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Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

> making sure that both the educational institutions and students enrolled at those schools were statistically representative of schools and computer science students throughout the respective nations.

Given the typical CS student body, this basically means Indian, Chinese, and Russian students studying at US universities performed better than those studying at Indian, Chinese, and Russian universities...

Either because US universities teach better or because the best students come to the US for their education.

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The study (which I didn't see linked in the article, so here it is: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116 ) also tried to investigate this question by restricting their analysis to students at US universities whose strongest language is English (89.1% of their sample) or those who claim two strongest languages and didn't find a significant difference to the overall US student population.

That doesn't say a lot about Indian/Chinese/Russian students in the US in particular, but their data is public at https://osf.io/c78wb/ , so maybe it's possible to get that information, depending on how strongly they anonymized it.

English is my strongest language. Indians do almost all their study in english. So thats not a good indicator.

>Given the typical CS student body, this basically means Indian, Chinese, and Russian students studying at US universities performed better than those studying at Indian, Chinese, and Russian universities

Once you get down to the average university, the number of foreigners in undergrad classes drops dramatically - it's just too expensive for most foreigners to pay out of state tuition unless it is a prestigious university.

In my undergrad, most of my engineering classes had only one or two foreign students.

Maybe at the undergraduate level. My grad school experience was exactly the opposite. I was the _only_ U.S. citizen in most of my classes and one of maybe three in the entire CS program.

Grad school is indeed very different, because:

1. People are willing to pay a premium for a MS degree. In many of their home countries, a BS is of low value.

2. Funding is much easier to secure for a grad degree - both from US institutions and institutions in their home country. Probably the majority of foreigners are not paying out of pocket.

The same "average" university that had so few foreigners in undergrad were completely dominated by them in their MS program. And I think there was only 1 US person in the PhD program (granted, it was a small department and they had very few PhD students to begin with).

an MS in CS has limited value in the US, unless you need it for visa purposes.

As an example, in 2013 Amazon was only offering an additional $5k salary IIRC for new grads with an MS.

Do people go to grad school for the money though?

No but most jobs offer the same benefit when it comes to research. You'd get paid more and do more cutting edge ML and data science working for FB or Google than MIT

It's both. A social norm sustains itself because if most of the people I want to be like are doing it (correlation), then I will do it (causation) too, unless I've put a lot of extra thought in and made a conscious decision to do something else.

The social animal's default mode is to follow the herd. "The herd" could have even started out as the Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy (random correlation), but now people are motivated to join in. To assemble. To copy.

I don’t think this says anything about teaching quality in US, to be honest. It says more about wealth. We are a much wealthier country and the smartest and wealthiest of the other countries study here. Teaching quality at many elite universities is notoriously horrible. The quality of outcomes of their students is more related to their selection of the top individuals.

What about culture? Computer programming languages and paradigms have all been developed under western culture; they're written in english with logic that is derived from western philosophy.

Without being fully absorbed in this culture, you will lack the key thing that makes you go "ah ha! I get it!"

Russia is more Western than Eastern country culturally. Historically ~20% of Russia which is oldest, most populated (~80% as per Pareto rule) and influental is the western part of the country, bordering European countries.

Yes, and Russian computer scientists are still good, but obviously the US is more Western than Russia, so perhaps that is why they got beat in the competition?

According to this logic Russia should be more similar to US in results while India and China should be more distant. Do test results show that?

Other than all the reserved words and major libraries being in English, what do you mean?

How does western philosophy or culture impact software design? I'd argue that how software works is influenced by how computers work, which is influence by how physics works, which is culture-agnostic. You can't possibly say "binary is so Western". So, what, exactly is influenced by the culture / philosophy?

It is interesting for sure. Americans -- far more than many other countries that I've lived in -- are incredibly legalistic, which, while perhaps annoying in personal life, is a boon when it comes to programming / computers.

That would be a good explanation if people from other cultures couldn't program worth a damn, but they clearly can.

Yes, they can still program, but not as good as the US (clearly). I didn't say that culture was the defining factor of being able to program or not, just that it could be the factor for what puts the US on top of other countries.

I don't think it's a question of skill. The US has more big tech companies because of its approach to business and regulation (if that's what you mean by culture), not the raw skill of its US-born workers.

I mean, look at the leadership of a lot of these companies. They're foreign-born, typically from Asia.

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