3 Reasons Why Competitive Programming is more Inclusive and more Fair than the Olympics
By: Harbour.Space University
Tags: Programming, Codingbootcamp, Oman, Olympics, Competition

16/03/19

Muscat, Oman

Whereas the world is holding their breath during Olympic Games, there is a lesser known international competition running in the Olympics’ shadow — the World Finals of ICPC, the International Collegiate Programming Contest, a world renown coding competition for young programmers from universities under the age of 23. These people are the next generation of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerbergs, with the potential to create and harness the technology that will lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

One of the notable qualities of the ICPC is that, although it is just as demanding, as a competition it is much more fair and inclusive for women and minorities than Olympics.

Here are the three reasons why:

1. There is no gender in competitive programming

The same Olympic events have shorter distances for women than for men. Tickets for men’s hockey are sold out, and one can see empty seats at women hockey events. There are notable differences in professional sports in mens and womens’ events. Things look much more cheerful for the programming Olympics: there is simply no “women’s” or “men’s” events at ICPC. Each set of problems is made for all the teams, regardless of gender. Mixed teams compete under the same conditions, with the same questions to solve and the same time to solve them.

India’s Manashi Sarkar, an MA student in Computer Science at tech-oriented University Harbour.Space in Barcelona says,

“When it comes to diversity, fields like competitive programming have a very absolute way of judging your performance. If you solve the problem right, you get your score. It is very fair.”

This weekend Harbour.Space organized an international programming bootcamp for 100 students for the ICPC World Finals in Oman. The bootcamp is the first international competitive programming event in Middle East. Oman, as the host country, has brought in the biggest team, nearly 40% of which are women.

Basma Zubair of Pakistan, who is now on her final year of studies in Computer Sciences in Oman, said,

“I think I am good at Computer Programming and I enjoy doing it. Oman still needs to embrace world’s innovations in their country and incorporate it in their economy. There needs to be more women researching and developing softwares and creating new technology.”

2. The United Nations of Computer Nerds

The Olympics are very political. Because of all the media attention, many countries use the event as a demonstration of power and trends in International Relations. This notion is not only inexistant in the world of programming — it the complete opposite.

As the ICPC is relatively unheard of and perhaps not as visually compelling, the media attention is at its very minimum. Therefore, there are no politics involved. Take the Harbour.Space ICPC team: an Israeli, an Iranian, and a Russian competed earlier this year in Paris, while representing a University from Spain, trained by a Cuban coach.

Your background does not matter, it’s all about your programming skills and team work.

3. No Financial or Geographical Barriers

Programming contests and communities have no barriers. It is not like golf or figure skating, when one has to buy expensive equipment and pay a private coach to get their kid started on professional career of an athlete. All one needs is a computer with access to the Internet and an inquisitive, logical mind to get those algorithms cracking.

There are many communities for such minds, Codeforces being the most prominent, with over 600,000 people from all over the world training and competing with each other — free of charge. Users might need to speak basic English to be able to interact with other teams and follow the leaderboard, but the language of competitive programming is hidden in the beauty of formulas, algorithms and codes.

International Programming Bootcamps, regionals and finals have long been famous as a huge career fair. Top companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, have hired finalists of ICPC. It works just like scouting in soccer: they sponsor international boot camps or competitions to get exposure to the top programmers in their region, watch them compete and win. Many of the winners have their jobs lined up at the end. In order to have access to top CVs, many companies are willing to pay for those who can’t afford to travel to trainings or competitions.

“Each programming bootcamp that we organized attracted tech-oriented sponsors who are hungry for young talents. Last year we had Japan’s Indeed who came to Barcelona to meet participants personally and this year in Oman, it is all possible thanks to our General Partner, Sberbank, the biggest bank in Russia ”

says Svetlana Velikanova, Harbour.Space CEO.

Competitive programming might be lacking some Olympic-level drama, but its impact on the world is as big as that of Olympics. Maybe even bigger, but the world is yet to realize it.