The best developers in 2024 – Which countries have the best developers? Consider Ukraine

The Best Developers in 2022

 

In search of the Best Developers in 2022:Which Country They Are From?

 Having lived through already two years of the notorious corona virus pandemic, we all changed – professionals and businesspeople alike. Although the nasty virus caused the grave recession, dubbed corona crisis, in most of the world economies, it taught us some important lessons.We realized that lots of tasks could be fulfilled remotely, and it’s quite achievable when the job really has to be done. We became more cautious with money. Cost-cutting became a daily concern for zillions of business owners all over the globe.At the moment, as a result, the Covid crisis served as a catalyst for outsourcing. But that isn’t all. 

Best Developers – Table of content 

 

• The entire mindset is gradually transforming
• Best-Developers-by-Country-in-2022
• Not Just Cost-Cutting: the Main Reasons to Outsource
• Software Developer – On Contests and Champions
• Here is the Top-5 >>HackerRank<< of this list
• 2019 report -> the top 5 countries 
• top 5 countries with the highest developers’ success rates
• Developers – The Worse, the Better?
• Eastern Europe and Post-Soviet Countries as a Source of Qualified Staff
• Ukraine Deserves a Closer Look
• Learn more about Nearshoring

 

The entire mindset is gradually transforming

1. Employers adopt more flexible remote working models.
2. Companies, from small firms to large corporations, now are not only more comfortable with their own employees working from home, but also more readily outsourcing tasks and positions to remote staff.

Quite suddenly, it turns out that the difference between a long-standing employee forced to work from home, and a hired remote specialist is getting blurred.The trend is clear, and this process is extremely likely to keep on as the world globalizes, even after the pandemic ends (roll on the day when it’s over!). 

The main Reasons to Outsource: Not Just Cost-Cutting

Software development industry has long been taking advantage of outsourcing.

No wonder: we are living in times when data transmission takes seconds at the most, so why not hire a coder from another region or abroad?Gone are the times when most developers were sitting in front of their monitors in offices and open spaces. Lockdowns of 2020 forced thousands of programmers switch to writing code at home. The Covid crisis turned an option into a necessity.

Why do companies outsource development? 

Contrary to the popular belief, it isn’t all about economizing, although it’s still the key concern. Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey 2020 shows that for about 70% of the respondents, reducing operating costs was the primary motive for outsourcing.

• 1 In 2016, 59% viewed outsourcing mostly as a cost-cutting means
• 2 But anyway, businesspeople use outsourcing as a multi-purpose tool. They appreciate its flexibility, which enables them to quickly scale their teams up and down whenever they want. What is more, access to the global IT talent pool implies much more opportunities to find rare experts and the very best software developers with reasonable rates.

Topic Developer: Optimal is the Key Word, not who’s best…

Well, before we brood over which countries have the best developers, let’s verbalize what developer deserves being called ‘the best’.

>>The best developers<< – Is it ‘the most qualified’? If yes, what it means to you?

You may need a star for your team, capable of thinking out of the box, or a versatile specialist, proficient in lots of spheres, or a narrowly focused specialist – a one-trick pony, so to speak, or an eager beaver for a junior position.Projects differ, and so do the people who fit them ‘the best’. You are looking for the optimal variant, and it will differ from project to project.Now that you have figured out who exactly you are looking for, let’s outline where to look for this person.You can find such a developer in any country, in fact. The other question is how easy it will be and how much this specialist will cost you. To put it differently, it’s all about demand and supply and price-quality ratio, or better say, Salary/Qualification ratio.Quite logically, it’s easier to find high-quality software developers in countries with an excellent educational infrastructure and a well-developed IT market.Well, what country is the best to start looking for? Which countries have the best developers? 

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The best Software Developer – On Contests and Champions

A traditional way to find out who’s the best in any field is to carry out a competition. Every day we hear about various contests, tournaments, and championships. IT spere is no exception: various challenges are held from time to time to determine the most knowledgeable and best-performing pros.

HankerRank is among the most reputable organizers of these contests.

The challenges are run in fifteen domains, from Algorithms, AI, and Data Structures to Java, C++ and Python. Speed and accuracy are also evaluated and scored.In 2016, HackerRank published the post on its blog, named ‘Which Country Would Win in the Programming Olympics?’ [2]In this article, the company unveiled pretty interesting information on the results it obtained from scoring over 1.5 million developers, who participated in multiple challenges. The contestants come from 50 countries in total; HackerRank listed these countries by the average score its citizens got across all challenges. 

Best Developers in Moment by Country in 2022…

Here is the Top-5 >>HackerRank<< of this list:

1. China 
2. Russia
3. Poland
4. Switzerland
5. Hungary

 It would be a mistake, though, to consider it a straightforward guide telling you where to look for the best programmers. It reflects simply the arithmetic mean of the participants’ grades scored in all contests.

