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Comment by Noxchi | Hacker News Reader

When someone asks why not outsource the coding to India, point them to this page.

The first Indian winner is #236, but if you go to the last page, there are a bunch of them trying.

EDIT: I'm gonna make a script to list the best countries that output programmers.

No need to do that, this website contains statistics for all rounds in the past 6 years: http://www.go-hero.net/jam/13/regions

You'll find the same countries consistently at the top: Russia, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine (i.e. Eastern Europe) and China, Japan (i.e. East Asia) as well as a few others. No news here.

Regarding "but if you go to the last page, there are a bunch of them trying", this is also a function of how many "bad programmers" participate. There's no way to tell whether bad Polish or US programmers filter themselves out of these competitions but Indians not so much.

There's not really much difference between the top 1000 places, since all that matters is solving all 4 problems. This is the qualification round that goes on for 27 hours, so there is not much pressure to solve the problems fast. The Indian programmers are in a time zone that makes it difficult to get up at 4:30am just to solve the problems a bit faster.

Comparing the performance in the next few rounds would make more sense.

Wait, do the results from each round make a difference in subsequent rounds? I didn't take the time to implement a solution to problem C because I felt like it would take too long.

As long as you qualify, results from each round do not make a difference in subsequent rounds. [0]

[0] https://code.google.com/codejam/faq.html

What kind of reasoning is this? How is performing in a programming competition like Code Jam an indication of whether you are a good developer or not? Unless of course if you just want to hate on outsourcing, in which case, go ahead and do it but please don't try to make it sound like you are basing yourself on logic.

Performance at Google Code Jam != Ability as a software developer, for sure. However, being unable to solve a couple of the simple qualification round problems in a language of your choice with no time pressure is a strong negative signal (for reasoning and/or coding skills that are essential to any software developer).

I'm American, but this kind of statement pisses me off: just because some people from India didn't perform well in the Google Code Jam, we shouldn't hire them?

Looking above (dllu's comment) a significant factor in success at these competitions is practice. There's a good chance a lot of these folks are just students trying this for kicks. Basically, its really unclear how much self selection goes on with these contestants. Genuinely "trying" here means genuinely practicing; its unlikely that you would fail the first round if you practiced

There are a lot of people who've only solved a single problem, and the ranking will tend to cluster people from the same timezone together (even if they eventually solve more problems)

Also, competitive programming contests are really popular at Indian schools, so a lot of these could be HS students (nothing to back this up, though - they don't publish this information)

I assume outsourcing is done to save money. The amount it would cost to have each developer get their answer would be interesting to me, and would remove the perceived racist element too.

How about this from last year? http://www.go-hero.net/jam/13/regions

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