Slashdot Mirror
Americans Are Scarce in Top Programming Contest
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Only four of the 48 best computer programmers in the world are Americans, at least according to a computer-programming competition run by TopCoder. Poland had 11 of the final 48, and Russia had 8. Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes asks whether this is more evidence of a sad decline in American education and competitiveness: 'Surprisingly, the Eastern Europeans don't seem to think so. Poland's Krzysztof Duleba, 22, explained that in countries like his own, there are so few economic opportunities for students that competitions like these are their one chance to participate in the global economy. Some of the Eastern Europeans even seemed slightly embarrassed by their over-representation, saying it isn't evidence of any superior schooling or talent so much as an indicator of how much they have to prove.'"
One of my professors did an exchange year at an Ivy League university, and when they got there they had to send back to the UK for their A Level (pre-university qualification) notes as the students were not at the level that they expected.
Also, I had a friend who was on the student exchange program at the same University at the same time. She was a pretty average C grade student (I'm sure she won't mind me describing her like that), but in her year in the US she got straight As.
I don't know if the standard of education is going down in the US, but it apparantly was nowhere near the standard that my professor and friend expected.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
Gosh, I hope not. What with their 21st century tax mechanisms, high literacy and technology adoption, I think the Baltics, Poland, and much of the rest of Eastern Europe are leapfrogging Central and Western Europe. Why would you open a new business anywhere in Europe outside the east or Ireland? Folks in France, the UK or Germany are not _that_ much better (nor are Americans, to be honest), and any skills you can't find locally just acquire them via fiber optics and conference cams... I wonder if the tax schemes of Croatia are nice and flat, Dubrovnik would be a _great_ place to live and work I'd think...
Better yet, they can take part in Euroland while remaining far more attractive for business investment (and, thus, jobs).
Wouldn't the ironing be delicious if "East Germany" were to secede again, but this time in order to go 21st-century capitalist (flat tax, low corporate tax) and join the Eastern European economy?
Luckily they can still remember the true face of socialism, and what havoc it can wreak, though perhaps in a couple of generations they too will transform into ignorant ingrates...
Science and technology is just give lip service here in America. We don't value science and tech geeks here. You want to earn some real money? Don't wast your time in science - go study law.
> I think they're just being polite saying "it isn't evidence of any superior schooling"
While it is true that Eastern Europeans are masters of understatement and self-deprecation, I don't think that's the whole story. There is a much stronger culture of high-profile competition in the East than in the West, probably because of a long tradition amongst old communist regimes to foster scientific competition. Kind of like the national spelling bee competition in the US, over there much more emphasis was placed on math competitions. Mind you, pretty much the same kinds of people sneered at them as do over here.
OTOH I really don't think there is that much difference between the science curriculums of the East and the West, with the singular exception of the US. I experienced three high school systems (Eastern Europe, Germany, Australia), and the only significant difference I could see was in the timing--Eastern Europe tends to drop a lot of the heavy science sh!t on unsuspecting students way too early, such as grades 5 and 6 and in general adopts a dog-eat-dog attitude towards the students, while in the West they tend to stage that later on during the senior years and also seem more concerned with not letting students fall off this speeding bus. Australia was the most pronounced in that respect, with the bulk of the advanced science and math being left for the last two years of high school. But at the end of high school I think most Western school systems have imparted about the same amoung of science and math as in the East.
I worked with a high school student who had recently moved from Romania to the US. I found his impressions of the US school system very interesting.
The first thing he said was that school was a lot easier here. But he immediately followed with the fact that he didn't think that his old school taught him anything more, or more advanced. Just that they took a much more adversarial approach with the students.
He said that getting a C was expected, and that you could at any time be expected to stand up in front of the class and explain any part of the subject matter, and be admonished if you could not. Pop tests were a common occurance. He said that you studied like mad just to avoid looking like an idiot.
Whereas, in his American school, you had to slack off to get bad grades, and you never had a test without a week's notice. But although easier, the same material was covered in the same detail.
Just thought it was interesting. In the US, you really aren't forced to learn any discipline, it's up to you to decide to care about it, whereas that doesn't seem to be a real option in eastern countries.
I guess most of the Polish contenders in Top Coder were students. Which means they are under 25, which in turn means they were in high school in late 90s and hardware wasn't a big issue here back then. OK, I was programming Atari 800 when I was 7 years old, but I guess it doesn't change much ;-)
My experience in such contests was that it wasn't at all about 2x speedup, so converting from C to assembly doesn't buy you anything. You need the right algorithm, you need to implement it fast and make no mistakes.
I guess there are several things that need to be done to win such a contest. You need a high profile algorithm classes (read: a lot of math). You need to be bright. You need some luck. But the most important thing is: you need a lot of training. Warsaw University have special classes that prepare students for such contests. Wroclaw University also does, but on slightly smaller scale. We have a national programming contest for high schools. Winners mostly (I guess 80% of them) go to Warsaw. This all can be seen in Top Coder results.
I guess this was also about the ,,we need to beat the Russia'' thing.
And some people from Wroclaw joined Top Coder because ,,we need to match Warsaw''... So there is something about the high
profile competition tradition in Central and Eastern Europe.
It is not the case, where people who are doing great in such contest are unemployed, and have nothing to do except to start in Top Coder. You can get relatively high paying job as a programmer in Poland, especially given much lower costs of living here, than in US or Western Europe. This is all despite the high unemployment in other areas. It takes a week or so to find a job as a programmer in Wroclaw. There are lots of R&D divisions of big foreign and Polish companies here. So they really need not impress US employees to get H1B.
And no, we don't have polar bears on the streets.