HONOLULU - The University of Waterloo is bringing home gold from an international programming contest held here Saturday, proving that Canada should not just be known for having some of the best hockey players in the world, but also some of the best coders.
The Waterloo, Ont.-based school placed third in the 26th annual ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) International Collegiate Programming Contest world finals, which featured 64 teams from 27 countries trying to beat the clock in a real-time programming showdown.
Shanghai JiaoTong University in China placed first and MIT in Cambridge, Mass. placed second - all three schools earned a gold medal for answering the most problems correctly, but Shanghai did it the fastest.
Student teams of three were given nine problems - equivalent to about a semester's worth of work - and five hours to solve them live in front of an audience using languages such as Pascal, C, C++ and Java.
IBM Corp., which has sponsored the competition since 1997, often uses it as an opportunity to develop and recruit new developer talent, something which may be even more important in today's market than it has been in the past, according to Hershel Harris, director of IBM Canada Ltd.'s Toronto Lab and vice-president of WebSphere server development.
"The key thing that students need to do now that they didn't need to do a couple of years ago, is they actually have to look for a job. And they need to complete a résumé and they actually need to think about what the important characteristics are of their experience and their academic background, and put some thought into what they've done and what they can offer a company," Harris said.
"Whereas two or three years ago, they kind of just had to be there, and they were getting two or three offers. People would go to job fairs and get job offers before they left the fairs. And the student really hadn't put much time and attention into thinking about what it was they were going to offer an employee."
In today's market, Harris said, employees have a much better chance to assess students before hiring them for a job, which may be actually beneficial in the long run, because they may get a better fit.
"It helps in some ways, because people have to think (more) about their careers. I think the challenge is that, today, the match between available jobs and students leaving schools doesn't necessarily cover everybody. So some people are going to look at doing other things, some may go back to school, some may look at different kinds of jobs than the ones they (originally) wanted," he said.
"But the best, the most talented, the ones with good experience and ambition are going to get jobs."
William Poucher, executive director of the ACM contest, said competitions like this one are important because they give the students a chance to build relationships with each other as well as with companies which may want to eventually hire them. This environment of collaboration and competition may also serve to put the students' talent and long term goals in perspective. Finding jobs isn't the only goal the students are encouraged to have - many choose to go to graduate school instead as a result of the experience he said.
"We want to take their goals and just raise them up a notch. Many of these kids were the best in their class - they don't even know what they are capable of (on a larger scale)," he said. "A lot of people don't know what they are capable of until they are on the verge of failure."
Top winners of the competition take home IBM Think Pads, software and scholarships.
IBM Canada Ltd. in Markham, Ont., is at http://www.ibm.ca