Computer science in USA?
Posted by Powerful_Feeling1211@reddit | AskAnAmerican | View on Reddit | 58 comments
I was always and I'm still astonished and surprised, how American society and engineers, built the computers and all infrastructure HW and SW.
I know they have very good universities and they push innovation but I'm still curious to understand the real mindset of this big engineers and entrepreneurs
can someone explain the raison behind.
any tricks of or hints of this mindset
hobokobo1028@reddit
We had money and nothing to rebuild post WWII and most of the developed world had debt and destruction.
Curmudgy@reddit
My high school had a computer programming course on a machine that used paper tape. In 1970. And it was a public high school in NYC.
To give an idea of how early this was, my college didn’t even have a full computer science degree at that time. It was a Math and Computer Science degree. There wasn’t enough in the way of computer courses to justify a standalone degree.
Basicly-Inevitable@reddit
Ask AI.
ZimaGotchi@reddit
Lol - underrated answer. The same basic mechanisms paying for all the data centers and energy to run them to give the US powerful AI were the ones that paid for the Internet to be build forty years ago.
Basicly-Inevitable@reddit
And yet, downvotes.
ZimaGotchi@reddit
They've just been conditioned. "AI? Downvote" Never underestimate how simple mass psychology is. I'm curious about how AI is going to rebrand itself in the near future.
kayakkkkk@reddit
It’s part of the American culture of innovation and invention. It’s the idea that if you can invent something new and in demand you can become rich and successful. It’s related to the idea of American freedom: anyone is free to create, to invent and to try to maje it happen. Engineers have the tools and education to live this dream.
FunImprovement166@reddit
I mean there aren't any real tricks. American universities draw the best and brightest from all over the world to teach the best and brightest. Salaries and benefits for these positions are quite high and are the incentives to draw the type of people they do. There's no shortcut or mental rabbit in the hat for engineers of that caliber. Just extreme competence
FunkyPete@reddit
Exactly. Many of these engineers weren't Americans (or became American by choice).
America just had the money to poor into the projects and pay the best in the world to come here and innovate.
vintage2019@reddit
You're correct about today, but Americans did start Silicon Valley. It took off with Americans.
FunkyPete@reddit
I mean, to some degree, yes. But our universities have been recruiting the best and the brightest for decades before silicon valley started. We've also been recruiting university professors from all over the world since at least WWII.
The term "brain drain" was actually coined to describe the flight of brilliant people from Europe to the US after WWII, and it never stopped.
lalachef@reddit
This was the exact raisin I was going to state. My godfather was the engineer that planned and helped setup and implemented the internet for my state.
He was from India. USA just had the best situation post WW2 and gained the most from the global economy. That's why now we can point around the world to modern metropolis' in other countries and wonder how they innovated. They incentivesed their best and brightest to stay or they imported them.
FunImprovement166@reddit
Yeah people go where the money is, whether it's engineering or medicine or whatever. The USA is where the money is so it becomes kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.
DGlen@reddit
Used to draw the best. We are actively trying to put a stop to that lately.
ucsdFalcon@reddit
I'll add to this that workers in the States as a rule don't enjoy labor protections, and are used to working longer hours and not having as much time off as many other developed economies. This makes hiring Americans attractive despite the fact that US salaries are much higher than in other countries.
FunImprovement166@reddit
I think that's definitely true for American workers as a whole but when you get into skilled, high paying professions you have way more leverage to negotiate your benefits including pto. Doctors in the USA have as much time off as doctors anywhere else so I imagine it's the same with high level engineers.
SteveS117@reddit
My first engineering job out of college was 3 weeks PTO and an additional 3-4 weeks of holidays including the entire week off from Christmas to new years.
UglyInThMorning@reddit
I work in aerospace and salaried employees like engineers start with 3 weeks vacation, a week of personal time, 12 holidays (including that Christmas to new years week), and a sick time allotment that starts at like 2-3 weeks and rapidly grows (I’ve been there four years and now it’s like 7 weeks a year? It doesn’t accrue, it just resets)
Reddit likes to act like Americans don’t get time off but for a lot of jobs that’s not the case.
SteveS117@reddit
They incorrectly look at what’s guaranteed by the government and use that to claim Americans don’t get PTO because there’s no guaranteed PTO. It’s similar to the strategy of quoting the federal minimum wage when talking about wages. It’s dishonest.
FunImprovement166@reddit
Yeah and for a lot of skilled jobs it only goes up from there.
If you're a fast food worker in the USA yeah good luck, you take the shit you're shoveled. But when you get into highly skilled work the leverage your skill set gives you flips the script with employers. If a specialist surgeon wants more vacation than anyone in Europe gets, he'll find a hospital that will give it to him.
SabresBills69@reddit
university faculty have much more flexibility that the admin personel. University faculty have this thing called tenure.
its very hard to lose tenure. Being in administrative jobs like deannorbprovodt and get fired, you don’t lose university tenure.
