“We won’t go to Facebook and Google”: Why some of the best programmers in the world live and work in Yekaterinburg

An interesting interview with the winners of the World Programming Championship from the Ural Federal University.

I’ve always been interested in understanding why programming competitions are so popular in Russia (more precisely, in the post-Soviet space in general) (probably the term used in this article is better suited: “sports programming”), despite the fact that in the decaying West I’m talking about them for a long time and I didn’t even know, and when I knew, for some reason I didn’t feel drawn to it at all. It's like a completely separate world. For many years I actively participated in various online programming communities, for example, I hung out on the mailing lists of various open source projects, met in real life with people sometimes, but there was never any talk about TopCoder, say. I learned that TopCoder exists from a Russian LiveJournal, in my opinion (and having learned about it, I didn’t immediately and urgently go there and didn’t create an account and didn’t participate). It’s somehow very funny and interesting to understand why.

Part of this popularity is explained by some remarks from this interview, in my opinion:

"Why did UrFU show the best result this time? Did the stars align?"

Mikhail Rubinchik: We have a stellar team. Oleg, Lesha and all the rest are very strong guys. Oleg is now in his sixth year, he started studying in the second, but by the third he already had a decent level.[...]

"Which is closer to you? A startup? Or a big company?"

Oleg Merkuryev: I haven’t worked anywhere at all. And I’m not going to work anywhere in the next six months. I’ll go to graduate school, I need to study a little science, otherwise I generally spent all my time on sports programming.

Those. it really feels like a sport first and foremost. Including some wild restrictions that are typical for sports competitions:

"Let's talk a little about the championship itself. Three people on the team. One computer. Why one? Why not three?"

Mikhail Rubinchik: The jury once decided so. This was thirty years ago.

Oleg Merkuryev: Then, perhaps, there were additional reasons that do not exist now. And then even a computer per team was a lot, but not much per person.

[...]You can use a printer at the World Cup. The first person sat down, wrote some solution, it didn’t work. He needs to find the mistake. Reading from a computer is expensive, but we only have one resource. Therefore, they print it out on a printer and read it on a piece of paper.

Well, I don't understand how it can be so attractive. Programming is a creative activity. There was no program, and now there is one. You couldn't do something with a computer, but now you can. Does it matter if it took 20 minutes or 40? It's just some uninteresting aspect.

No, I can imagine the restrictions that bring sports excitement - but at the level of several days and really difficult, interesting tasks. Like the Ludum Dare competition - write a game in two days. Or The ICFP Programming Contest, they give three days, and the conditions are usually mind-blowing. Compare this with the tasks of the World Cup in sports programming. If you compete for minutes and seconds (also with one computer between three people), then the tasks come out like this - the cunning use of several standard algorithms with some tricky twist.

In general, this is a strange world. Don't blame me, those who are in awe of him. But I didn’t understand and don’t understand.

We are often asked about sports programming. What is the point of the Olympics? How important are they when working on a real project? If they are important, is it too late for an 11th grader to start studying this area? We, of course, referred the questions to the experts.

Participation in Olympiads develops skills to work in stressful situations, and it puts a lot of stress on the brain. In general, during the preparation for the competition, I studied enough large number algorithms and approaches to solving problems. In industrial development, you rarely have to deal with standard algorithms; at least, you almost never need to implement them yourself. But knowing what is under the hood of a particular algorithm sometimes allows you to come up with some non-standard approach to solving a specific industrial problem. In any case, it’s worth taking part in the Olympiads regardless of whether these skills are important or not, it’s just interesting :)

It's not too late to start studying in 11th grade. A wonderful example is a person with whom we played the ACM ICPC finals last year. He actively started participating in Olympiads in his 2nd (!) year and achieved very good results.

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Much depends on what kind of project. The majority (95%) of projects are related to business process automation, graphics, etc. In such projects, Olympiad skills practically do not play a role.

But there are projects in which it is necessary to solve a complex new problem - and here the experience of participating in Olympiads is useful.

So it all depends on what kind of projects you will have. The vast majority of programmers do not have to deal with such projects.

