This article claims to rank nation's Olympic programming ability, but uses the average score from online tests.<p>The olympics are scored by the best a nation can do, not by its average.
The conclusion I would draw is China, Russia, and Poland perform the best in programming challenges. The article even shows this in a quote about the greatness of Chinese programmers:<p>> In universities and colleges, education resources are relatively fewer in comparison with many other countries, so students have less choices in their paths to programming. Many great students end up obsessed with competitive programming since it's one of the few paths.<p>The headline is somewhat click-baity.
Well, Hackerrank is a recruiting company. If you are from China or Russia, and you want to leave the country and find a job elsewhere, having a high score on Hackerrank is going to improve your chances. If you are from the UK or US, you probably wouldn't bother.
I never heard of hackerrank until now. Maybe the site has a location bias? Interesting bit, when I used to have ad-sense for my tumblr app certain regions just visited more of that site than others
Or may be good programmers in US don't feel the need to prove themselves on such sites, instead they can just go and work for good company like Facebook, Apple, Google, etc.
Are those tests representative of what we have to do at work? I did a couple of tests on another site and they were almost artificial, something you do only at university exams but never at work.<p>If I were an interviewer I'd use them only to see how somebody starts thinking about solutions but we can use real world problems for that.
The ranking is a joke. Look at taobao, the most famous website in China. Its front page is a mess. As an Chinese I can tell you those Chinese copycat software or websites are often patched up Frankensteins.