Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has announced that the ninth season of TCS CodeVita has won the Guinness World Records title as the world’s largest computer programming competition, with 136,054 participants from 34 countries.
“The 2021 TCS CodeVita competition invited college students from around the world to pit their programming skills against each other. The winners walked away with cash prizes, and internship offers to work directly with technology leaders at TCS. This year’s champion, Ben Alexander Mirtchouk of Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, is the competition’s first-ever US winner,” TCS said in a statement.
“Long before words like hackathon became common, TCS saw the potential of programming as a sport, and that inspired TCS CodeVita,” said Ananth Krishnan, CTO, TCS. “This competition is fuelling a passion for programming in brilliant young people.”
The 1st runner-up was Václav Volhejn, a student at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, and the 2nd runner-up was Ali Khosravi from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
These three received cash prizes of $10,000, $7,000, and $3,000, respectively, and have been offered the opportunity to intern directly with one of the company’s technology leaders. TCS CodeVita was launched in 2012 to spread awareness about the various applications of coding and help spot promising talent.
Since then, hundreds of students have completed internships at TCS via CodeVita. In addition, from season 3 onwards, CodeVita has led to more than 11,000 TCs job offers.