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The Olympics are part of the world of sports programming. As in any other sport, the point of the Olympics, in my opinion, is to test one’s strength, improve oneself and receive moral satisfaction. I am sure that the experience of the Olympics is useful in work, because constant training makes the brain more flexible and receptive to new tasks.

It’s not too late for an eleventh-grader to start participating in programming competitions. I have many friends who took up sports programming only at university and achieved significant success. I myself took part in the first Olympiad at the end of my first year and I don’t think it was too late. If this had happened in my last year, then I would have regretted it.

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, technology evangelist for Microsoft, associate professor at MIPT, MAI, teacher at the JUNIO-R children's camp

Programming Olympiads allow you to master theoretical knowledge in the field of Computer Science, and they often help you get into a university. However, in practice, not all tasks require the skills acquired at the Olympiads.

There is such a thing as overqualification. If you have too much theoretical knowledge of Computer Science, then you will be bored with solving everyday problems, and you will be able to fully realize your potential only in large companies, such as Yandex, Mail.ru, or the same Microsoft. Therefore, the circle of employers you are interested in will be somewhat narrower, but the tasks being solved will be much more interesting and more global.

To gain real skills in working on projects, competitions like Imagine Cup are better suited. In this competition, you need to have more entrepreneurial talent in order to choose an interesting problem to solve and create a prototype software product and demonstrate it at the competition. In the long term, participation in such competitions is good for developing skills in teamwork and real work on projects, and can also lead you to an entrepreneurial career path and to your own startup.

11th grade is a little late, because there is too much to do to enter a university, and it will be difficult to devote enough time to the Olympiads. But better late than never!

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The Olympics, like any sport, are extremely important for training willpower, focus and other valuable qualities. Sports programming has nothing to do with applied programming, but it allows you to train in a truly competitive environment, which will later be useful anywhere. It's never too late to start.

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An excerpt from ours, Stanislav answers the question “is it true that success at programming (mathematics) competitions negatively correlates with work in a company? Do you have many Olympic athletes on your team?”

The Olympics will not help directly. Just like knowledge of mathematical analysis will not help a person write programs in Java or Python. But Olympiad programming, if you like, is like sports sambo. It does not guarantee success in street fights; moreover, there are many examples when sambo athletes were brutally maimed in street fights, because there are no rules: they can hit with a knife and three of them attack one. But a sambo athlete becomes a fighter much faster by starting to study combat sambo (or other hand-to-hand martial arts) than a person who looks at the monitor screen with popcorn. Therefore, you need to treat it exactly like this: Olympiad programming is good way improve your level. It will be easier for a person who does this to master a new area of ​​computer science or a method of programming. This is a beneficial activity and should not be avoided. If a person works professionally in a company and makes products that are sold widely, it becomes like a hobby. A person who works in a company that produces products for backup, probably within a few years he becomes a world-class professional in this field. And Olympiad programming, if he starts participating in it, is unlikely to help him much to make him stand head and shoulders above his colleagues. But this is a useful hobby that develops the necessary skills.

In general, it’s amazing how people refuse to learn. When I was young, the propaganda was very powerful: you need to study, it’s useful, knowledge is power, ignorance is darkness. I don’t understand why your guys might have such questions. Knowledge is never superfluous. Ultimately, life is structured in such a way that if a person understands something very, very deeply, it is easier for him to see how some completely, seemingly unrelated area works. Everything we do ends up being similar. So, I was under an illusion about builders until I started doing my first renovation. The first and the last. I discovered that the work of construction workers in an apartment is very similar to the work of a team of programmers. And not only that, all the problems that we face are faced by builders in full force. And it's even worse there. Because the average level of a builder is lower than the average level of a programmer, in terms of education and general intelligence. They also make mistakes, they have bugs, there are both good and bad project managers. If it’s bad, they can, figuratively, screw the toilet to the ceiling, and then pretend that it was so. Therefore, there is no need to avoid knowledge. Perhaps this particular knowledge will never be useful to me, but if I understand something, understand why it is this way and not otherwise, it will be useful to me at least in the form of an analogy.

