> All joking aside, we fledgling mathematicians understood that the single
most important thing was not raw intelligence or knowledge (Americans tend
to lag behind in the latter compared to all international students). What
mattered was passion. The way to become successful in mathematics, like
almost every endeavor, is to care about it, to love it, to obsess over it. And in
this, Eastern Europeans had a clear superiority, a cultural advantage. They
had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely.
IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field.
I suspect we'll see a continuous slow decrease in all aspects of quality of software as those who have a genuine love and passion for the field are replaced by those in it just for the money.
Other examples I can think of (from my Gen Z experience, growing up in SoCal):
- Elementary school: Making custom action replay codes, hacking game saves with programs, CheatEngine/memory/hex editor and following YouTube tutorials, Javascript "document.contentEditable=true" hack and changing stuff on websites, pressing F12 and changing random javascript code until something interesting happens or breaks.
- Middle school: making sites on Weebly/freewebs, embedding chats and flash games
on them, sharing them during computer class
- High school: Making PHP sites/vbulliten/Newgrounds/flash games, later iOS apps
I wasn't the only one doing these things. There were always like 3 other kids like me in any classroom that would do the same things.
Most of us ended up becoming passionate SWEs, besides one that became an accountant.
Hasn’t that happened already? As someone who started coding a long time ago and who did it for fun, I’ve seen the industry move from enthusiasts to mainstream and finally to massive comp optimisers who spend more time on angling for a promotion than building.
I’ve fallen in and out of enjoyment of engineering many times. But I still come back because I love making something that adds value.
There will always be space for the builders who give a shit.
As someone who has needed to hire quite a few developers, I will say that the biggest communality of the greatest software engineers are those who are in it for fun. So I ask about side projects, I ask about what they did as kids, I ask about what they're excited about... Someone who is just there for the money can be great in a bigger company but has no place in a startup.
I like to be passionate about what I am doing, but there's plenty of great projects / companies to work for. So might as well look after the money, too.
(Generally, the companies that can afford to pay you well, are also those that can afford to treat you well.)
> I suspect we'll see a continuous slow decrease in all aspects of quality of software as those who have a genuine love and passion for the field are replaced by those in it just for the money.
And that's exactly how progress looks like!
When you need to know 6502 assembly to make a game, only geniuses can make games. When you can click one together in Roblox, game development opens up to many more people.
So the average game developer won't be as smart. But that's not because the new tools make us stupid.
The same applies to any kind of software. (Or photography, or music, or movies, etc.)
The average quality might go down when the floodgates open, but with modern tools the geniuses can produce even better stuff than before.
> IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field.
People in the Soviet Union had much less access to computers than in the US. And the first years after the fall of the USSR were quite lean for the vast majority of the population. Only by the late 90-s people in the xUSSR started getting enough money to buy computers en-masse.
Survivorship bias. Eastern Europeans are actually very bad with math, no better than your regular American. But immigrants you see were very really motivated to leave the post-Soviet hell, so they had to show excellent results.
Math is taught horrifyingly badly in Eastern Europe. It presented as something extremely overcomplicated and most teachers, having a laughably low salary they barely survive on, don't care teaching it in a way kids would understand.
> Survivorship bias. Eastern Europeans are actually very bad with math, no better than your regular American.
Most people everywhere are bad at math. However, Eastern Europeans and Asians have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math compared to the US. And it's not even close, if you look at math competitions. Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented among the US team members.
I've long pondered a similar question - why are there so many Indian and Pakistani women in SWE in comparison to western women? Are Indian/Pakistani women better than western women in engineering? Is the education there better? How are these countries successful in mitigating this gender gap?
My theory is that this is actually caused by sexism and gender discrimination. There are smart, intelligent women everywhere, but due to sexism many career options have been traditionally closed for women in these societies, while SWE (as a completely new field) isn't. Their high numbers can be explained by the lack of opportunities in other areas. If you're an intelligent woman in Pakistan, IT is one of the few ways to prosper, meanwhile a woman in the West has way more opportunities.
I think it used to be the same principle with science in EE. Like, you're a highly intelligent person, you strive for success and recognition. In US, the classic path is entrepreneurship, but that was pretty much closed / very difficult in the Soviet block. You could get into politics, but you have to bend the knee to the party line. Science is one of the few avenues where you can thrive intellectually, get recognition and keep yourself relatively unaffected by politics.
There is a general finding that women go into engineering fields (and other relatively high-paying fields) more the poorer their country is. Neither "software engineering" nor "India / Pakistan" is an exceptional case; there is no reason to look at the specifics of the field or the region.
Usually the theory is that women everywhere hate engineering, but poor women may suck it up and go into engineering anyway because they need the money.
I agree this has an effect as well - software engineering is one of the few fields which provide good living in those countries.
