Ask HN: Why does the Eastern Bloc produce so many good programmers?

As a Russian programmer living in the west, I know of at least one strong reason:

Harsh climate, forces you to stay more in-door during the winter and autumn. This naturally pushes people to be more involved with computers. I am sure anyone who live in the area with strong winters can emphasize.

I disagree with the answers that about good schooling or teachers. Teachers and professors are strongly underpaid, bribery in universities exists, IT teachers in pre-university levels frequently can’t even touch type, rely on outdated curriculum, use old textbooks that break apart. Certainly I learnt nothing from IT lessons in school except how to do arithmetic on binary and other things of little practical use (and also boring.)

And about the answer that good grades are emphasized. A-students who dedicate most of the time to studying can be bullied like in the west. Being socially outgoing is definitely more valued in school, just like in the west.

You also have to look at the following dynamic: immigration system in the west creates a situation where if an immigrant is fired from his job, he will lose his visa. Which is very hard to get in the first place. And obviously western people don’t _need_ to be to good programmers: all they need to be is to be good managers, who can exploit the opportunity of getting cheap talent to work for you.

Having studied in Russia, Germany and UK, I would say that:

- Technical education was emphasized over humanities. It was much more important to produce good engineers as required by industry and military rather than "thinkers".

- Maths was traditionally well taught across the board, whereas in Europe and especially UK it is seen as tough and unnecessary.

- Doing well in school is seen as a point of pride. Thus many work hard to do well in school to get the respect of their peers.

As someone from eastern bloc, it's always about teachers and their passion, always. It's never about salaries, government motivation, prizes or anything else. Thank the universe for those few exceptionally teachers that I had.

Good... everything really. Every day I thank God that the next generation of the UK’s workforce is being educated right now in Poland and Romania. If only we could get their teachers to come here as well as their programmers and plumbers. But they are probably well aware how bad British school are.

Source: went to “bog standard” state comp. Everything I have accomplished in my life has been despite my “education”.

In Flash Boys, Michael Lewis explored why so many of the programmers for High Frequency Trading firms were Russian.

The conclusion he reached was that in the former USSR, people studying CS only were allowed about 15 minutes of computer time per week at universities. They had to write their code by hand and make it as elegant and bug-free as possible long before actually running it. Learning in this way lent itself to writing highly efficient code in an industry that rewarded whoever could execute trades the fastest.

Disclaimer that this is highly anecdotal and I haven't read the book in a while so I may have some details wrong, but I thought the story was entertaining.

USSR had never put humanities on the pedestal. It would be highly against ideological questions answered by the government.

If you would like a similar example I would extrapolate for it to be China. Not necessarily because China is controlled by the communist party, but you could see how a highly-controlling government would not be interested at all in people asking questions about the meaning of life. Thus goes the question of religion, and therefore science being the pinnacle of the world.

Besides, even if you'd really like to teach philosophy in the USSR - you'd still end up teaching whatever the government tells you to; and thus you'd never give the required framework for the person to actually be good at it, since it's one-sided anyway.

I could also see why it's incredibly hard to find brilliant managers coming from the "Eastern Bloc", as opposed to pure sciences; for the same reasons: party always makes the choice.

I do come from Lithuania myself and I have a few friends who have later found good jobs in medicine later on in the UK. Me, though - I was between my IT hobby since the age of 11 and getting a degree in medicine; and decided to become a software developer since I believed it would give me more power over the choices I make later in life. I think I made the right choice.

Because getting the best grade on a test doesn't get your ass kicked. This motivates you to get good grades in the future.

Source: grew up in Russia went to school there and then also in USA. Doing well on test in USA earns you phyiscal abuse from footballers who were "counting on the curve". Then the school refuses to investigate because football is apparently more important. Doing well in Russia earns you admiration and respect of your classmates.

Strong, decentralized maths education. Maths and physics were emphasized, so there are plenty of free schools specializing on maths and physics, teaching both at a very high standard. In these schools, the focus is on the best students and those that can't keep up are allowed to drop out.

The incentive of entering these schools is that entrance exams to the best tech universities (free) are extremely competitive. And if you don't enter a tech university, not only are you likely to struggle to find a paying job afterwards, but if you are not a student you will be conscripted into the army, which nobody wants.

Maths olympiads are fairly popular, so teachers are encouraged to try to identify talented students and have them study maths/physics at a higher level than their peers.

Now, why does the West appear not to produce as many good programmers? Soft skills seem to be valued more; strong humanities education is traditionally seen as prestigious/lucrative; culturally, those interested in maths/computers are seen in a negative light; sports and extroversion are overemphasized; centralized school-leaving exams perhaps put more focus on rote learning than deep understanding.

Historically, as I understand it, there was a strong tradition of hacking (in the original sense) as well as cracking in order to get all the dodgy Soviet knock-off computers working with imported software, and so on.

That bled into the demo scene, and I think the tradition continues to a certain degree, and is concomitant with the educational philosophies mentioned in other comments.

I think I might like a citation on that. I don't live in the Eastern Bloc, so the only programmers from the Eastern Bloc I meet are those that have left and are working as programmers elsewhere. I suspect (but cannot prove) that good programmers would be over-represented in the set of Eastern Bloc programmers working elsewhere in the world.

Unless you've got some data to back that claim up, it's likely that the answer is "it doesn't, and some kind of bias just makes it appear that way to you".

Programming jobs since the 90s were offering a much better pay than pretty much every other job. So parents were pushing kids to pursue CS degrees. With completely free or very cheap education this created a lot of competition for such degrees. And with math exam being the only deciding factor to get accepted, only people who were really good at math and really well prepared were getting in. Sort of due to the lack of other opportunities filtering the most capable and the most motivated.

It was/is the way out of poverty. While in the "west" a "humanitarian" can enjoy a high quality of life, in the east it is associated with poverty.

The real answer?

Genetically Russians have a great mix of the creativity seen in Europeans with the raw logic seen in Asians. Down vote me to hell, it’s the truth

The cultural heroes of the US are not mathematicians, computer scientists or programmers, but rather billionaires and celebrities.

To put it bluntly, there are more people trying to become Steve Jobs than Steve Wozniak.

Russia has a rich history of scientific and engineering that is a source of national pride. They put the first satellite in space, the first man in space, and they pushed frontiers of science in many regards. They are avid Chess practitioners and avid readers. Finally, being intellectual is a source of respect not social shame like in the US.

I remember that Soviet-era math books were really good.

At least the ones you could get in Spain (translated of course).

Probable not the reason, but a factor.