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Everything is very complicated and at the same time simple. Why does sports programming even exist? Not “why bother with it,” but precisely “why does it exist as a phenomenon.” Why is sport needed at all, be it intellectual or physical. Someone will say that for health, development, all that? Yes, there are so many injuries in professional sports that no amount of health is enough. For money? Yes, everyone there becomes millionaires in a year. The true reason is one: the desire to win, to be different from others, to be better, more perfect, more significant. Do something great for your people. Everything else is a consequence. If it were not for this desire, which gives rise to competition as such, everything else would not exist. It's the same here.

What attracts people in the beginning. Some kind of interest, novelty, a kind of “wow” effect. But it passes. For sustainable motivation to emerge, deeper mechanisms are required. Otherwise, if there is anything left, it will only be enough for “for fun” activities.

Therefore, the first and main thing you can do to motivate a beginner is the opportunity to become the best in your field! Not just a coder, like thousands of thousands, but a champion. After all, every person dreams of something big and meaningful. Maybe that boy as a child dreamed of scoring goals in the Champions League, and this girl dreamed of singing songs at Eurovision. He went to a sports school, and she went to a music school, but it didn’t work out. But mathematics always went with a bang, but what’s cool about being a nerd nerd, solving abstruse problems that are interesting to you alone? And to some excellent student who dreamed of becoming an astronaut, his parents, who didn’t care about his dream, drummed into him that an astronaut should at least know by what physical laws rockets fly, so he began to solve physics, all the more so he went with a bang. And now they have all entered the university and somewhere inside the thought is already beginning to ring alarmingly: “So what? Am I really not going to do anything outstanding in this life?” After all, by and large, any graduate programmer can be replaced at work. And here is your chance: to compete for your city, for your university, for the whole of Russia, to win, to reach the semi-finals, finals, to do something that if you don’t do it, then no one else will do it.

When we first started programming, in 11th grade, we were told over and over again how it all began. For the first time our teams went to the semi-finals. How did you pass the first task? How they got to the finals for the first time. How we went abroad. How we fought on equal terms with the best minds on the planet! And my heart sank with the desire to become at least a little like them. We looked at the final tables and the names flashed before our eyes: MIT, Harvard, Stanford! Does everyone dream of studying there? But here’s what’s much cooler: tear all the vaunted foreign teams to hell! How Tarasov’s team, in the very first match of the super series, demolished the team of the greatest hockey professionals from Canada 7:3. Here it is, the challenge of our lives! And this is all possible! This is reality! And this is what makes life truly worth living. And maybe someday in our own university the same stories will be told to recruits about us. And everyone will dream of being like us. This is exactly how newcomers look at the Olympics.

You know, we are all accustomed to these phrases: “semi-finalist of the World Championship”, “prizewinner of the North-Eastern European Championship”, etc. This should not surprise us. But for a random person on the street, such achievements are just space! And the newcomers are the people from the street. So why not use it? After all, getting to the semi-finals of the NEERC World Championship for many contestants remains for the rest of their lives the highest peak they have reached, the loudest title they have won. This was no joke now.

You have ten thousand students, and here is the opportunity to become one of those three elite students who will represent the university and the city at the world's main student competition. Each of them is already, as they say, “one of a kind in many thousands”! The elite division of your university.

Yes, then there will be hours of hard work, but who said that becoming a world champion is easy? Working hard will happen by itself when a person knows that he is moving towards a worthy goal. No one will run a marathon or climb Everest without preparation. Everyone understands this. But if you go through this, you will have something for which you can respect yourself. It’s the same here. No less.

But no one goes to the mountains just for the sake of hardships, or to a marathon only to not get out of bed for a week. No one enters the boxing ring for the love of getting hit in the head. There are few masochists. All these people are driven by something else. Just like sports programmers. Namely: goal!

