Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarapetyan | Hacker News Reader

Many of the really good software engineers I know are Russian. As in they grew up and were educated in Russia but they all end up working for U.S. companies. Russia is missing out on a lot of talent right in their back yard. If the government was a little more forward thinking and didn't try to stifle and control things so much who knows where they would be right now.

View on HN

Our government has no incentive to retain them. Their main source of money is not small / medium / innovative business taxation - it's oil and other natural resources. And you don't need higher education and talent to extract oil. Actually, you don't need any population at all.

As I see it, their real incentive would be to shut down the higher education system, because it a) costs money, b) sends a good part of produced talent to other countries, and c) produces educated citizens which are harder to manipulate.

Sadly, I hear quite a few confirmations of this from friends who work in education.

BTW, here's a great video, Rules for Rulers, which is basically a video TL;DR of "The Dictator's Handbook" that explains incentives of democratic and autocratic rulers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Many dictatorships eventually failed due to a lack of brains. The Third Reich is a prime example of this.

What? The German war machine was extremely efficient compared to its counterparts, especially if you compare the asymmetric casual count. Many technologies such as radar or jet aircraft were first used by the Germans. I'm pretty sure Germany lost because several countries united, and took heavy casualities fighting rather than a failure of the education aystem.

The 'lack of brains' argument holds if you're looking at the Third Reich leadership rather than Germany as a nation. Aside from the poor choice of trying to take on both the USSR and the USA, near the end of the war, the Third Reich made a number of awful military tactics and logistics decisions that accelerated their loss.

What? Albert Speer pulled off a "armaments miracle" where production increased despite allied bombings. [1]

Hitler got extremely far in the war against the USSR, and probably lost (in his words [2]) because the USSR rapidly moved production beyond Nazi reach. Also the USSR had a resolve to send millions of people in near suicide waves, something the French refused. Also the unwillingness of the Japanese to attack the USSR [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Speer

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClR9tcpKZec

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge

Most of the brilliant scientists and engineers behind that technology were trained before the Nazis came to power.

This is necessarily true because the Nazi's were in power for less than 15 years. Nevertheless, many scientists, specifically those whose work was directly applicable to war effort received significant support. For example, Wernher von Braun, a large part of those thesis was classified.

Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

Not just the Russian trained software engineers but a lot of children and grandchildren of the 1990s Eastern Bloc immigrants are lost to Russia. These were the families most likely to have access to computers and educational institutions no matter which country they stayed in but widespread oppression pre- and post-USSR by antisemites, thugs, corrupt bureaucrats, etc and an economic collapse robbed the country of much of the talent pool.

I'm one of those immigrant children that arrived in SF in the early 90s, now having grown up in SF and found success here, I'm actually looking at moving back to work in tech in Moscow. There is an energy there that I haven't felt anywhere else, hopefully the geopolitical situation will settle down over the next few years to make it a reality.

Where/How would you start looking for a job there?

Do you know if Skolkovo is still a thing there?

Skolkovo is a big bullshit, not even close to Silicon Valley. They did nothing useful and have spent a lot of budget money for nothing.

There are quite a few outsource shops who would benefit from having tech people with SV experience. For starters you might land a job for one of these.

I would also recommend Sankt Petersburg over Moscow, having lived in both.

"Don't confuse tourism with immigration"

Though if you go as an American, you will be in a nicely padded expat bubble and the life can be quite comfortable. Just like in any other country.

There's this problem where tourists visit tourist sites or big cities in autocratic states and see everything as so orderly and relatively clean, with no homeless, not too much petty crime, little to no graffiti, etc. They see a lot of police around and think 'Hey these guys know what they're doing.' Of course, the cleanliness is a side effect of absurd fines, though not usually official, but because the police grab you and demand a bribe unless you want a higher made-up charge. The littering or jaywalking is just an excuse to shake you down. Or the fines and jailing are real and if a Westerner was on the receiving end of a week in jail or even physical punishment like caning for spitting out gum, they'd be incensed.

The realization that should come later is that because people in the West have basic human rights, life is messy as its harder to control a population that's guaranteed rights. But in autocratic/dictatorial states many people are beaten, jailed, or simply killed with impunity or have a mock trial for formalities. Tourists will never see any of this and their Western passport means they'll never be shaken down or beaten or harassed by the authorities. They'll get preferential treatment because its within everyone's economic and political interests to do so. They mistakenly think this is how the locals are treated as well.

