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HackerRank Tries To Calculate Which US States Have The Best Developers (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Palo Alto-based HackerRank, which offers online programmng challenges, "dug into our data of about 450,000 unique U.S. developers to uncover which states are home to the best software engineers, and which pockets of the country have the highest rate of developer growth." Examining the 24 months from 2015 through the end of 2016, they calculated the average score for each state in eight programming-related domains. (Algorithms, data structures, functional programming, math, Java, Ruby, C++, and Python.) But it seems like low-population states would have fewer people taking the tests, meaning a disproportionate number of motivated and knowledgeable test takers could drastically skew the results. Sure enough, Wyoming -- with a population of just 584,153 -- has the smallest population of any U.S. state, but the site's second-highest average score, and the top score in three subject domains -- Ruby, data structures, and algorithms. And the District of Columbia -- population 681,170 -- has the highest average score for functional programming.
California, New York and Virginia still had the highest number of developers using the site, while Alaska, Wyoming and South Dakota not surprisingly had the least number of developers. But maybe the real take-away is that programmers are now becoming more distributed. HackerRank's announcement notes that the site "found growing developer communities and skilled developers all across the country. Previously, the highest concentrations of developers did not stray far from the tech hubs in California. Hawaii, Colorado, Virginia, and Nevada demonstrated the fastest growth in terms of developer activity on the HackerRank platform..." In addition, "we've had a noticeable uptick in customers across industries, from healthcare to retail and finance, with strong demand for identifying technical skills quickly."
Their conclucion? "Today, as the demand for developers goes beyond technology and as there is more opportunity to work remotely, there's a more distributed workforce of skilled developers across the nation, from the Rust Belt to the East Coast... Software developers aren't just attached to VCs, startups or Silicon Valley anymore."
California, New York and Virginia still had the highest number of developers using the site, while Alaska, Wyoming and South Dakota not surprisingly had the least number of developers. But maybe the real take-away is that programmers are now becoming more distributed. HackerRank's announcement notes that the site "found growing developer communities and skilled developers all across the country. Previously, the highest concentrations of developers did not stray far from the tech hubs in California. Hawaii, Colorado, Virginia, and Nevada demonstrated the fastest growth in terms of developer activity on the HackerRank platform..." In addition, "we've had a noticeable uptick in customers across industries, from healthcare to retail and finance, with strong demand for identifying technical skills quickly."
Their conclucion? "Today, as the demand for developers goes beyond technology and as there is more opportunity to work remotely, there's a more distributed workforce of skilled developers across the nation, from the Rust Belt to the East Coast... Software developers aren't just attached to VCs, startups or Silicon Valley anymore."
The best developers all attended the tremendous Trump Iniversity. If that's not on your resume, don't even *think* about applying to work at my company.
Hackerrank can't measure the best developers because the best developers don't waste time on hackerrank.
Furthermore, even if we assume that some of the best developers do spend time on hackerrank, the questions that hackerrank provides don't measure developer skill particularly well. A lot of them are more like tutorials.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In California it is possible to get paid even if you're incompetent. It draws the Java programmers here like flies to shit.
Proper abstraction can actually help efficiency, e.g.: the templated c++ sort is a lot faster than the C qsort function because the compiler can optimize the code for each datatype and inline the compare function, while the C qsort has to use indirect calls to the compare function via function pointers and can't do static optimizations based on things such as size of the elements.
Efficiency is also often a question of using a proper algorithm. Most of the time that O(n) DP-algorithm coded in Python is going to be much faster than a O(2^n) bruteforce algorithm handcoded in assembly.
Jan
In the most popular challenges in Hackerrank speed is not an issue. You only need to be a speed champion if you are competing for the top 5% or so. Otherwise speed is not an issue but figuring out the right algorithm and being able to write it down without making tons of mistakes that require long debug sessions. Taking your time to think properly about the problem and then carefully writing correct code is actually the way to go, as debugging can easily use a lot more time than coding itself. Many of the easier tasks are just a few lines of code in C++, Python or Java without any code golfing.
Jan
I disagree. That someone is doing well in competitive programming (CP) type of questions does not tell you that that person is a good programmer. However, it also doesn't measure pointless stuff and proper knowledge of data structures and algorithms is a skill every good developer should have. CS101 can sometimes be pointless because many people cannot transfer this knowledge to any other problem. Just being able to tell that Quicksort is average O(nlog n) and worst-case O(n^2) is not useful if that doesn't mean anything to you. A bigger CPUs is not going to fix that O(n^3) algorithm that worked fine when the developer unit tested it with 10 elements, but somehow struggles when trying to run it on 100k elements in the production system.
Jan