‘IT capital lacks problem-solving skills’

BENGALURU: It is a myth that India produces the best software professionals and programmers, says Anup Kalbalia, BU Head, CodeChef. “The results at the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), which is considered to be the Olympiad of programming at the collegiate level, shows India’s rank between 50 and 60. It was only once since the contest started 40 years ago that India came in the top 20. In 2012, teams from Hyderabad and Delhi secured rank 18,” he said, adding that the years after that, the performance of India dipped again.

He says the reason is the education system in the country. Most IITs and engineering colleges in India focus on offering more programming languages than problem solving skills, he says. “Students learn programming only when they join colleges. They should be prepared from school,” said Kalbalia. Hence, Kalbalia co-founded CodeChef, a non-profit organisation of Directi, in 2009. “We started organising programming contests online every month.

It started as a small experiment to motivate Indian programmers but today, we have over one million users from across the world. Most participants are from India and we have held over 8,000 competitions in the last 10 years,” he said.

CodeChef also started an initiative Go for Gold in 2010 to motivate Indians to do better at the ICPC. If a programmer gets a better rank than his last rank or crosses the rank of the other programmer, he receives a cash prize of `5 lakh, a job offer at Directi and other benefits. Kalbalia observed that teams from Russia, Korea and Eastern Europe were doing well at the ICPC. “We learned that they start preparing at the school itself. We also launched programmes at schools to improve their performances. Many students in India aren’t aware of the International Olympiad in Informatics, an annual competitive programming competition for secondary school students. The contest is being held since 30 years,” he said.

CodeChef is organising SnackDown for the first time in Bengaluru today. The fifth edition of the event will see the participation of 25 teams from across the globe, including the MIT, Stanford and Google. The teams of two have to solve maximum number of problems in any of the 52 programming languages recognised by the platform in minimum time.

The event is being held at Zeta office, Domlur.