More and more ITspecialists from Poland are joining the market each year. Not only this, butthey are high achievers in international programming competitions such as GoogleCode jam and the Facebook Hacker Cup. The country has developed a reputationfor having incredibly talented programmers. But how have they become so good inthis field? And exactly how well do they do in programming competitions?
One thing to mention is their strong level of education and how this has affected the IT industry. Polish students accounted for 10% of graduates from European Universities.
IT education in Poland begins young, with nearly 100,000 high school students attending IT specialized courses annually. This encourages students to continue their IT studies at university. There are around 15,000 IT college graduates joining the IT market per year. As they take up foreign languages from a young age, they are exceptional communicators, adding to their capabilities in IT.
The passion for IT also begins at a young age, influenced by IT competitions starting in primary schools. A national program called “Coding Champions” is aimed at teaching primary school students the fundamentals of programming language. This knowledge follows them through the rest of their education and into the workforce.
There are plenty more reasons we could talk about and we could delve further into the education system for more insight, however, let’s stick to the focus. Below you will find 4 major competitions and tournaments where Poland has placed very well.
Hello World Open- 2014
Hello World Open is a global competition that attracted 2500 teams to take part in. Teams from tech giants like Facebook and Google participated in the world coding championship but it was a team from the Poland’s University of Technology that won. This game of errors, with one error in a single line of 5000 program lines, was enough to win or lose!
International Olympiad in Informatics – 2016
This is a massive worldwide event. Not many people realize it started nearly 30 years ago. Similarly to the Olympics, a different city hosts the competition each year. In 2016, the Polish participants excelled, taking home 101 medals. 36 gold medals were won, 37 silver medals, and 28 bronze. This placed Poland in the top 10 countries with the best results.
Capture the flag- 2016
This competition lays more focus on computer security and is used as educational training. It is a perfect opportunity for participants to gain more experience with security machines and learn how to react to attacks that they could face in the real world. Germany, U.U, and Russia had some amazing teams, but this didn’t stop Poland’s Dragon team from coming on the fifth place.
ACM International Collegiate ProgrammingContest- 2017
IT students from across the globe can participate in IMBs competition. Participants have to solve a minimum of eight problems in five hours. What makes it more challenging is that the team may only use one computer between them. The team from the University of Warsaw was able to gain gold for Poland, matching Russia and South Korea. What is more, Poland scored higher than China, solving one more problem.
By looking at just these four competitions, you can see that Poland has earned its reputation after gaining top positions. They have gone on to win more tournaments and competitions. This, on top of the growing IT market, is an excellent reason for choosing Poland for its IT services.