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 today many of them work in top IT companies worldwide, 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:

Precisely the same conclusions one can find in “Where to find the best developers in 2019?” compiled by SkillValue from the Pentalog group (download the report here), which ranks Poland 3rd in the world in terms of developer skills.

Successes in IT Contests

Why do Poles occupy such high places in this type of rankings? 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 from HackerRank, many of today’s adult developers started programming very early on. Almost 8% of them did so between the ages of 5 and 10, which gave Poland the 4th position among the 17 countries surveyed. Likewise, Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020 shows that Poles write their first line of code at 14.2 on average, which is the second-best result in the world. In consequence, Poles can boast many successes, such as 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.

What is also very important is that young people in Poland can study IT at outstanding universities. The International Collegiate Programming Contests (ICPC) results, organized for many years now, show the excellent quality of instruction in this case. In the 21st century, in the world finals of this contest, Polish teams won six times gold medals, nine times silver and seven times bronze! In 2019, two Polish universities were among the top six 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 2021, the University of Wrocław won the silver medal in this championship. The University of Warsaw has continuously qualified for the finals since participating in the ICPC. No other team has succeeded.

Broad knowledge

Programming languages

By creating their IT teams in Poland, international companies can employ some of the best specialists with top competence. Importantly, while Poland is famous worldwide mainly for the skills of Java software engineers, there is no problem with finding specialists who speak other 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% and C – 16%. Python, with 95% popularity, 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%) and Jupyter notebooks (48%). Among cloud platforms, Amazon’s AWS leads the way (50%), ahead of Google platform (30%) and Azure (22%). Among pre-packaged AI tools, the most popular are Google AI (21%), Microsoft Azure ML (13%), and Amazon SageMaker (10%).

Agile methodologies

At the same time, Polish IT professionals are known and appreciated for their passion for agile methodologies, which are an industry standard. 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 proposed by agile-scrum.com).

Foreign languages

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” (see the full report here). 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, which 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 https://doITinPoland.com and is published with the authors’ consent