Skills assessment: The best developers are in Slovakia

The United States is one of the world's technological leaders, especially Silicon Valley, home of many major companies. US developers are good, but they’re some way from being the best (26th position worldwide). The best being countries like Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (Eastern Europe).

SkillValue, a subsidiary of the french company The Pentalog Group, rated the programming skills of programmers from different countries. They have cross-referenced all the data that SkillValue has with the data their competitor, HackerRank, gets from the same kind of programming skills testing program. SkillValue don't target China and some of the Far East countries. In the countries in which both companies are located, the results in most cases amount to 80-90%. Overall, eastern European countries are very good and the best are Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. The countries of Western Europe, especially the United Kingdom and France, are lagging behind. Of the countries of Western Europe, only Italy, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland overcome Bulgaria and Romania. What purpose do these two rankings serve? Especially for economic reasons.

These rankings can give us an idea of the value for money each area offers when deciding where to set up shop or to look for a new partner. France, UK, US... a large proportion of the people taking tests in these countries come from older technologies and applications, with older working methods, and that shows in the way they code.

On the other hand, they have much bigger populations, and there is no doubt whatsoever that they have greater numbers of very highly skilled workers than the smaller, higher scoring countries. Programmers from Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary did not get outdated in the field of information technology. All of their tools, technologies and practices are modern, they work with the very latest products and startups - that did not adopt the wrong practise.

On average, Eastern Europe, Spain and Portugal offer extremely good value for money. With modern style of work, developers' teams can be virtually anywhere, so this kind of information on the quality of country specialists can be useful when creating teams. Some countries can really offer much greater benefits than others at the same price.

Source: https://www.pentalog.com/blog/IT-ranking-world-top-developers/