If we look at the results by domain, the picture would be a bit different.

While Chinese remain at the top in Mathematics, Functional Programming, and Data structures, developers from Russia, being #2 in the average score list, are #1 in Algorithms, Polish are #1 in Java, French (#8 in the list by average score) – in C++, Finnish (#15) – in Ruby, Hungarians – in Tutorials, Hong Kongers (#17) – in Python, Sri Lankans (#49) – in Distributed Systems, and Ukrainians (#11) – in Security.SkillValue, a subsidiary of Pentalog, also holds competitions and hackathons, which are extremely popular with developers, students and experts alike. Also, with SkillValue’s pre-defined tests and multiple-choice tech quizzes, everyone can check their skills and knowledge in 160+ skillsets. Results of these tests are a valuable source of information on programmers from different countries.

To figure out which countries have the best developers, 

let’s compare two reports from SkillValue: the 2019 Report [3] and the one published on PentaBlog on January 17, 2022 [6].It should be noted, however, that rankings from Pentalog & SkillValue don’t cover most of Asia, particularly China, but when it comes to Europe, these data are reliable. 

According to the 2019 report, the top 5 countries where the best developers came from were the following: 

1. Developers from Slovakia
2. Developers from Mexico
3. Developers from Poland
4. Developers from Hungary
5. Developers from Ukraine

And here is the list of January 2022. This ranking was obtained by analyzing 20,557 results of quizzes and algorithm exercises done on SkillValue platform. 

Here are the top 5 countries with the highest developers’ success rates:

1. Moldova
2. Mexico
3. Romania
4. Ukraine
5. The USA

Nevertheless, it doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘super-star’ programmers shine only in these countries: brilliant talents are everywhere. Also, there are a couple of nuances you should take into account when hiring a remote specialist for your team. 

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Do you speak English? Sure!

Nowadays, international teams speak English, and it is even more true when it comes to IT staff.English is the second most commonly spoken language in the world, with as many as 527 million native speakers, including bilinguals. Thanks to its simple structure, this language is relatively easy to learn. Those who find English spelling unpredictable and its grammar tough, simply didn’t try learning, say, Mandarin Chinese or Hungarian.English became kind of a lingua franca in multiple spheres. International business, diplomacy, science, not to mention aviation, radio, and seafaring. And, of course, software development is inconceivable without English.It’s therefore not surprising that about 1.5 billion people are learning English all over the globe [5]. There even is a joke that the most frequently spoken language in the world is broken English.Foreign accents and minor errors in speech don’t actually pose a problem unless they hamper understanding. When India, Bangladesh, or Philippino residents speak English, it may sound somehow strange to a European or North American ear. English with Slavic accents is often easier to comprehend, probably because Polish or Ukrainian is phonetically and grammatically closer to English than, say, Chinese. 

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Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening!

Oh, those time zones! Time difference could be a pain in the neck in a team, whose members are scattered all over the globe.The bigger the time-zone difference is, the more problems it causes. It could happen that a developer from Europe won’t be able to communicate with their boss in the USA during standard working hours, due to the eight hours’ gap between them.That’s one of the reasons why businesspeople may prefer nearshoring to offshoring. Being geographically closer mitigates the problem: one hour is by all means better than seven or eight.     

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Developers – The Worse, the Better?

It may sound somehow cynical, but when a developer lives in a country, which is facing economic hardship, it works to your advantage. Although an economic crisis triggers brain drain, the ‘brains’ who stay home, often have to look for another job or additional source of income to make the ends meet.To assess the level of living in different countries, economists often use such parameter as average wages, i.e., the total wages including income tax, divided by the number of employees. However, many argue that it doesn’t actually reflect the state of affairs, due to the large income stratification among the population. Statisticians joke that if someone is nibbling a slice of bread, while the other one is chewing a roast beef, statistically both are eating meat sandwiches.The minimum wage seems to be the better fit for this purpose. It also won’t paint a clear picture of how people live there, but let’s not dig too deep. All we need is to guesstimate what countries whose programmers win the challenges, are poorer than others.

Let’s take a quick look at the list of 202 countries by minimum wage, sorted from highest to lowest. [8]

The ‘richest’, so to speak, is Poland that occupies 29th place, then go Slovakia and Czech Republic – 31st and 32nd respectively. Hungary is listed 39th, Romania – 41st, Bulgaria – 53d, Serbia – 66th, Ukraine – 76th, Russia – 84th, and Moldova is 98th.For you as a prospective employer, it means that remote developers from an economically challenged country are more likely to agree for modest wages, due to lower cost of living. Moldova, SkillValue’s 2022 favorite, and Ukraine, with its #4 place, are two telling examples of such a situation.And what about average salaries of software developers from these countries? According to the data from SalaryExpert, PayScale, and DOU.ua [7], for the last few years Moldavian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hungarian, and Serbian developers have been in great demand. The main reason is that these countries can boast of highly skilled specialists with comparatively low rates. 