SteveS117@reddit
This is not really true for skilled workers like engineers. Every engineering job I’ve had (except one job that was at the plant level instead of corporate) has had great work life balance. Every single one had decent vacation and paid holidays that equally 6-7 weeks of PTO. This isn’t guaranteed by the government so it may not be the case for unskilled work.
Attila226@reddit
I can say that the engineerings that got ahead in my experience were curious, and constantly wanted to learn and get better. They were motivated to master their craft because they genuinely cared about what they were doing.
_edd@reddit
I'll add in that the barrier of entry has generally been very low for software. Computers are relatively cheap. Regulations are relatively lax. You can legitimately create a software product as a one man team.
And then culturally, the advent of smart phones, social media and ecommerce all combined to make the idea of creating an app culturally exciting. It still is the case, but the enthusiasm has lessened now that these markets are much more saturated and the people who were the exciting success stories at the time have pretty well transitioned either into cultural villains (think Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk) or generically corporate (reddit).
Free-Sherbet2206@reddit
I am confused. How else are you supposed learn how to build a computer if you don’t do it?
MonsieurRuffles@reddit
That’s not entirely accurate. For example, an Englishman invented the World Wide Web, HTML, the URL system, and HTTP in Switzerland.
jessek@reddit
MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UT, Georgia Tech, etc are some of the top schools in the world for the subject and there’s a lot of government/military funding. That’s how.
Nanakatl@reddit
A lot of the early R&D for computers and the internet was funded by the US government as military technology due to the cold war and America simply being a world power.
DelcoUnited@reddit
Came to say this.
“Computers” wasn’t some random garage invention like Apple. That was the seventies, the 40s and 50s was massive government investment directly or investment into universities where the R&D was. The in the sixties it seemed more corporate, but the government still had a strong hand in all of it.
I worked for Computer Sciences Corporation who still has a huge DoD contracts. You’d be amazed to see who “owns”/“leases” the range of IP addresses around the world.
PerformanceDouble924@reddit
The real mindset is that in America there's no significant penalty for failure.
In other countries, owning a business that goes bankrupt is viewed almost as a moral stain, and it can have a lasting negative effect on one's reputation.
In America, a business bankruptcy is viewed almost as a right of passage, and you just shrug it off and keep going.
On top of that, we have architecture in place to make entrepreneurship much easier. We have all kinds of accelerators and seed funders that will provide guidance and funding.
Then add the fact that America has been a haven for risk seeking individuals since before 1776, and you've got a recipe for entrepreneurs.
icyDinosaur@reddit
Also you have a functional capital market. The EU doesn't have those cultural aspects but should be able to make up by its larger population, and potentially also with more accessible education (although I am not sure how that plays out in practice), but our capital market is very poorly integrated.
LifeConsideration981@reddit
America has the least amount of red tape and plenty of capital, as well as a culture that emphasizes the importance of work. Not many other countries gave a mix of all three.
vinyl1earthlink@reddit
Read the biography of Bill Gates. What 19-year-old in any other country would drop out of the most prestigious university in the world, drive 2000 miles to New Mexico, and start a software company with four or five other guys? Incredibly bold, completely ruthless, and willing to stake everything on an idea.
TheOwlMarble@reddit
Engineers are well paid here, and the tax burden here is lower.
On top of that, American education tends to emphasize critical thinking over the rote memorization that you'll find in other places, particularly Asia.
Playful_Letter_2632@reddit
Average salary for engineers and other related professions is quite high compared to other countries
SteveS117@reddit
American companies pay way more than virtually every other country for all kinds of engineers, so many of the best engineers want to be here. I’m a mechanical engineer and my first job had a salary that was more than an engineer of 10-20 years would be getting anywhere Western Europe.
Adept_Carpet@reddit
A few things were important.
We established a lot of universities spread them out over enormous distances. Not a lot of countries have so many large laboratories in little farming towns in the middle of nowhere.
This turned out to be a pretty good idea, and is one little reward that we reaped for the overall bad idea of creating the Senate where every state has equal representation.This spread caused us to take an early interest in data sharing and communications technology. If we ran things like France or Italy, there probably wouldn't be a major research university in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois (where the first graphical web browser, MOSAIC, was developed).
But the bigger story is twofold.
The first part is money. After WW2 we had an enormous advantage having tons of industry that was not destroyed and a set of reasonably wise leaders who invested heavily in research and development. R&D was up to 11% of the entire federal budget in the mid-1960s. That is down to 3-4% today, as part of our campaign to kill our own golden goose.
The second part is people, and specifically immigration. We were lucky that a number of very talented scientists chose to flee Nazi persecution and landed here despite our best efforts to keep refugees out. Likewise we got a ton of talented people fleeing the USSR and the Cultural Revolution in China. Of course we are currently working very hard to make sure this doesn't continue either.
Slight_Manufacturer6@reddit
I think it is more about the capitalist environment that incentivizes businesses to invest and grow faster than it is about the intelligence of the people that live here.
Other countries could have done the same thing if they had the drive and motivation.
Many of us love working also.
