How communist Bulgaria became a leader in tech and sci-fi | Hacker News Reader

How communist Bulgaria became a leader in tech and sci-fi

aeon.co

126 pointssagamore53 comments

Bulgarian here. It is probably a long story but the IT industry is one of the very few not-heavy-regulated here and it flourishes. There is a growing start-up culture, companies are fighting over talants and people with various backgrounds are just pouring in the industry. I know a few dosens of architects, layers and medical doctors that made that step. Also a flat 10% tax certainly helps :)

Is there a data on the average salary? Do employees forced to work as contractors like in Ukraine?

>Do employees forced to work as contractors like in Ukraine?

Or like American IT industry?

The salary really depends on the job title. Junior developers usually start 500-750E. The juniour position is a tricky one because with no background it is usually hard to spot the talent. From then on it really depends on the carrier path you take but compensations in the range of 3000-5000E are probably a soft cap for a developer position.

For QAs and DevOps is around 30% less.

Job security is something quite strange here. Once your trial period passes, it is terribly difficult for you to get fired. If you arrive on time - there is no legal mechanism for you to get fired. The only means would be for the company to trunc the position you're taking. This means they are not allowed to hire someone for the same position for 6 months or so. If they do - it must be you. This is enforced by court. So if they fire you for some reason, you can sue them and the court will return you back to your seat.

Even with this in mind, contractors are terribly rare. I know just two people working this way.

I don't work there but do know several people working in Sofia for startups or corps like VMWare, SAP, etc. I'd say that you'd get about 2-2.5k euro net if have 5+ years experience. Junior is probably 1-1.5k

Since the lack of talent is a huge problem, there are tons of _academies_ that claim to be producing developers in just a few months. This generates a lot of people with no experience, close to zero knowledge but yet eager to join the industry. A viable strategy for companies is to hire as many of those as possible, hoping that there are just a few diamonds there. That's the main reason Jrs are terribly underpaid. If one prooves to have potential - it is not uncommon to have a salary doubled in a few monthsm, otherwise other organization might snatch the person.

I had interviewed a little more than a hundred people for regular and senior roles only to eventually give up and train a couple of juniours.

Everybody prefers to be a contractor p much everywhere in Europe. Lower taxes and insurance. I can claim back VAT and expanse my car, fuel, laptop etc.

Interestingly [1], Bulgaria was a major supplier of computer tech to the entire Eastern block. (I wonder if anything’s left of its technological leadership...)

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

Ah, capitalism.

I don't know about the factories themselves (likely not, since most Communist electronics were obsolete by Western standards). But that hardware left a strong legacy of software development that survives to this day.

I remember hearing somewhere that they have 6 times as many IT professionals per capita than the EU average. But I can't source that right now.

Bulgaria also leads the EU in % of women in IT, according to Eurostat.

It also has the highest rates of prostitution and human trafficking of women.

Turns out all you need to make tech attractive to women is to reduce the wages of every other job they might enjoy more to below starvation levels.

So I am not Bulgarian, and not currently in that hemisphere. That said I feel as though this is unfair to many in the ex-Soviet blok countries. There was a push in many to force equality of the genders, which may or may not have been misguided. One of my Maths professors who was very influential to me, was from that region and that time. I thank everyday that she was in a country and position to learn that. Otherwise I would be unemployed like my brother.

I am Bulgarian.

The "push for gender equality" under communism is largely misunderstood, and purposefully so, in the West.

As an example the entrance exams for primary school teachers were more competitive than the exams for any of the hard sciences or any type of engineering.

My mother failed her teaching exam, yet was accepted into the Naval Academy, a cross between MIT and West Point.

Those women who would have had the prestige of being teachers, the relatively high salaries, the early retirement and a whole host of other benefits lost them during the transition to the point that today being a teacher is one of the worst possible jobs. So now they are moving to tech, their second or third choices under Communism.