So, if you are a guitar teacher, then you should not tell your students how their fingers will hurt and let them try to immediately take the barre (“yeah, you can’t? It will be difficult!”). But you can tell how cool it is to be the life of the party at a party around the fire and with what eyes the girls will look at you. If you are an SAF instructor pilot, then you shouldn’t immediately talk about how to evaluate, for example, the weather. Try to convey the feeling of flight and romanticism.

It's the same here. If you explain balanced trees and at the end of the lecture you say: “An Olympiad student can write this,” no one will understand you. If you spend five hours competing and analyzing, they will get bored and leave, looking for their childhood dream elsewhere. Some will remain, but without enthusiasm. So, solving problems is still more interesting than solving some crossword puzzles or hanging around on social networks in apps. If you doubt your usefulness, your success, your doubts will be passed on to the recruits. If you yourself are convinced that ICPC is cooler, bigger, more significant than all scientific student conferences and forums combined, that it is possible to win, that it has already worked (or has not worked, but everyone is waiting for it) - they will also believe you. The most important thing is to believe in all this yourself.

Indeed, it is very good when there is competition. It’s even better when the university already has finalists, and there are young and green ones. The youngsters will sleep and see the first contest, where they will finally, at least for five minutes, beat the old guys! For complete beginners, even just being in the monitor above them for a minute is already happiness.

These are the basics of motivation. These are algorithmic problems that no one knows how to solve, when at three in the morning you jump out of bed, turn on the computer to finish the code, finally pass this damn 80th test and get accepted, and then you feel a little like Mendeleev, who had the epiphany in a dream. This is a year of preparation, only five hours for which it was all, and a decisive task submitted at the very last minute. It's an honor to represent your city and country in what you do best. Well, then they will figure it out themselves. It’s unlikely that you need anyone who applied just to get a degree and get a normal job. Everyone else, and, as Mirzayanov wrote, mathematicians and gamers come, if they love the process, if they find echoes of a childhood dream, if they are not afraid of difficulties, if they are ready to play, welcome.

This is already a very old holivar: are sports programmers suitable for harsh applied development, or are they such beautiful white birds, soaring in mathematical-algorithmic clouds and perishing in more mundane conditions? There is a common myth that says that all sports programmers go to Google or, at least, to Yandex, where they work with inspiration on search algorithms and the like. Simple Belarusian outsourcing is not for them. Perhaps, if not an end, then at least a punctuation mark in this battle of opinions can be put by facts. We collected information about all sports programmers in our country and, based on three criteria:

• participated in the ACM ICPC finals;
• spoke on behalf of the Belarusian university;
• has already completed his studies at the university;

made a selection. The result was a list of twenty-one ACM ICPC finalists from Belarus. We were able to contact most of them and ask three simple questions:

1. What is your current place of work and what is the position/essence of the work performed?
2. Why this company/occupation?
3. What are your plans for the future, how do you see it for yourself? Where would you like to go?

Some of them chose a management career, some remained faithful to sports programming, and who actually develops search algorithms, you will find out from “direct speech”Belarusian finalists of ACM ICPC.

Ivan Mikhnevich (ACM ICPC 2000)

1. Wargaming Public Company Limited, Director.
2. This is the result of growth in the group of companies from the very beginning of my working career.
3. In reality, I’m already tired of all this and it’s time to start a new career, in a new place, in a new field (most likely, not IT).

Sergey Stepantsov (ACM ICPC 2000)

1. I currently work as Vice President Business Development at Intetics Co.
2. Most of my career is connected with this company, where I managed to try myself in a variety of roles: I started as a testing specialist, and also worked as a programmer, project manager, and head of a production department. And eventually I came to specialize in business development.
3. I still don’t feel old enough to stop developing myself :). I think that the future of the business part of my life will still delight me with many exciting turns.

