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Comment by rockemsockem | Hacker News Reader

European countries, historically known for their dominance in the field of software.

Your mobile phone runs on a CPU architecture designed in Europe (ARM), manufactured by a machine that only a European company can make (ASML), using a number of protocols invented in Europe (Bluetooth for example), using protocols invented in Europe to browse the internet (HTML/HTTP), based on a very long history of computer science ideas and programming languages invented in Europe or by Europeans.

Give credit where credit is do.

Having said that, I do agree that US companies tend to be better at commercializing new ideas than European ones.

It's an ARM CPU - ARM is built off Berkeley RISC. ASML would never exist if not for billions of dollars of R&D spending by American chip manufacturers, much of which was directly provided.

Obviously there are good engineers in Europe. There just aren't as many as there are in the US, in large part because the US encourages immigration with much higher salaries.

It is correct that a lot of talented Europeans get educated in Europe and then immigrate to the US starting successful companies. Without those Europeans, there would be a lot fewer successful US companies.

American rules, if you start a billion dollar company in the States you're one of us :)

On a more serious note, the US awards more college degrees per capita than most other developed nations. Strict licensing requirements or not, software engineering is just what it's called here because of the many and obvious similarities between it and other kinds of engineering.

For sure there are great engineers that are from Europe, I've worked with a bunch in the US, but it's a numbers game, and there's no competition there. Partly because so many of those great European engineers come here.

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