It's true, speaking as a US to Finland expat. The median CS grad I've met here in Tampere handily outclasses the CS grads I knew at Northwestern - which is no MIT, sure, but they're definitely no slouches.
Marc Andreessen once described reading a magazine as a teenager and seeing the "Midwest tinkerer" archetype of tech mogul, people who figure out a little bit of everything from scratch because on a farm you just have to do that to stay afloat and then bring that mindset into their SWE work and become minor legends wherever they go, and having this sudden enlightenment moment that shifted him from quiet nerd to confident striver. I spent my honeymoon year in northern Finland and came to the conclusion that the whole country is like that. Except, no one filled them in on just how absurdly good the margins on software can be when you throw business prowess into the mix. So many companies here been punching well below our weight class. (Okay, the very business-hostile nature of making a startup in the 90s/00s didn't help either - that's less the case now.)
I'm convinced it's more sociological than legal, although there are elements of both. My long term aim while I'm here is to be missing link between Finland and Silicon Valley. These guys are genuinely, still, much better than they themselves realize.
Marc Andreessen once described reading a magazine as a teenager and seeing the "Midwest tinkerer" archetype of tech mogul, people who figure out a little bit of everything from scratch because on a farm you just have to do that to stay afloat and then bring that mindset into their SWE work and become minor legends wherever they go, and having this sudden enlightenment moment that shifted him from quiet nerd to confident striver. I spent my honeymoon year in northern Finland and came to the conclusion that the whole country is like that. Except, no one filled them in on just how absurdly good the margins on software can be when you throw business prowess into the mix. So many companies here been punching well below our weight class. (Okay, the very business-hostile nature of making a startup in the 90s/00s didn't help either - that's less the case now.)
I'm convinced it's more sociological than legal, although there are elements of both. My long term aim while I'm here is to be missing link between Finland and Silicon Valley. These guys are genuinely, still, much better than they themselves realize.