Vladimir Tankovich (ACM ICPC 2000, 2003)

1. Currently at Microsoft I am working on Computer Vision algorithms for Kinecta. Before that I was in search relevance.
2. I have been with this company since 2005. They brought me from the Republic of Belarus, and there was no point in moving yet. I joined this team because it allows me to do scientific work, which does not go into a collection of articles, but into a finished product.
3. There are no specific plans for the future. In IT, money is not a problem, both in Minsk and here. So far, I am very interested in understanding Machine Learning and AI. It turns out that I do whatever I want almost all the time, and I also get paid well for it. That is, for the next 1-2 years I will be doing the same thing, and then we’ll see. I’m gaining a lot of experience, and if I have an idea on how to reliably apply it, I’ll try a startup.

Alexey Kirkovsky (ACM ICPC 2002, 2005)

1. NT LLC "LuxSoft", software engineer of the 2nd category.
2. I really wanted to go to the famous Moscow body shop Luxoft, because since childhood I dreamed of automating hatches, but I didn’t notice one letter and ended up in the Belarusian LuxSoft. There, I signed some papers without looking, and now I’m working under a 20-year contract for a fixed salary in Belarusian rubles, which is only enough for gasoline.
3. I plan to meet the standard for the number of lines per minute and become a 1st category software engineer. Then get a CMS in programming, which I will be assigned here if there is not a single lateness to work for the entire duration of the contract.

Alexey Danchenko (ACM ICPC 2002, 2005)

1. NT LLC "LuxSoft" Software engineer. Recently I have been developing a domain-specific programming language for our product.
2. An opportunity to work with friends to implement an interesting idea.
3. Continue to enjoy life.

Evgeniy Gonchar (ACM ICPC 2003)

1. Google Switzerland (Zurich), Senior Software Engineer. I'm working on one of the web search infrastructure projects.
2. Since childhood I loved programming.
3. I would like to progress in playing the electric guitar and go to New Zealand again.

Ivan Metelsky (ACM ICPC 2003, 2004)

1. TopCoder, Inc., Marathon/Algorithm Problem Coordinator. Launch of Marathon and Algorithm Competitions on TopCoder.
2. In a way, it just happened that way. More seriously, good income, relatively interesting work, it’s difficult to find a better alternative.
3. Plans for the future - it doesn’t really matter where, but somewhere in the direction of somewhat less busyness and more freedom of action. Perhaps some kind of business, not necessarily in IT.

Victoria Lebed (ACM ICPC 2004)

1. I was and remain a mathematician. She was the only person on the team who did not touch the computer :) She did all the “side” work. I live and work in Paris. I currently have a temporary position at Paris 7 University - research and teaching. Recently received my PhD.
2. This activity is because it provides a rare opportunity to maintain personal and creative freedom.
3. I try not to make any plans for the future. Again, so as not to limit yourself to anythen within the framework and not expose yourself personally to the burden of expectations, hopes and other things. I'm fineI imagine continuing the journey I have begun in the university and scientific environment, but I am not closing the door for other options.

Maxim Osipov (ACM ICPC 2004)

1. VironIT, director. Business management (mainly not operational, but aimed at changing sales processes, development, quality of work, etc.)
2. VironIT company, because it is my company, I am the owner. This is a class (non-operational management) because figuring out how to grow a business is the most interesting thing for me.
3. Develop your company, switch, among other things, to a product model, start a family and children. I see the future as interesting, difficult, but definitely positive.

Pavel Irzhavsky (ACM ICPC 2007, 2008)

1. Teacher at BSU, mathematician-programmer at Orientsoft, teacher at ShAD, graduate student (formally this is study, but in fact it is closer to work).
2. Each activity has something interesting and useful (besides the fact that they all generate income :)), simple ones that allow me to relax a little, and complex ones that allow me to develop. I think I become generally less effective when I start doing the same thing for, roughly speaking, 8 hours a day, and changing activities daily allows me to be at my peak.
3. There are no significant changes in our plans for the future :)

Vladimir Kerus (ACM ICPC 2007, 2008)

1. EPAM. Leading software engineer of the department mobile development. I am developing applications for Android.
2. I love learning new things, and in my current company I can easily change my profile and find the right people-teachers.
3. I’ve already planted a tree, I’m saving up to build a house, I’m planning to have kids (ideally, my own Barcelona squad).

