From Top Coders to Top IT Professionals

This paper presents the history of successes of young Poles in the field of computer science (particularly, in programming) in the past 15 years and indicates the grounds for their outstanding achievements. We will also discuss conditions which should be fulfilled in order for successes of young computer scientists to evolve into achievements in their professional life, corresponding to their abilities and ambition. It seems that Polish experiences are universal enough to be adopted also by some other countries and could be helpful in the process of selecting gifted IT students and in work with them.