How to find IT talents? Through a prestigious programming contest

Aquasoft has become, already for the second time, a partner of the largest and oldest international programming contest in the world. It is a unique opportunity for Aquasoft to find talents, i.e. potential employees, among the students of IT branches.

The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is a three-level team competition in programming held under the auspices of ACM, a professional computer organisation. The competition takes place with attendance of a world-wide network of universities which organise regional rounds from which the best teams are selected to the world final. The contest participants are three-member teams, from almost one hundred countries and six continents. The entire tournament is attended by several dozens of thousands of students from all over the world, and its popularity is evidenced, among other factors, also by the fact that the attendance rate has risen seven times for the last ten years.

The Czech and Slovak national round was held at the Czech Technical University in the middle of October. The aim of the competitors was to solve as many tasks as possible in the shortest possible time. The team members together overcome difficult tasks, they try to understand the task specifications which are often rather non-transparent, they create programs for task solutions, and all of this takes place under a stringent supervision of referees. The skills necessary for a team to be successful include excellent logical judgement, strategy, knowledge and psychical resistance. The best results have been achieved this year by the team from Charles University, and this team will take part in the Central Europe round in which the best teams of this region will compete for participation at the ACM ICPC World Final in China.

"The competition is an opportunity for us of how to find young talented people featuring a potential as well as willingness to achieve high performances and presumptions for team work," explains Dagmar Mrkosová, HR Director of Aquasoft. According to her words this holds vice versa as well – to take part in this competition is a good opportunity for the students who want to make themselves visible and increase their chances for their professional career.

One of the former contest participants is also Ing. Stanislav Hostomský, who took part in the competition when he was a student. "The tournament was a unique experience for me of how to test my own skills and how to compare them with those of other students," says Stanislav Hostomský, who has been working with Aquasoft as a Technology Consultant of the Quality and Operation Department for several years.