Sergey Tikhon (ACM ICPC 2009)

1. EPAM Systems, Lead Software Engineer. Architect/special project developer.
2. Friendly, strong team, interesting tasks, good opportunities for professional growth.
3. Work in IT, but on the border with science, work on the implementation of Data Science in real applications and services (machine learning, natural language processing, search technologies, modeling). Propaganda, dissemination and implementation of functional programming (I run a blog on F#).

Alexey Lobanov (ACM ICPC 2010)

1. Yandex company, developer of Yandex.Maps. In parallel with this, I am studying at the graduate school of BSU and working as an assistant at the Department of DMA FPMI (I teach practical classes in the course “Algorithms and Data Structures”).
2. Why Yandex: there are interesting tasks (including complex, knowledge-intensive, algorithmic ones), comfortable working conditions and an excellent team. Why FPMI BSU: I think it is important to pass on my knowledge to the next generations of students.
3. Plans for the future: successfully complete graduate school and try to defend a Ph.D.

Alexey Tolstikov (ACM ICPC 2010)

1. BSU, assistant at the Department of Computational Mathematics, graduated from graduate school, teaching the course« Parallel and distributed computing» (practice). Yandex,curator of academic programs, head of the Minsk branch of the School of Data Analysis (+ teacher there), search developer.
2. I can’t do it in one sentence, but because: “I like it!”
3. Not much to say. I'm moving in all these directions.

Following the results of the regional semi-final of the ACM ICPC World Championship, the results became known All-Russian Olympiad schoolchildren in programming. Within the walls of ITMO University, gold medals were awarded to children from Almaty, Astana and Moscow. The residents of St. Petersburg shared the “silver” with their colleagues from Tbilisi, and the “bronze” went to the guys from Yekaterinburg, Izhevsk, Kremenchug and Vitebsk. Coaches of St. Petersburg teams Andrey Lopatin and Andrey Stankevich, tutor of the department computer technology ITMO University Lidiya Perovskaya, Dean of the Faculty information technology and programming Vladimir Parfenov and world champions in programming from different years told why guys from the CIS have been breaking all records for the last 15 years.

ACM ICPC winners from ITMO University

It's time to root for programmers

“Programming is the future: every home has huge amount programmable devices, and these technologies continue to permeate every area of ​​our lives. Just like engineers in the Soviet Union, programmers are now at the cutting edge of science and technology. Coding competitions are becoming an increasingly popular and spectacular sport, and the future is very promising."- emphasizes Andrey Stankevich.

Lydia Perovskaya, As an experienced organizer of Olympiads at various levels, I agree with my colleague. According to her, programming competitions have a more complex structure than traditional competitions. In the finals, teams of three most often compete, and the teams themselves can number more than a hundred. As a tutor from the Department of Computer Technology is sure, there is a place for fans in sports programming: a person who understands programming can root for a team that is closer to him in terms of university, level of knowledge or strategy/brightness of performance.

As the coach of the St. Petersburg State University team notes: Andrey Lopatin, programming competitions are not only spectacular, but also truly useful. According to his observations, modern champions easily solve problems that seemed unsolvable just 10 years ago. The efficiency and speed of teams work increases, and the code is simplified, which makes it possible to spend less time on developing and debugging programs. And this is already beneficial for large IT companies, for which it is important to reduce the cost of production processes.

“It is important that the guys can not only kick the ball well into the goal, but are at the forefront of technology, and every self-respecting large company holds its own major programming championship in order to subsequently find the best specialists. After all, championship finalists are people who think quickly and find optimal solutions. After all, in life we ​​need not even so much ideal solutions, how many are optimal. Therefore, even those who did not receive prizes, but simply participated in one of the finals of major competitions, are very cool, and companies are literally fighting for them.”“, the coach summed up.

Victory from start to finish

As he notes Andrey Stankevich, sports programming is developing in waves. There are many strategies for developing teams, but sometimes the result is influenced by a key player. For example, largely thanks to a talented ITMO University student Gennady Korotkevich The university team twice became the absolute world champion of the ACM ICPC. However, laurels also go to those who adhere to a long-term strategy, when one team hones its skills for many years and in the end deservedly breaks through to the top - this is how the St. Petersburg State University team became the absolute champion of ACM ICPC-2016. Therefore, it is not surprising when one of the teams or one of the players gives way to others at the top: this means that someone got ahead thanks to long and hard work.

