According to Forbes magazine, Poland is rich in IT skills, tech innovation and talent. Harvard Business Review ranks Poland 5th among the most tech-skilled labour markets globally.

However, zooming in on IT, we need to make an even bolder statement. Poland has some of the best specialists in this field in the world. It is confirmed that many of them work in top IT companies worldwide today. But also by the results of independent studies conducted by well-known companies and organizations.

According to HackerRank, Polish programmers would stand on the podium if software development Olympic Games were to be held:

These are precisely the same conclusions as in “Where to find the best developers in 2019?” SkillValue from the Pentalog group ranks Poland 3rd in the world regarding developer skills.

Successes in IT Contests

International Olympiads in Informatics

Why do Poles occupy such high places in this type of ranking? The answer is simple: Poles have loved developing software since the early days of the IT industry! That is why, as shown in the Developer Skills Report 2018 from HackerRank, many of today’s adult developers started programming very early on. Almost 8% did so between the ages of 5 and 10. It gives Poland the 4th position among the 17 countries surveyed. Likewise, the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020 shows that Poles write their first line of code at 14.2 on average. It is the second-best result in the world. In consequence, Poles can boast many successes. There are those in the International Olympiads in Informatics (IOI) for secondary school students. Only two countries have two representatives among the top 10 contestants in the IOI Hall of Fame, and one of those countries is Poland.

ICPC

Young people in Poland can study IT at outstanding universities. The results of the International Collegiate Programming Contests (ICPC) show the excellent quality of instruction in this case. In the 21st century, Polish teams won 6 gold medals, 9 silver and 7 bronze! In 2019, two Polish universities were among the top 6 globally: the University of Warsaw and the University of Wrocław. The University of Warsaw won the title of European Champions in the same year. After the pandemic, in the ICPC 2021 finals, the University of Wrocław won the silver medal in this championship. Read more about the successes of the Polish students in the ICPC 2022. The University of Warsaw has continuously qualified for the finals since participating in the ICPC. No other team has succeeded.

Broad knowledge

IT skills from Poland: programming languages

By creating their IT teams in Poland, international companies can employ some of the best specialists with top competence. Poland is famous worldwide mainly for its Java software engineering skills. But there is no problem with finding specialists who use other programming languages.

As reported in the Bulldogjob report, Polish IT specialists declare the ability to use programming languages accordingly:

• SQL –  58%,
• JavaScript – 54%,
• Java – 45%,
• Python – 32%,
• C# – 32%,
• C++ – 25%,
• Bash/Shell/PowerShell – 24%,
• PHP – 22%,
• TypeScript – 22%,
• C – 16%.

With 95% popularity, Phyton is the most frequently used language by AI specialists in Poland – according to the report “The state of Polish AI in 2021”.

The same source informs that the toolkit of Polish AI developers relies on:

• Docker virtual environment (56%),
• Jupyter notebooks (48%).

Among cloud platforms:

• Amazon’s AWS (50%),
• Google platform (30%),
• Azure (22%).

Among pre-packaged AI tools, the most popular are:

• Google AI (21%),
• Microsoft Azure ML (13%),
• Amazon SageMaker (10%).

IT skills from Poland: agile methodologies

At the same time, Polish IT professionals are known and appreciated for their passion for agile methodologies. For many years, IT employers in Poland have expected candidates to be fluent in Scrum, Agile, Kanban or Lean. Training courses in these methodologies are among the most popular events in the industry. In contrast, Polish Agile conferences are top-rated worldwide. For example, ACE! in Krakow is No. 4 on the list of Top 10 Agile conferences to attend in 2020, as proposed by agile-scrum.com.

Knowledge of foreign languages: English and German

Poles also have other advantages not related directly to IT skills. The majority of Polish IT professionals have an excellent command of English. The indicators in this respect will improve over time, according to “Software Development in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Romania in 2019.” Today, 90% of Polish ICT students speak English, and 30% speak German. Last but not least, Polish IT specialists are highly motivated, well-organized and goal-oriented. It is appreciated by their colleagues from all around the world. Employers across Europe and North America additionally emphasize the absence of significant cultural differences, which dramatically facilitates work communication and allows them to achieve top performance.

The following article is based on materials from our partner’s website do IT in Poland, and is published with the authors’ consent.