India had a dismal show at the Rio Olympics, with its 1.2 billion population managing to win just 2 medals in the worldwide competition. Some observers had said then that India might not be a sporting power, but where we shine is computers and IT, and our programmers are among the best in the world. A new study shows that that might not be true either — if there were a Programming Olympics, India might still fare quite poorly.
A study by HackerRank has attempted to rank nations in order of the quality of their programmers. HackerRank is hugely popular global website where programmers from around the world try to solve programming puzzles. It is also well known in India, and many Indian programmers test out their skills along with the best in the world.
HackerRank’s analysis of the relative skills of its worldwide coders shows some interesting results. China tops the list, while India languishes at a lowly number 31. USA does marginally better and finishes at number 28.
Interestingly, America, where a large number of talented Indian coders migrate to, also finished outside the top 25. The US and India have the most number of users on HackerRank.
According to the data, China and Russia score as the most talented developers. Chinese programmers outscore all other countries in mathematics, functional programming, and data structures challenges, while Russians dominate in algorithms, the most popular and most competitive arena.
Other countries which had better programmers than India included Poland, Chile, Turkey and Vietnam.
India might produce the most number of engineers in the world, but looks like they have some catching up to do with their global counterparts.