ComprehensiveStay755@reddit
also worth mentioning a lot of the talent isn’t originally from the US. it’s more like the US is really good at attracting and keeping skilled engineers
UpbeatPhilosophySJ@reddit
It's the economic system. It funds innovation. A ton of stuff doesn't make it, but venture capitalists fund stuff that goes bananas.
In other countries the governments try to figure out what's going to be big and fund that, and they fund nothing else and it's usually wrong.
Slytherin23@reddit
It's easy to start businesses in America. Places like Europe if you hire someone you can't ever fire them so it creates all sorts of problems for small companies.
TheCrowScare@reddit
There are a lot of factors, and I'm not sure how much weight to give any nor how accurate any of this is.
I would say that following World War II, two superpowers emerged. The United States and the Soviet Union. I could be entirely wrong about this, but I feel like there was a brain drain as scientists in the appropriate sphere of influence went to the superpowers as they were leaving the world and their spheres economically and educationally. Obviously this is not a 100% explanation, as other countries still had very skilled scientists and programs. And the capitalist world you still had prominent institutions in Great Britain for example, or in China for the communist world.
They're actually was a very very heavy push in the United States following World War II to channel a significant amount of money towards scientific research and education. V. Bush who I believe was some politician perhaps in the '40s, actually having instructed by Roosevelt to catalog the scientific achievements from the war and how to sustain that research enterprise. Truman ultimately rejects the proposal at large but there was a definite desire to continue that scientific legacy left behind.
As for why computer science and the United States are so intrically linked, I cannot say. I think as mostly just an attribution to the wealth of the country and the 20th century, it's prominence in the world as a superpower, and specifically that because it was a capitalist country the market would determine what enterprises would grow.
On that last point, I'm again talking about this in comparison to the Soviet Union. Under the Soviet Union's command style economy, the government itself dictated what opportunities and industries they would invest state money into. This is why the Soviets were able to industrialize so quickly between 1928 and the start of war II. During that time they focused heavily on heavy industry to protect against the foreseeable war.
That Soviet plan ultimately reached a point of stagnation in the late '60s early '70s, as it focused so much on the extrinsic growth, building up its labor force and new factories etc, that it failed to properly grow intrinsically by bolstering productivity. So while the Soviet sciences were in ways beyond America, specifically in regards to the space race and competitive for the arms race, the Soviets failed to adapt for other scientific industries. Also various levels of corruption, the one party state, just a smattering of different things made it so that the only superpower that was competitive for computer science was likely the United States.
Again I know nothing about the history of the computer science, been applying the logic of other American and Soviet industrialization, I think that's why you would see America become that center
Endy0816@reddit
Had the government/business need, resources and talent.
longganisafriedrice@reddit
Wut
ElectronicCorner574@reddit
Just explain the raisins bro
unknowingbiped@reddit
They are not tight grapes.
redvinebitty@reddit
You need to look further back to the post civil war industrialization and read Battle Cry for Freedom. It gets into how far education was advancing the innovative drive of the US. WW2 n post WW2 has been a continuation of that, especially with respect to scale
lil_jakers@reddit
The British built the first computers, but since the 1950s the US has dominated the scene.
theEWDSDS@reddit
America is the richest country in the world, and was even richer (comparatively) when computer technology was being developed
We had also invested a lot into higher education following WW2, so that helped
kabekew@reddit
If your mindset is that you would like to make a lot of money, then you'll naturally think of ways to do it. One of the easiest ways is to come up with innovative technology solutions to solve problems, because people and especially businesses will pay sometimes a lot of money for that.
Micosilver@reddit
A lot of LSD and shrooms
AfterAllBeesYears@reddit
The government knew that computers were the future, and they would be important for global power/the military, so they funded grants for universities and businesses.
xSparkShark@reddit
Not really sure what the question is. Are you trying to break into big tech in the US? There is a wealth of stuff you can read about it, but there’s no easy path. Work extremely hard, build great relationships with people who have capital. Go from there.
RsonW@reddit
Business-friendly government regulations plus military investment (ARPANET was a military project which the military gave grants to the University of Utah, University of California Santa Barbara, and UCLA to develop), and a culture that doesn't mock failure.
Apprehensive-Log3638@reddit
We financially reward engineers.
One thing I like to do is go onto social media when I am outside the US. I get a pulse for the society and culture of the country I am in. While in Japan I saw a Senior C++ SWE making $60k/year asking if they were being paid fair. I was shocked when the comments indicated the pay was around market rate. It then made immediate sense to me why Japanese software looks like it is right out of the year 2000. When you financially incentivize things, people respond.
o93mink@reddit
What’s to understand? We’ve pretty much invented everything since World War II. Other countries should be asking why they gave up on innovating.
holymacaroley@reddit
Yikes.
AdamOnFirst@reddit
Some of it was built directly by universities - we had a Second World War to win and more military research to do - but much of it was built by people who didn’t even have degrees who were taking risks and working out of their garages as entrepreneurs. Our entrepreneurial, risk-taking and success-rewarding spirit is the secret sauce.