Generally speaking, the guys' preparation consists of training competitions, when participants solve problems from previous years' tournaments, as well as theory - lectures, problem analysis and other sometimes routine things. As Gennady Korotkevich adds, training camps also play a significant role in the development of programmers with a university education, when teams from different cities of the post-Soviet space can unite and help each other improve.

“In this sport, communication between people plays a very important role. Teams from the CIS countries are successful because different universities come together, practically under one roof, communicate and do what they love together. The training camps really develop you, they give you a chance to prove yourself, to look at the task in a new way.”“, the champion is sure.

As Alexey Maleev, director of the Center for the Development of IT Education at the Moscow Physics and Technology Institute, emphasizes, those who want to prove themselves in sports programming need to realize that 4-5 years of real plowing await them. And at the same time, no one can guarantee that in five years you will be at least among the top ten ACM ICPC. But this hard work, coupled with the cooperation of universities, allows graduates from Russia and the CIS countries to enter the global education market with a real trump card. And that is why the Russian school of programmers is in demand all over the world, the MIPT representative is sure.

The ACM ICPC champion also agrees that sports programming benefits universities Niyaz Nigmatullin. According to an experienced participant in international competitions, by how a university team performs in championships, you can quickly understand what their alma mater can teach you. At the same time, you need to understand that sports programming is not at all something that hundreds of students do, because only a few choose and go through the path of a sports programmer, notes Niyaz.

Economic question

“Now the issue of the relevance of sports programming has moved into a purely economic aspect. The thing is that we are at a certain critical point, when there is not long left until a new round of information technology development. This is the world we will all soon find ourselves in: completely changed banking system, medicine, driverless cars will appear, not to mention the fact that many professions will simply disappear - people will lose their jobs. But programmers will have really a lot of it. And we see this now: the demand for them is such that the salaries of physicists and mathematicians, even in the USA, are two times lower than those of programmers. And those countries that now have highly qualified personnel in the fieldIT will make a breakthrough in the next 10-20 years", - Vladimir Parfenov is sure.

This is why the Olympics are needed. To identify the best of the best, talent and those who simply love programming and need support, Vladimir Parfenov is sure. In addition, talented children - those very future assets - are eager to compete and prove themselves from an early age. There are 3 thousand out of 140 million of these guys who will soon change the world in Russia alone, and the most important thing is to see those who can keep them company. After all, the rest of the world does not stand still, adds the dean of the Faculty of Information Technology and Programming - over the past 15 years, China has already made a colossal leap, and the United States remains on top due to its developed infrastructure.

“Our modern programmer starts working immediately in the fourth year, unless he goes into science, where, alas, the salary is still lower. At the same time, he receives a lot of offers from employers. Of course, if we are talking about St. Petersburg, our 400-500 IT companies are trying to create something new, and they are worth going to. It's not uncommon for those who start working for large companies like Google to return home, sometimes with complaints. After all, it’s one thing when you’re sitting in the beautiful city of St. Petersburg, and quite another when you’re in a village called Silicon Valley...”, - the teacher laughs.

Doping

Despite the endless questions about doping, young champions still note that in sports programming the main thing is that the head works well. For example, 2016 world champion Stanislav Ershov admits that he likes to get a good night’s sleep on competition days and also eat sweets. At the same time, the young man notes that he does not dream of increased media attention and fame - like people of science, he prefers to stay away from the hype. Gennady Korotkevich, a prize-winner of many competitions, doesn’t really believe in doping either, and he’s one of the few people in the world who can make a living from sports programming. According to Gennady, it would be great if someday there were professional recommendations for programmer athletes - on regimen or nutrition. In general, young people do not deny that in the future there may be a real doping for brain activity that is more serious than chocolate, but they do not need it.