That seems a popular sentiment in this thread. But there are of course quite a few unicorns that emerged out of Europe and there is of course the notion that a lot of the mobile networks in the world are running on software that came out of Ericsson or Nokia, which are the dominant options if you don't want to go with Huawei instead.
There is of course the notion that Silicon Valley has produced a lot of amazing companies. But it should be noted that a lot of these companies are staffed, and lead by people from all over the world. E.g. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is from my home country the Netherlands. Both MS and Google have Indian CEOs. etc. And of course US companies have long been outsourcing just about anything complicated to India, Eastern Europe, China, etc. That's not just European companies doing that. That game was pretty much invented in the US.
A lot of silicon valley based companies have most of their development departments in different continents. Mot surprising, the local market is very expensive and you can get a full team for the same money that a single developer costs there elsewhere. And you'd be wrong to assume the local developers are better/smarter. There are of course a lot of talented developers there. But I've worked with and been impressed with teams all over Europe. And I've dealt with some US companies where I wasn't so impressed with their engineering.
The state of software development in legacy car manufacturers is not good. That's simply because they are historically not software companies and they are all struggling to adjust. What little remains of the US car industry after the Japanese and the Koreans took over is basically being disrupted by Tesla just as badly as the European manufacturers.
>a lot of the mobile networks in the world are running on software that came out of Ericsson or Nokia
Ericsson's and Nokia's software divisions are offshoring bodyshops at this point. They do the complex RF R&D in Finland, Sweden and Germany and the software/firmware is offshored to Eastern Europe and India.
Discarding Eastern European countries like Poland is a mistake. Says a person who sees the country consistently growing their foothold on the global IT market, often with customer satisfaction.
Also says a person who is an immigrant to Poland and saw the sector boom in both size as well as international impact.
I never discarded Poland and would never do that. Sincerely, an Eastern European.
The thing with Eastern Europe is, it's still a hub for body shops mostly. Sure, there are also big names there working on cool products thanks to remote jobs and offshoring from the tech scenes of other major tech hubs like SV/London, etc. but most of the jobs are still body-shop style.
There is of course the notion that Silicon Valley has produced a lot of amazing companies. But it should be noted that a lot of these companies are staffed, and lead by people from all over the world. E.g. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is from my home country the Netherlands. Both MS and Google have Indian CEOs. etc. And of course US companies have long been outsourcing just about anything complicated to India, Eastern Europe, China, etc. That's not just European companies doing that. That game was pretty much invented in the US.
A lot of silicon valley based companies have most of their development departments in different continents. Mot surprising, the local market is very expensive and you can get a full team for the same money that a single developer costs there elsewhere. And you'd be wrong to assume the local developers are better/smarter. There are of course a lot of talented developers there. But I've worked with and been impressed with teams all over Europe. And I've dealt with some US companies where I wasn't so impressed with their engineering.
The state of software development in legacy car manufacturers is not good. That's simply because they are historically not software companies and they are all struggling to adjust. What little remains of the US car industry after the Japanese and the Koreans took over is basically being disrupted by Tesla just as badly as the European manufacturers.