Strong IT Skills of Polish Developers

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Strong IT Skills of Polish Developers

Area:   IT, Human Resources

Relation to: Product Quality, Innovation

Importance:   Very High

Impact on revenues:   Very High

Impact on costs:   High

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Quality of IT Professionals in Poland

Forbes claims that Poland is rich in tech innovation and tech talent, Harvard Business Review ranks Poland 5th among the most tech-skilled labor markets in the world while Coursera Global Skills Report (available to download here) shows Poland as one of the world's leaders, especially in the area of technology. However, focusing specifically on IT, we need to make an even bolder statement: Poland has some of the best specialists in this field in the world. This is confirmed by the fact that today many of polish developers work in top IT companies around the world, but also by the results of independent studies conducted by well-known companies and organizations.

Poland at the top of the Global Rankings

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

HackerRank Best Developers by Country

Source: HackerRank

Exactly the same conclusions can be found 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. In the Pentalog's latest ranking of the world's best developers, Poland stands out as one of the few countries that has consistently maintained its position in the Top 10. While the landscape has changed significantly since the 2019 report, with countries like Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, and even tech powerhouses like Germany and Switzerland no longer making the cut, Poland has proven its enduring excellence.

SkillValue Developers by Country

Source: SkillValue

Why Polish Developers Are the Best in the World? 

Why is there so much consistency across different studies? The answer is simple: Poles have simply 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 the age of 14.2 on average, which is the second-best result in the world. In consequence, Poles can boast many successes, such as the ones in the International Olympiads in Informatics (IOI) for secondary school students. Second most titled participant in the IOI, with an impressive 131 medals (just after China’s 142 medals) is, you guessed it – Poland. Additionally, in the 2024 IOI, Poland earned a golden and a silver medal, further solidifying its standing on the global stage.

What is also very important, young people in Poland have the opportunity to study IT at very good universities. And it shows. The results of the International Collegiate Programming Contests (ICPC), organized for many years now, demonstrate the excellent quality of instruction in this case. In the 21st century, in World Finals in algorithmic programming contests for college students, Polish teams have won gold medals 6 times, silver medals 10 times, and bronze medals 7 times! In the 2024 World Programming Championship, 2 Polish universities ranked among the Top 40 universities in the world. These were: the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (16th place globally and 2nd in Europe after the University of Zagreb) and the University of Wroclaw. Excellent results Polish teams are also gaining in regional competitions. At the 2024 ICPC European Championship, the University of Warsaw took first place as the only team solving 9 tasks out of 11.

What is also worth maintaining is the fact that a lot of talented Polish Programmers have high positions in international companies. For example, Jakub Pachocki assumed the role of Chief Scientist in May 2024 in OpenAi.  You can read more about this in our news section.

The Most Popular Programming Languages Among Polish Developers

By creating their IT teams in Poland, international companies can employ some of the best specialists with top competence. Importantly, while Poland is world famous mainly for the skills of its Java Software Engineers, there is no problem with finding specialists skilled in other languages; as reported by Bulldogjob, in 2024 the distribution of skills in the most popular programming languages among all people in the industry (not only Software Developers) was as follows: SQL: 42%, JavaScript: 40%, Python 36%, HTML/CSS 31%, TypeScript 31%, Java 27%, C# 19%, PHP 12%, C++ 7%, and Kotlin 5%.

Python, with 95% popularity, is the most popular language used by AI professionals in Poland according to the State of Polish AI 2021 report. 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%).

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, and training courses in these methodologies are among the most popular events in the industry, whereas Polish Agile conferences are recognized around the world (for example ACE! in Krakow is recognized as one of the best Agile conferences to attend in 2024).

How Well Polish Developers Know English?

Poles also have other advantages, not related directly to IT skills. The majority of Polish IT professionals have a very good command of English, and their English proficiency level will improve over time – according to Software Development in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Romania in 2019, at the end of the last decade, 90% of Polish ICT students spoke English and an additional 30% spoke German. While according to Bulldogjob’s 2021 report, almost 100% of Polish IT professionals speak English and an additional 16% speak German.

The overall level of English proficiency in Poland is high. According to the English Proficienty Index, we rank 11th out of 35 in Europe, 13th out of 111 countries in the world

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 major cultural differences, which greatly facilitates work communication and allows them to achieve top performance.

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