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Comment by gtrubetskoy | Hacker News Reader

I don't think so because nobody could afford these. It was the education system. Standard curriculum for everybody. By the time you finished 10th (last) grade you had studied pretty advanced math, physics, chemistry, etc. Even if it's not your thing, even if you could only get the lowest passing grade, you still had to do it or fail school. It was kind of rough, but I'm still reaping rewards from what it gave me.

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Also may have to do with the prestige of being an engineer in USSR. That was a popular profession.

I feel like I can only dream about such a time, such a place. Engineer? Prestige?

Well, I think, being a software engineer is still pretty cool in Silicon Valley :)

Eh, don't know about the place. You'd be respected, but stuck with working for a shitty government and shitty people with their own agendas for all of your life.

That doesn't sound unique to the USSR lol

I guess so, but at least you'd have the choice to leave :-)

I think it's the inverse. Disregard for engineers seems like an anglo-saxon phenomenon to me. The Germanic countries are, of course, famed for holding engineers in high regard, but so do most third-world countries, and China.

I think the anglo-saxon opinion of engineers is caused by blurring the line between engineer and technician.

I think its caused by the inappropriate elevation of the marketing classes, who don't have a job unless someone else does the work of building something...

Not in the late 1980s certainly.

If only they did this in the UK.

Although when I went through school, A level mathematics didn't even touch anything past polynomials and physics didn't go much past classical mechanics and energy. Now they're all over calculus and quantum mechanics!

Some of those were initially. But by early 90's you could by cheap ZX Spectrum clones. I had one and we were more on the poor side than on the rich side.

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