&gt; The large companies that converge on these contests in a feeding frenzy of head-hunting would beg to differ on your assessment of how good a proxy such contests are.<p>I&#x27;m yet to see some good code produced by winners of such contests. And large
companies typically struggle to achieve sensible accuracy of assessing hiring
candidates; hard to argue that they suddenly got this sole criterion right.<p>&gt; Poland has a long tradition of brilliant mathematicians, logicians and chess players.<p>Yes, it does. I constantly stumble upon Poles when studying anything related
to modern mathematics.<p>&gt; Just look at all the Polish names in the industry or in open source.<p>...like? I don&#x27;t remember anything of significant size and popularity written
by a Pole. The most prominent thing originating in Poland I can recall is
Nemerle. The only big Polish names I can think of are lcamtuf and Rutkowska.
Not too much of global achievements, I would say.<p>&gt; They tend to get excited at the deep problems with mathematical implications, not so much with the shallow problems (by shallow, I don&#x27;t mean insignificant, or trivial for industry).<p>By now, I&#x27;m still waiting for Poland to <i>produce</i> something significant (or
for something already produced to gain significance).<p>&gt; This is the time for programmers who operate at that nexus between mathematics and programming to shine. You can be sure that the Polish will be at the forefront of this.<p>We&#x27;ll see. I hope you&#x27;re right; I want to take pride of my country&#x27;s
achievements. For now, I just feel offended by talking how good Poland is in
computer science or programming, but mentioning only programming contests.