. As Jesse Eisenberg asks in The Social Network, "Did you know there are more people with genius IQ’s living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?"(2)

(1) Your guess is as good as mine.

(2) Any relationship between IQ and developer skill is left as an exercise for the reader.

Btw I don't think the China thing is actually true unless genius means something like top 20%. I would imagine genius meaning something closer to top 1%.

Yes 20 % of China's population is roughly the population. So it's a fancy way of saying that China is five times as big as the U.S. Which it is!

The real interesting comparison lies elsewhere. Also we have to take into account that we can not use the same tests on intelligence on both populations.

"The real interesting comparison lies elsewhere. Also we have to take into account that we can not use the same tests on intelligence on both populations."

I actually think that intelligence test questions have highly correlated difficulty when given to people from different cultures (even more different than US/China). I.e. there's broad agreement in terms of what questions are hard/easy.

Well, American coders seem not wasting time on presenting their skills at some obscure competitions, doing tech interviews and making money instead. Indeed, if you compare average salary rank for coders, the US will be on the top, and Russia on the bottom line of distribution.

In Eastern Europe it is a cultural thing perhaps. Math and programming Olympiads I think are taken more seriously and are often a gateway to a good college. In some cases those who rank higher get to skip entrance exams. In US it might be more of a hobby with a lot less at stake. Not sure about India and China.

Also note that it is possible to train to do well in those but not necessarily be a good full time programmer.

Could it be an overhang from the Soviet Union's focus on chess?

See for example http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

Could be. I used to watch chess competitions on TV with my dad like people watch football here in US.

Yeah we've got quite a lot of eastern european developers here in Germany, especially Ukraine. They are mostly top notch.

I guess it's also related to survival - I can't imagine how people live on salaries in "humanities" fields. This is less relevant to west where people have more or less good jobs/salaries outside tech as well.

If they were, then the center of the tech world wouldn't be in the US.

But it is.

Don't be salty.

Facebook, Google and alike constantly hires foreigners.

The worlds favorite IDE to write code in comes from Russia.

What IDE is that? Visual Studio? Eclipse?

IntelliJ IDEA and other products by JetBrains. Their R&D is in Novosibirsk and St. Petersburg, and Sales are global.

Their R&D is also in Munich and Boston, and they're headquartered in Prague.

Their IDEs can't really be fairly said to come from Russia.

Virtually no big russian software companies incorporate in Russia, because the criminal raiders will take over the company - see Yandex, Parallels, Kaspersky Lab, all are registered in Europe with those companies controlling all the IP.

You just explained how pressure of natural selection stimulates talent in Russia. Once it is squeezed into civilization, it flourishes.

their EMEA Sales are in Prague. Anyone can go and see their offices map on https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/ . By the way, most contact second names are distinctively Russian. And the name of their own programming language - Kotlin, is a tribute to island in front of St. Petersburg.

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