However, coming from (relatively poor, but relatively gender-egalitarian) Eastern Europe, female engineers aren't anywhere close to the amount in e.g. India and Pakistan, so I don't think it can explain the disparity completely.
Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented among the US team members.
Still survivorship bias. Immigrants from China and India are not selected randomly from the population, they're selected by their means and determination to emigrate. Furthermore, if you include the fact that the US caps the number of visas granted on a per-country-of-origin basis and the fact that China and India have the 2 largest populations in the world, the people who successfully obtain visas from these countries are the survivors of the most stringent selection process.
> Eastern Europeans and Asians have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math compared to the US.
These are two different claims:
Eastern Europeans and Asians who are in the US have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math.*
Eastern Europeans and Asians who are in their respective countries have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math.*
If you are making the first claim, you're just restating the parent comment's survivorship bias claim. If you're making the second, then you are making a strong claim, but it would be interesting to see data behind it. (I don't have any insight one way or the other.)
> Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented
That's exactly the bias. Immigrants are self-selected for higher risk tolerance, higher endurance, often wider or deeper knowledge, and readiness to think hard and work hard to achieve a better place in life.
Unsurprisingly, these same qualities help achieve results in studying and professional career.
Coming from a culture that respects abstracted knowledge (Chinese, Jewish, Russian, Indian, etc) helps additionally, but is by far not sufficient by itself.
There are lots of Chinese and Indians, are you sure that there is a larger percentage who are good at math? When you take 1.4 billion x2 compared to 380 million Americans, the percentages don’t have to be high. Immigrants from those two countries at least, also tend to be in highly educated and more well off segments of those societies. You could find a lot of Chinese refugees from Vietnam in the early 80s not actually good at math, and instead having typical problems refugee communities have. You’ll also find this in African immigrant populations today if you compare refugees from east Africa to Africans who went the work visa route. Race isn’t really an indicator of anything compared to education background and the resources your family has access to (and inter generational knowledge on using those resources).
> I suspect we'll see a continuous slow decrease in all aspects of quality of software as those who have a genuine love and passion for the field are replaced by those in it just for the money.
This seems narrow minded. In the early days of software development, the barrier for entry was incredibly high. The possibility of people making high quality, unique software is greater than it ever has been.
It's also narrow minded to insist that only passion for engineering itself can produce high quality results. It's like claiming famously wealthy musicians can't and don't make remarkable, impactful music.
> It's also narrow minded to insist that only passion for engineering itself can produce high quality results. It's like claiming famously wealthy musicians can't and don't make remarkable, impactful music.
I think you're making a logical fallacy, or at least you seem to be implying that the set of "famously wealthy" people is disjoint with the set of people who are passionate.
Sure, famously wealthy musicians can make great music. So can poor ones. But I haven't seen a lot of lazy, uninspired musicians make great music.
I never said anything about laziness, so I’m not sure why you’re adding that qualifier. I take it you believe that without pure love or enjoyment in something, a person could only be lazy.
Inspiration doesn’t require passion for the art to come first, or even at all. Look at Gene Simmons. He co-founded one of the most successful, influential rock bands ever, driven by the goal of becoming rich and running a successful business, not by an unadulterated love for music.
I was looking for an antonym for "passionate". You're right that "lazy" doesn't quite capture it.
> Look at Gene Simmons. He co-founded one of the most successful, influential rock bands ever, driven by the goal of becoming rich and running a successful business, not by an unadulterated love for music.
This is a good example because while Kiss certainly has popularity, few of their songs are really loved for their musicality. Kiss' music is more about being a good time than good music per se.
Sort of like how Garfield is an effective comic product but not actually really funny in the way that other comics are.
In both of these cases, the creator is passionate about something and working hard at delivering it. They're passionate about providing a certain product experience, and less so about "art" (for however you want to define that).
But imagine a version of Gene Simmons that didn't have the passion to master playing the bass and also didn't have the passion to grind every day at making Kiss a world-known rock band. That person isn't someone you'll ever hear of.
John Carmack, a juvenile delinquent, dropped out of university and went on career programming, soon upending the game industry.
Linus Torvalds released Linux while being a university student, five years before obtaining a master's degree.
Vitalik Buterin dropped out of university and created Etherium, funded by a grant from Thiel foundation. Whatever you may say about cryptocurrencies, Etherium is a nontrivial piece of software, showing remarkable longevity in the fast-moving field.
None of them had a ton of formal qualifications. None of them had to obtain a license. They could just sit at a computer, write great software, and release it to the world, changing the world quite much.
What they all have is a passion for (and resulting deep knowledge of) computers, mathematics, logic, plus independent thinking, and, well, not asking for permission.
This is what a low barrier to entry plus universal availability of powerful tools (computers, compliers, etc), and books leads to.
