Are Chinese and Russian Developers More Skilled Than Americans?

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3113107/application-development/us-developers-have-the-numbers-but-china-and-russia-have-the-skills.html

by technologyvault • 9 years ago

36 34 9 years ago

infoworld.com

alexmlamb23• 9 years ago

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.

stock_toaster• 9 years ago

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

zachrose• 9 years ago

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.

alexmlamb23• 9 years ago

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%.

dllu• 9 years ago

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...

jordanb• 9 years ago

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.

mturmon• 9 years ago

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

flukus• 9 years ago

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

BrailleHunting• 9 years ago

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.

tn13• 9 years ago

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.

rdtsc2• 9 years ago

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.

a_bonobo• 9 years ago

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...

rdtsc2• 9 years ago

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

MrBuddyCasino• 9 years ago

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

zerr• 9 years ago

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.

sandeatr• 9 years ago

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

teknologist2• 9 years ago

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.

bjourne• 9 years ago

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.

teknologist2• 9 years ago

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

planetjones• 9 years ago

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.

devoply• 9 years ago

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.

throwawaysk5345• 9 years ago

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

But it is.

fenrisbear• 9 years ago

Don't be salty.

Facebook, Google and alike constantly hires foreigners.

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

sand500• 9 years ago

What IDE is that? Visual Studio? Eclipse?

andrewwhartion• 9 years ago

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...

IndianAstronaut• 9 years ago

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.

ommunist4• 9 years ago

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.

Are Chinese and Russian Developers More Skilled Than Americans?

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