Americans Are Scarce In Top Tech Contest
Americans Are Scarce In Top Tech Contest
The results have been carefully tabulated by a computer and, thus, are beyond dispute: Of the 48 best computer programmers in the world, only 4 of them are Americans. But what that bit of data says about the state of the U.S. education system is open to debate. Back in February, Wall Street Journalist Lee Gomes wrote about a computer-programming competition run by an outfit called TopCoder. That event was part of the run-up to the global finals held last week in Las Vegas. If you have trouble putting “computer programming” and “spectator sport” in the same sentence, you haven’t been to one of these contests. From the gasps, moans and cheers as the audience watched the scoreboard tracking the contestants, you’d have thought you were at a World Cup match.
As noted in February, these competitions were dominated at their start in 2001 by Americans, but that’s no longer the case — not by a long shot. In fact, of the four Americans who won the top seats out of 4,500 contestants, two were brothers: Po-Shen Loh, 23, a graduate student in math at Princeton University, and his 21-year-old sibling, Po-Ru, now an undergraduate at CalTech. Both were born in the Midwest of parents who had emigrated to the U.S. from Singapore; their father is a professor of statistics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
By contrast, there were 8 from Russia, and 4 each from Norway and China. The biggest delegation, 11, came from Poland. Is all this more evidence of a sad decline in American education and competitiveness?
Ken Vogel, a former TopCoder contestant who was at the event recruiting for his current employer, UBS, noted that in the real world, programmers need many other skills in addition to the ability to solve quickly some discrete and entirely artificial problems. These include, he said, thinking about the big picture, working well in teams, and anticipating the sorts of things that users of computers and computer software might actually want. Still, when contemplating how out of place some of the strongly disciplined Russian or Polish programmers would be among American college students, who all too often become either slackers or salary-obsessed careerists out for the easy score, it’s hard not to be depressed.
American contestant Po-Shen Loh recalled recently happening upon an afternoon TV cartoon aimed at toddlers, in which a stereotypically brainy student was being teased by his classmates. “They were making fun of the smart one,” he sighed. “If this is what American kids are watching even before they know any better, it can’t help but affect them later on.” People should monitor more closely what message their child’s cartoon is sending.
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