Thank you for commenting, I have not lived in a way to understand the tradeoffs. I do not mean to miss understand. Where I am from I worked with many women in tech, who all graduated from technical universities. I do not know. I hear a lot about how in the west women are dissuaded from tech. I do not know.

The "push" was quite simple: they wanted people who could do the job and the gender was very far down the list of requirements. Technical universities were full of female soon-to-be engineers because there was nobody to tell them it's not a woman's job. These were among the relatively few well paid jobs so everybody would go for them. And women were expected to work just as men did since one income per family wouldn't be enough. There was never a time in the recent history of those countries when women were expected to stay at home (more than the maternity leave) or have menial jobs so there was no reason to have that imbalance. This is seen pretty clearly in the gender pay gap for some of those countries [0] and the average number of women working in science and tech [1].

Today on average you can make just as much money in PR as in engineering. Since the choice is much wider now it's easier to fall prey to that "not a job for a woman" BS. I can assure you if an engineering job became one of the few ways to escape poverty the balance would quickly shift towards neutral.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

The pay for engineering was actually quite poor in Soviet block. If money were what you wanted, you'll go into coal mining.

Sadly, most of those to-be-engineers of both genders will find themself sitting 9-to-5 doing nothing useful, and then their jobs will evaporate as socialism fails.

> as socialism fails

You mean "as communism failed". I wasn't talking about the Soviet bloc as it is today but the former "USSR-aligned" countries like those referenced in this article (countries like Bulgaria or Romania) during communist times. They were and still are in that region of prosperity where they could never afford to have a single income earner in the family so pragmatism led to a more uniform development path for both men and women alike. So in those communist times they pumped out tens of thousands of qualified engineers with no regard to their gender. And while some of the opportunities they had in their home countries may have dried out over the past few decades that "legacy" of not caring about gender means today's Europe is full of such "eastern" male and female engineers doing everything from writing software for your bank to designing the suspension of your car. There may be countries that "import" more skilled female engineers than they bother to produce internally.

Probably for the same reason prosperous countries like Switzerland, Germany, UK, or Austria pay their women ~20% less than the men.

If you work in IT and have any kind of contact with teams outsourced in Eastern Europe you probably already noticed that you're just as likely to deal with qualified women as with qualified men.

As for coal mining every single piece of literature I've come across about that period mentions low wages, no paid overtime, 7 day work week, pay cuts for not meeting production quotas, poor living conditions, "shortened" lifespan, etc. That's a far cry from the engineers working to build cars like Bulgarrenault, Bulgaralpine, Pirin-FIAT, Chavdar, and whatever else they were manufacturing at the time.

Full disclosure: I am not Bulgarian and never lived there.

USSR stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and it never called itself communist. Communism was supposed to be the utopian society that was always just around the corner. As the Soviet joke goes:

"We are told that the communism is already seen at the horizon. What then is a horizon? "

"Horizon is an imaginary line which moves away each time you approach it."

The party was a Communist Party, yes - as in, a party of communists. And communists would be people who believed that communism is possible and desirable (indeed, within Marxist-Leninist philosophy, it was deemed historically inevitable - the only question was, how soon), and so made efforts to advance society towards it.

As far as coal miners, I can't speak for Bulgaria, but it's very well known that physical work paid significantly more than any intellectual work in late USSR (roughly 1960-...) - that was part of the whole "dictatorship of the proletariat" arrangement, as it was interpreted by the official ideology. In 1980s, a teacher, a doctor, or an engineer would be getting 120-200 rubles per month, while a factory worker or a miner would be getting 200-600 rubles, depending on qualification and working conditions. Workers could make even more by signing up to work in adverse conditions (northern polar regions, for example) where the salary would be multiplied by coefficients reflecting that adversity. In factories, it was not uncommon for the workers to get 2x of what their supervising engineer did.

And China calls itself democratic. So did the GDR. Socialism is just an economic system. It becomes communism when it's controlled by a single ruling power: the communist party. So communism is the combination of political ideology controlling the socialist economy.

