21 July 2017

Poland is one of the countries that give IT specialists to the work market every year. Also, it is known the fact that as a nation Poland has many achievements in international programming competitions such as Google Code Jam, Facebook Hacker Cup and much more. Poland has already built up a reputation as a homeland of exceptionally gifted programmers. But some questions remain for the outsiders: why are they so good in this industry? And what are their results after those programming competitions?

First of all, we have to take into consideration some aspects that make Poland different in a good way. The most important one that influences the most the IT industry and its development is the strong education system. 10% of the European university graduates came from Poland. Studies showed that almost 100.000 high school students attend IT specialized courses every year, which makes them continue in the same field at the university, at least a part of them because 15.000 IT college graduates enter the market annually. Moreover, they are good in the IT industry because they start to study foreign languages at a very young age and that makes them communicate efficiently no matter the country they are working in.

The interesting thing is that Poland trains the IT passionate for this kind of competitions starting with the primary school. “Coding Champions” is a national campaign which tries to teach elementary school children the basics of programming language, and then the knowledge should help them achieve a successful professional career.

We could continue to talk about the elements that influence the development of the IT industry, but that isn’t our purpose. We will instead concentrate our attention on the competitions and tournaments that Poland obtained good results over the last few years. This way, we can see what’s Poland place in this contest ranking.

Hello World Open – 2014

In 2014 a group of computer programmers from the University of Technology won the Hello World Open, the world coding championship. There were 2500 teams over the globe, including from such giants like Facebook or Google but the team from Poland have been the best. As is sometimes the case in sport, it was a game of errors, with one error in a single line of the five thousand program lines having the potential to seal the victory or defeat.

The International Olympiad in Informatics – 2016

This competition in another huge event organized every year. It started almost 30 years ago, and since then a lot of cities have been hosting the event because every year the location changes. The 2016 edition was a good year for Poland, 101 medals went to Polish programmers: 36 gold, 37 silver, and 28 bronze, which made Poland be among the first ten countries with best results.

Capture the flag – 2016

Capture the flag is a popular competition in computer security. The contests are designed to serve as an educational training, which gives participants experience to work with the security machine and also to react to plenty of attacks found in the real world. The Dragon Sector team from Poland was ranked fifth in 2016 at this competition. They succeeded to be in top five even if there were also great teams from U.S., Germany, and Russia.

ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest – 2017

IBM specially organized this competition for the IT student around the world. University teams can register every year in this contest, and they have to solve eight or more problems in five hours. The challenge proposed by this tournament is that every team is allowed to use only one computer even if there are three or four members. This year Poland obtained the gold medal with a team from the University of Warsaw, and they had the same ranking as Russia or South Korea, also known as very good in the IT industry. Moreover, Poland surpassed China, solving one more problem.

Those four competitions examples are enough to understand that Poland is situated at the top when it comes to programming games and tournaments. Their success continued over the years, and Poland teams have won a lot more competitions. So, in the end, there are plenty of reasons why you should choose Poland for programming services, knowing that the IT market is steadily growing and the people are proving that they are good at that.

Photo source: www.pexels.com

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