These Universities Are Training The World's Top Coders

[FarCenter]

With early college admissions under way for many universities around the country, we got to thinking: Which colleges have the best coders in the world?

While there are academic rankings, like the Top Computer Science Programs by U.S. News & World Report, there is no list that ranks colleges purely by their students’ ability to code. The criteria for the U.S. News & World Report, for instance, includes number of research papers produced, global research reputation, and number of conferences. In fact, practical coding skills aren’t even part of their methodology at all.

We decided to answer the question: Which universities have students who can roll up their sleeves and code?

At HackerRank, millions of developers, including hundreds of thousands of students, from around the world regularly solve coding challenges to improve their coding skills. In order to figure out which colleges have the best coders, we hosted a major University Rankings Competition. Over 5,500 students from 126 schools from around the world participated in the event. Companies also assess developers’ coding skills using HackerRank to hire great developers.

According to our data, the top three best coders in the world hail from:

Russian Federation College, ITMO University (Russia)
Sun Yat-sen Memorial Middle School (China)
Ho Chi Minh City University of Science (Vietnam)

The University of California, Berkeley was the #1 college in America, and came in fourth overall.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3066485/the-future-of-work/these-universities-are-training-the-worlds-top-coders

[PoliticAverse]

1. Quite frankly there are so many great free resources for learning programming now...

I don't know why anyone would go to college for that except for the stamp of approval (aka a degree).

[Yavin4]

2. True dat.

You become a top programmer like you become anything else, through hours and hours of practice. Not some college degree.

[hunter]

3. That's not true. We're all still suffering the plates of vomit Bill Gates and Steve Jobs coughed up.

Both men rose to the top of the food chain as business sharks. But as programmers, and as supervisors of programmers, they didn't know what the hell they were doing.

A long time ago, maybe in a different universe, I met Bill Gates when he was complaining about software theft. Shortly after he decided a little software theft was good for his brand. If people are stealing MSDOS and Windows, then it must be worth something, right? Monetizeable.

"Expertise" in Microsoft Windows or Apple System fucking xWhatever are all well and good for employment but the bad-ass players, all the way from House Google to state sponsored agents of espionage, they all have very solid credentials in mathematics and computer science. Graduate degrees. Minor minions are writing Android and iOS apps. These days ARM rulz.

Programming is easy. The entire point of various programming languages and their platforms is to make it easy.

Math is hard. Programming, not so much. No offense, programmers are mechanics, computer scientists are engineers.

And there's a reason Posix operating systems and C are still going strong, whereas GW Basic, MSDOS, and Apple's System 6 are all extinct but for sorry and regretful objectified emulations.

Yes I am as a creature of Berkeley (but not a computer scientist) deeply prejudiced. I've seen so many programming languages and programming fads come and go. I'm not easily impressed.

When I was in school Pascal, C, LISP, and FORTRAN were the academic languages and my favorite microprocessor was the 6502. I'm glad I never had to suffer the fetid swamps of Java, Visual Basic, or even Borland Delphi. Oh, and I do confess, a little part of me died when Javascript, oh excuse me, ECMAScript, became the standard scripting language of the world wide web. But this too shall pass.

Lately, just for fun, I'm playing with Tcl/Tk again. It's a tiny little LISPish and FORTHish thing, and it amuses me that Tk is an official aspect of Python, and it works by spinning off the equivalent of Tcl scripts.

Abstractions upon abstractions, turtles all the way down. It's been my good fortune in life to know some of the turtles at the bottom of it all.

I remember when I quit a deeply pruned down and hacked legal copy of Windows 98SE for Linux. Linux was like coming home.