There's no point in getting into semantics, the USSR and the "aligned" countries (all of which put Socialist or Republic in their names) were very much communist countries even if they didn't achieve the ideal textbook communism. Just like there's no textbook example of a free market.

I said the fall of communism because it encompasses both the political and economic systems. And the communist ideology might have played a big role on gender equality.

> Socialism is just an economic system. It becomes communism when it's controlled by a single ruling power: the communist party. So communism is the combination of political ideology controlling the socialist economy.

Your definition of communism seems to be out of nowhere. I would dare say that the people who first introduced the word, get to define what it means. It can gradually evolve from there (as "democracy" did), but what you suggest is throwing it away entirely and replacing it with something completely different, which is unnecessarily confusing.

In its proper meaning, communism means an Utopian society. That was there in the original definition, very explicitly: per Marx, communism is "classless" and therefore "stateless". If you redefine communism to be something else, how do you describe what USSR was ostensibly trying to achieve? "More communism"? - but that doesn't make sense, because there was supposed to be a qualitative difference between socialism and communism; it wasn't just a matter of "becoming more communist" over time - it was always meant to be something like a state transition.

And you don't need to arbitrarily redefine that word to describe USSR, China etc. It can be perfectly well described as "authoritarian socialism", just as USA can be described as "democratic capitalism", and, say, Franco's Spain as "authoritarian capitalism". Either way, these are two different axes - there's no need to conflate it. Furthermore, "socialism" describes the economic reality in the USSR quite well, so it's not at all the same as "democratic" in DPRK etc.

all this did not make a woman equal to a man unfortunately

as a female dev who started her career in Russia about 15 years ago and whose mother was also a dev programming aviation radars, I can tell there was a he-e-ell of sexism and predjudice against women in the society back then, despite all these pretty numbers.

Collapse of the USSR opened up huge opportunities for discrimination and I still remember the job ads for devs where it was explicitly specified "men only" :( I was a subject of sexism, my mom was a subject of sexism.

(there is even more sexism in the modern Rusian society but we are not talking about the modern days)

This is interesting... So the government forcing "equality" was artificial then. People's hearts and minds hadn't changed. I would suggest that forcing solutions on people like equality of outcome are not actually solutions, but mere short sighted illusions. Once the balance of power changes to another group (as it inevitably has throughout history) the smoke and mirrors fade away and the society is left with the original problem, if not and exacerbated one. Now we have bitterness and grudges on both sides and worse relations than before. When I look at history, and then I look at many of today's social justice warriors, I don't have much hope that their methods are going to an actual net positive for either side in the long run. If there is any permanent change, what permanent damage will also be left on the society as a whole. This is not something that is easy to predict and as such is dangerous. Division is growing. Any society throughout history who have had ideologies forced on them have inevitably fought back en mass. Tribalism to this type of stimulus is inherent in humans. The only effective and lasting change that I have witnessed when studying history has been though discourse and discussion (two thing which are being suppressed today). Healthy and respectful discourse leads to concessions and increased empathy on both sides. Opposing enemies become humans to each other, deserving of respect and consideration. Disrespectfully ridiculing the other side's views with blanket classifications meant to silence and discredit the opposition's credibility (and humanity) are far too common today and will only serve to divide further.

The big problem in USSR specifically (I can't speak for other Sovbloc countries) was that the messaging was never consistent. Early revolutionary period was very heavy on gender equality, and very sincere. But under Stalin, there was a big reversal towards "traditional family" and all that stuff, largely to encourage rapid population growth - so they banned abortions, for example.

After that, it was some weird state in the middle - for example, in my mother's time, abortions were not banned in the USSR, but they were heavily discouraged and socially shunned. For another example, conscription was always all-male. In general, it was accepted that some jobs are just "male jobs"; e.g. Soviets had a token female cosmonaut in Tereshkova and later in Savistkaya, but overall the space program was a blatant sausage fest.

I do wonder sometimes what would have happened if the original revolutionary message of gender equality was never reversed or diluted, and lasted at full strength long enough that there was at least one generation growing up without seeing anything else.