(High barriers bring very different results: look now many small aircraft still fly with engines designed in 1950s, burning leaded avgas. A worthy challenger still fails to step over the sky-high barrier.)
For Carmack and Torvalds, I’d argue the barrier to entry was still very high at that time. Both had the opportunity to attend university, which in itself gave them access to people and resources they otherwise wouldn’t have had. Additionally, they had access to personal computers when almost the entire world did not, along with the time and resources to focus on their interests. They were extremely fortunate to have that kind of privilege.
As for Buterin, I have no idea who they are, so I can’t speak to them.
> IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field.
IMO it was funding that made the difference. People outside of USA did not have any less passion towards the field.
Any amount of funding gets immediately sucked into the abyss. The entire mathematical research community in Soviet Union probably cost less than a series C startup.
The only sense in which this is true is if choosing that field is a death sentence relative to other society outcomes due to lack of resources.
> They had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely.
Nonsense, sounds like post-hoc rationalization. Maybe talk to some actual Slavic people. Sure the Russians had "math clubs" and "chess clubs" but it wasn't as if the US didn't have RadioShack and garage/ham culture. Talk to some of the older generations that still remember the Berlin Wall and you might also understand why so many women from the ex USSR states are in STEM while it's the opposite in the West. TL;dr: STEM was a quick way to prosperity, the eastern bloc countries were poor, and engineers are useful even in a communist regime. They studied math because there wasn't much else they couldn't have done.
And this attitude was everywhere. For example, getting low marks and then overcoming them was a theme for a lot of iconic Soviet cartoons and stories ("The country of undone homework", "Vovka in a Faraway Kingdom", etc.). I have not seen anything similar in the US.
> Hah. In the USSR an average engineer earned less money than an average worker.
But in the USSR, your ability to buy something was generally not limited by the amount of money you had. It was limited by whether you'd be allowed to buy the thing for other reasons.
> But STEM was seen as far more prestigious than manual labor.
Sounds like an engineer's money may have been worth much more than a laborer's?
> Sounds like an engineer's money may have been worth much more than a laborer's?
Not in general. It heavily depended on individual circumstances.
For example, machinists could earn a bit more money by using factory tools (lathes, drills, etc.) to make replacement parts for cars. And a lot of workers were stealing some of the product their factory was making. There was a common attitude of "everything around is common, so everything's around is mine".
On the other hand, engineers had more career perspectives. They were more likely to be promoted to managerial positions.
That depends on what you are buying. Some things worked like health insurance in US, some others weren't. Housing you don't buy at all, a car you need to know a secret way to jump the queue or be in a right position. Fancy stuff -- you need to have friends who can sail and bring it to you.
But there was plenty of stuff you just buy, from air plane tickets to beer and meat.
(I was already shocked that one of the leading roles in the romcom Три плюс два was a physicist, but then again Young Sheldon might provide evidence that pop culture in the Old Country is more STEM-accepting now than it had been in my day?)
EDIT: I love how the exclamation point cries out "Halt!" and the question mark demands "Where [do you think you're going]?" (and the doodle of Kyzya)
EDIT2: Vovka needs much more russian-specific cultural background than Homework. I recognise the golden fish (Только ты — рыба моей мечты), but not any of the other tales. I'll probably eventually run across filmstrips explaining each/each family of tales, but if anyone would care to give pointers to specific ones, I wouldn't mind any spoilers!
Is the "sam" of the samovar the same as the "sam" of "sdelai sam"?
> Is the "sam" of the samovar the same as the "sam" of "sdelai sam"?
Yes. It literally translates as "self" in "yourself/himself/myself", and in compound words it can be translated as "auto" (which also means "self" in Greek).
EDIT: wait a moment, now I'm confused: if her (Lena's?) marks weren't an issue for induction, why does it matter that her friend got jealous and ruined her test?
(or did I get this story right, but it wasn't necessarily a general all-Union thing, just that in this specific case a 2 would have been problematic for her troop/school/family?)
Universities in eastern bloc were really elite places. Only low single digits percent of people were able to enroll. Also majority of degrees were in STEM, education or medicine as they were deemed useful for the state. To get degree outside of STEM, political background of your family was checked and things like having family member (even say uncle) who emigrated outside of country or having grandparents who owned businesses or farm decades ago will get you discarded. So the smart kids usually have very limited path forward, so STEM it was (if you were lucky)
> All joking aside, we fledgling mathematicians understood that the single most important thing was not raw intelligence or knowledge (Americans tend to lag behind in the latter compared to all international students). What mattered was passion. The way to become successful in mathematics, like almost every endeavor, is to care about it, to love it, to obsess over it. And in this, Eastern Europeans had a clear superiority, a cultural advantage. They had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely.
IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field.
I suspect we'll see a continuous slow decrease in all aspects of quality of software as those who have a genuine love and passion for the field are replaced by those in it just for the money.