Sadly, many Westerners get the 'big city' autocratic treatment and bemoan the messy chaos of their own cities, without realizing that chaos is a feature, not a bug, especially if you want your 'features' to be the rule of law, personal freedom, property rights, an independent judiciary, and human rights.

We have other sad excuses to shake you down. Petty drugs (Ganja), Copyrightviolations and beeing a Idiot (literally Privat-Man in ancient greek). Thus far, your list of things not found in the west can bef ound in the west.

Western states certainly aren't perfect but they are far more permissive on a practical level and tend to lean towards lowered corruption and reasonable punishments outside of edge cases.

From a tourist's perspective NYC, Chicago, LA are a madhouse of crime, graffiti, etc while Pyongyang is a wonderful, clean, and relatively quiet capital. You'd think the latter would be utopia, but of course, its far from it. My point is that a tourist's experience actually has the opposite incentives as a citizen's experience. An oppressed and submissive populace is nice for tourists but not nice for locals. A boisterous, empowered, and loud populace is nice for locals but not nice for tourists.

For example, I imagine the Paris and Athens metro systems go on strike a lot more than the Moscow and Pyongyang metro systems do.

To be fair though, as a European who has lived in China and spent some time in NYC. I'm always very fearful of the police in the US. I've heard about all the horror stories and I know that as a foreigner I'm even less likely to be treated well. I'm much more scared of the US police than of the police in UK, France or Spain.

In China, I'm scared of the police too but I know that I'll get preferential treatment because I'm a foreigner so excesses are less likely.

That said, I agree with your points, especially with China becoming more and more autocratic since 2013...

Both China and Russia run this kind of anti-us proganda. Its not true, the police in the US will treat you the same way that the police in other countries such as Britain treat their citizens.

Again, I'm European. I look at police shootings statistics and see a huge difference between European countries and the US (55 shootings in the last 24 years in UK compared to 59 shootings in the first 24 days in US). It's an order of magnitude higher and the difference cannot be explained by population.

So, yes I'm much more afraid of the police in the US, they are demonstrably more violent. That doesn't mean that China and Russia are not dictatures, they are. It also doesn't mean that the police in those countries are not scary. They are scary and they are corrupted and will shake down locals (but rarely foreigners because it's too risky for them).

"police grab you and demand a bribe unless you want a higher made-up charge. The littering or jaywalking is just an excuse to shake you down. Or the fines and jailing are real and if a Westerner was on the receiving end of a week in jail or even physical punishment like caning for spitting out gum, they'd be incensed." - I'm wondering when and where did you find that in Russia? Been caught few times by police for doing bad things on streets (and had many friends in "obschaga" with similar experience), I can't confirm this was true even in early 00s.

i always had your experience (not being harassed) at another not-first-world country. and was always hearing comments like the above yours and distrusting them.

until my significant other got shaken down by the police there three times in the last three times we were there. so now i realized my first experience was skewed because I'm not the demographic that is the target of all that.

now i know better: your isolated anecdotal experience should never be the only argument for a political discussion.

I would like to say the same about your anecdotal experience and utterly primitive "first-world/not" crazy talks.

Many programmers still here, and talented people also arriving from other countries (mostly ex-USSR and Eastern Europe, but not only).

Just because we're stuck here doesn't mean we like it.

Who we? Me and my circle like the living here.

Who says the government is missing out? Russian economy as a whole might be missing out, because qualified labor is leaving, but the state probably gets their pick of top graduates. Who do you think runs Kremlin's hacking, spying, and bot programmes? I imagine it's not the straight C students. Same goes for critical industries like defense and o&g.

>Same goes for critical industries like defense and o&g.

not much. In O&G all the complicated drilling is done by foreign companies who have the tech (while, yes, accounting IT in Russian O&G can employ the top grads :). In defense it is even worse - Russia still can't build a stealth plane, i.e. they were able to produce a body, the easiest part, can be calculated on computers with basic scientific knowledge, while the radar and engine require a well developed technological base and thus still not reachable for Russia.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com