
Are Chinese and Russian Developers More Skilled Than Americans? - technologyvault
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3113107/application-development/us-developers-have-the-numbers-but-china-and-russia-have-the-skills.html
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dllu
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_International_Collegiate_Programming_Contest)

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

[2] [https://www.quora.com/Why-were-there-no-American-
competitors...](https://www.quora.com/Why-were-there-no-American-competitors-
at-the-finals-of-the-2013-Facebook-Hacker-Cup)

~~~
jordanb
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.

~~~
BrailleHunting
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.

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teknologist
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
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.

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

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andrewwhartion
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
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.

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planetjones
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
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.

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

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alexmlamb2
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.

~~~
zachrose
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.

~~~
alexmlamb2
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%.

~~~
rijoja
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.

~~~
alexmlamb2
"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.

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ommunist
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.

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rdtsc
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
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...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2009/09/red_squares.html)

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

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throwawaysk5345
If they were, then the center of the tech world wouldn't be in the US.

But it is.

~~~
fenrisbear
Don't be salty.

Facebook, Google and alike constantly hires foreigners.

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

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sand500
What IDE is that? Visual Studio? Eclipse?

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

~~~
meepmorp
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.

~~~
gspetr
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.

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

