You might imagine that California, where Silicon Valley is located and with the highest concentration of  software developers, would be the state with the United States' top coders. In fact, according to HackerRank, it comes in third place, behind Washington and Wyoming.

HackerRank, which has its offices in Palo Alto, California, runs coding challenges and assigns score to individuals based on a combination of accuracy and speed across several domains - algorithms, data structures, functional programming, math and the languages Java, C++, Python and Ruby.

 We've previously reported on its findings on which countries and which universities have the best developers but now HackerRank has narrowed its focus to the USA where it has data on 450,000 unique developers, to uncover which states are home to the best software talent.

Here's the full league table in which states are ranked by scores across all the domains. 

Washington State being the US state at the top of this table shouldn't come as a surprise given it is the headquarters state for Microsoft and Amazon. In addition the University of Washington has a built a good reputation for computer science. When it comes to top CS universities California has both Stanford and Berkley which are among the top rank along with Carnegie Mellon (Pennsylvania), MIT (Massachusetts) and Princeton (New Jersey) which rank at 17th, 13th and 11th in the above table respectively.

Wyoming is best known for the Yellowstone National Park so finding it in second place comes as bit of an eye opener. But the next table, HackerRank's scores for each of the eight domains is even more so. Wyoming ranks 1st in three of them - algorithms, data structures and Ruby and 2nd for C++. Washington, on the other hand only obtains one 2nd place, algorithms, and a 3rd place, C++ , but it does have another three placings at 5th/6th. California has a total of three - 3rd for algorithms, 4th for Math and 9th for Functional Programming.

So why do developers from Wyoming dominate this table? 

According to HackerRank, The developer population of Wyoming is the smallest after Alaska, which ranked 44th overall and wasn't included in the Top 10 by domain table. Maybe the small number of developers in Wyoming, around 900, makes them more keen to compete on HackerRank and attract attention of potential employers which will enable them to move to California or Washington. 

More Information

HackerRank

The United States of Developers

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