Developers with the lowest salaries…

Here is a bottom-5 list of countries whose programmers agree to the lowest salaries:

1. Romania $25,958/year
2. Ukraine $26,400/year
3. Hungary $31,855/year
4. Poland $37,950/year
5. Czech Republic $41,170/year

 

Developer with the highest salaries…

Now, let’s compare them with the top 3 of the countries where developers of same qualification are paid the most:

1. USA ($106.816/year)
2. Switzerland ($95.100/year)
3. Israel ($76.700/year)

 As you see, cheaper doesn’t always mean worse. It’s all about cost of living in different countries. 

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Eastern Europe and Post-Soviet Countries as a Source of Qualified Staff

You must have noticed the former USSR countries mentioned in the lists every so often. Programmers from Russia, Moldova, and Ukraine not just perform well in various spheres, from functional programming to data structures, and everything in between. They also offer their work for compensation considered low in the Western countries. The same is true for almost all Eastern Europe as well.Numerous of qualified specialists are searching for a job there, and their numbers is growing from year to year, as thousands of students graduate from colleges and universities.

The study, covering IT Services and software development market of Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, and Poland, reveals the numbers of both.

The figures speak for themselves, so impressive they are. These four countries can boast of an enormous IT talent pool: as many as 580,000 software developers and technical specialists! By the way, the R&D and IT service market in these countries is growing from 4 to 5 times faster than in the rest of the world. [9]

When it comes to developers from Russia, there is one thing worth mentioning.

Russian programmers have gained a reputation of being highly qualified and creative, but their physical location matters a lot. Moscow, the capital of Russia, stands out compared to other cities. Russians joke that Moscow actually is a separate state rather than Russia. Due to sky-high tenancy costs real and estate prices (which implies oppressive mortgage), Moscow residents simply can’t afford working for a salary that could be ok in other Russian cities and towns. So, their salary expectations will be higher. 

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Ukraine Deserves a Closer Look

• Ukraine can boast of a huge pool of IT talents: different sources quote 172,000 or 200,000 specialists, who graduated from as many as 150 universities and colleges. [9] [11]
• The IT sector in Ukraine has been growing exponentially for the last few years. Stats from IT Ukraine association show that in 2017, 2018, and 2019, the volume of Ukrainian IT exports grew by 25, 28, and 30% respectively. Year 2020, with the pandemic on the rise, slowed down the growth a bit, and it equaled only 20.44%. Nevertheless, 2020 became the year when the total volume of Ukrainian IT service exports exceeded $5 billion for the first time ever. [10]
• As you have already seen, Ukrainian programmers score high in both HackerRank and SkillValue challenges, while their average salaries occupy the bottom positions in comparative lists.

• High qualification, meticulousness, great quality of work, and relatively low average salaries make Ukrainian developers a dream of an R&D staff.

• No wonder that such tech giants as Google, Samsung, Oracle, Huawei, Amazon, and a lot of other renowned companies have R&D centers in Ukraine. [11]
• Every year 16,000 new coders graduate from Ukrainian educational institutions; if the most optimistic prognoses come true, by 2030 the number of tech school graduates will increase up to 37,400 per year.

 

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All in all, at the moment it looks like Ukraine is on its way to becoming a major exporter of IT services and the home of the world´s best programmers.

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Want to learn more about Nearshoring and better understand the differences between offshoring and onshoring, as well as outsourcing?

COME THIS WAY & LEARN MOREhttps://nsf-new/2022/02/14/nearshoring-offshoring-outsourcing/ Links[0.1] https://nsf-new/4 tips on how to hire senior developers[1] https://www2.deloitte .com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/process-and-operations/us-how-much-disruption.pdf[2] https://deloitte. wsj.com/articles/outsourcing-accelerates-taking-on-a-transformational-role-global-survey-1481259734[3] hackerrank – the programming olympics[4] https://www.daxx. com/blog/development-trends/which-country-has-best-web-developers#best-programmers-by-country-in-europe[5] washingtonpost.com – worldviews[6] https://www.pentalog. c om/blog/it-outsourcing/best-developers-in-the-world-pentalog-report-2022[7] https://www.trustshoring. com/blog/average-software-developer-salaries-rates/[8] https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_wage[9] https://software-development-cee-report. com/[10] https://itukraine. org.ua/en/ukrainian-it-exports-exceed-$5-billion-in-a-year-for-the-first-time.html[11] https://alcor-bpo. c om/your-own-rd-office-news/ukrainian-it-industry-market-overview-for-2022/