Which Country Has the Best ‘Programmers’?

If you ever wondered about which country produces the best programmers, wonder no more.

A new report from California-based HackerRank, a service that administers tests to developers around the world, says it’s China.

HackerRank offers its community of programmers, apparently 1.5 million strong, with challenges to hone their skills. It examined data from these challenges from the last few years to come up with the rankings, scoring developers from different countries and finding national averages.

“According to our data, China and Russia score as the most talented developers. Chinese programmers outscore all other countries in mathematics, functional programming, and data structures challenges, while Russians dominate in algorithms, the most popular and most competitive arena,” according to HackerRank.

This week HackerRank published a study showing which countries have the best developers.

HackerRank is a free coding practice website that allows developers to hone their coding skills by solving challenges. Based on the speed and accuracy with which people finish the challenges, HackerRank has ranked 1.5 million developers.

This study ranked which countries were best overall, which types of challenges were most popular, which countries dominated in each type of challenge, and which languages each country preferred.

While the United States and India have the most participants on the site, both countries put up disappointing numbers overall. The U.S. came in at 28th, while India was a few behind at 31st.

Here’s how the field of 50 looks: