This August, Wincent supported the International Olympiad in Informatics in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

IOI is one of the biggest competitions for high school programmers. Contestants spend two days working through hard algorithmic problems, where a good idea is only the start. You still have to make it efficient, implement it correctly, and do all of that under time pressure.

A week around people who like hard problems

We spent the week meeting contestants, talking about programming, and hearing how they approached the competition.

We also ran the Wincent Challenge alongside the main event. It gave participants something to try between competition sessions, and gave us another reason to talk about problem-solving beyond the official tasks. Our booth became the place for those conversations. Some were about algorithms, some were about university, internships, and what working in tech looks like after competitions like IOI.

More than getting the right answer

Competitive programming can look narrow from the outside: read the task, write the code, get the result.

In practice there is more to it. You need to understand what the problem is really asking, spot the constraints that matter, choose between several possible approaches, and recognize when your first idea is going nowhere. That way of thinking is familiar to us. A lot of engineering at Wincent starts with a problem that does not come with instructions, so you break it down, test your assumptions, and build something that works reliably, not just once.

It is also what our internship is built around. Interns work on real problems alongside experienced engineers, and we care less about what you already know than about how you think through something unfamiliar. That is one of the reasons we enjoy supporting events like IOI.

A big thanks to the organizers and volunteers who put IOI 2026 together, and to the contestants and everyone we met in Tashkent. If you like problems that don’t come with instructions, our internship might be worth a look.