Which Country Would Win the Programming Olympics?

This post was originally published by Ritika Trikha & the HackerRank Team. 

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Which countries have the best programmers in the world?

Many would assume it’s the United States. After all, the United States is the home of programming luminaries such as Bill Gates, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Donald Knuth. But then again, India is known as the fastest growing concentration of programmers in the world and the hackers from Russia are apparentlypretty effective. Is there any way to determine which country is best?

We decided to examine our data to answer this question: which countries do the best at programming challenges on HackerRank?

At HackerRank, we regularly post tens of thousands of new coding challenges for developers to improve their coding skills. Hundreds of thousands of developers from all over the world come to participate in challenges in a variety of languages and knowledge domains, from Python to algorithms to security to distributed systems.  Our community is growing everyday, with over 1.5 million developers ranked.
Developers are scored and ranked based on a combination of their accuracy and speed.

According to our 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. While the United States and India provide the majority of competitors on HackerRank, they only manage to rank 28th and 31st. 

We began our analysis by looking at which test types are most popular among developers. HackerRank developers can choose to participate in 15 different domains, but some are more popular than others.  The following table shows the proportion of completed tests that come from each domain.

The most popular domain by far is algorithms, with nearly 40% all developers competing. This domain includes challenges on sorting data, dynamic programming, and searching for keywords and other logic-based tasks. For algorithms tests, developers can use whichever language they choose, which may partially explain why it’s so popular. Algorithms are also crucial for coding interviews, so it could explain why more coders would practice algorithm challenges. At a distant second and third, Java and data structures coming in at about 10% each. Distributed systems and security are our least popular tests, though we still receive thousands of completed challenges in those areas.

So based on these tests, which country has the programmers that score the highest?

In order to find out, we looked at each country’s average score across all domains. We standardized the scores for each domain (by subtracting the mean from each score and then dividing by the standard deviation; also known as a z-score) before finding the average. This allows us to make an apples-to-apple comparison of individual scores across different domains, even if some domains are more challenging than others. We then converted these z-scores into a 1-100 scale for easy interpretation.

We restricted the data to the 50 countries with the most developers on HackerRank. Here’s what we found:

Since China scored the highest, Chinese developers sit at the top of the list with a score of 100. But China only won by a hair. Russia scored 99.9 out of 100, while Poland and Switzerland round out the top rankings with scores near 98. Pakistan scores only 57.4 out of 100 on the index.

The two countries that contribute the greatest number of developers, India and the United States don’t place in the top half. India ranks 31st, with an overall score of 76 and the United States falls in at 28th, with a score of 78.

Though China outperformed everyone else on average, they didn’t dominate across the board. Which country produces the best developers in particular skill areas? Let’s take a look at the top countries in each domain.

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