No, it's about the radically different life style than in US. In all Eastern Block countries, at least in cities, women were expected to go to school, work and pursue their careers regardless of their marital status. Partially because of lack of money so families needed both salaries, and partially because of communistic ideas of equality, for a woman to be just a housewife was not very common, nor respected life choice for the generations who grew in socialism. It was something reserved for old ladies and wives of politicians. And education was free so there was a lot of women (and still is) in natural sciences, and they naturally later moved into IT as it grow more popular (and started paying better). Also women had (and mostly still have) many benefits that were not that common in West, like long fully-paid childbirth leaves, easy getting free days when kids are sick, long vacations, etc. Socialism had a terrible productivity and was bad for 100 and 1 reason, but it was stimulating time for people (regardless of gender) to do science and tinker with stuff.

You do know that men face the same "starvation level" wages outside of tech, no? (they're not really starvation-level, just pretty bad poverty...)

Human trafficking happens just because men are desperate for sex, especially with good looking, young women. And in the West they are willing to pay what are huge amounts for it, relative to salaries in Bulgaria. It would happen to men, too, if there was a market for it...

Care to share us your nationality so we can dig out something offensive about it? *Not a bulgarian, just offended by an unrelated and offensive comment.

I am Bulgarian, but thanks for being offended on my behalf for what I said about myself.

I think it's actually the lowest in the Eastern Bloc. And if there's prostitution, it's Gypsy prostitution, which is something totally off-topic.

Absolutely. There were Apple ][ clones (the Pravetz series) that were fairly common in the 1980s. Yes, I know that for example, the Soviet Union had its Agat, but nobody I know who grew up in the Soviet Union had seen an Agat, while Pravetz computers were relatively common in Bulgaria.

Agat user reporting. We actually had a full classroom of these things in 89. Dreadful but interesting.

Bulgarian here, my mother used to work in a factory that produced hard drives. Specifically a company called DZU.

She told me about a joke the president made when they opened:

"Today we are proud to have developed semi-conductors, we look towards tomorrow, when we will have full-conductors"

I am sure that your mother’s tale is apocryphal. A similar apocryphal tale that goes around the former Eastern Bloc countries is a Communist official boasting that his country “has now built the world’s largest microchip!”

Naturally, soviet microchip would have four pins and two handles to lift it up.

The GDR had its electronics RND and factories in and around Dresden, so now they have Silicon Saxony https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Saxony

The Soviet central planners allocated different activities to different countries. If it had not been Bulgaria it could just have easily been Czechoslovakia or Romania.

I've been to Sofia. Its a good place to start a business and has the best coworking space in Eastern Europe (look up Puzl Coworking).

Downside is that English is not at all widespread (except among the IT elite and some young people), air pollution can be pretty bad, and there are problems with street dogs. They use the Cyrillic alphabet, so you at least have to learn that to get by.

Like most European countries you also have a byzantine mess of taxes if you want to hire a worker or pay yourself. You also have royalty withholding taxes if a US company pays you.

Well thats a bit unfair. English is very popular among the young people in bulgaria, since it was a required subject in most schools, starting from the 90s, so everyone below age 30-40 knows at least some english, most understand it quite well.

As for taxes - they are one of the lowest in europe, specifically regarding softweare companies. Which is the main reason that it currently has so many local and foreign IT companies operating here. And I think that is why there are so many it people as well, because of the prevalence of employers (and the bidding war for talent which inadvertently raises salaries)

But I agree that knowing Cyrillic is a plus, though I’ve known quite a few people that have lived happily in Bulgaria for 5+ years with english as their only means of communication.

Cyrillic is not that hard. I learned basic reading Cyrillic from traffic signs while transiting Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia, over the course of two days.

>As for taxes - they are one of the lowest in europe, specifically regarding softweare companies.

I researched Bulgarian market when we were looking for a place to open an EU branch.

Nominal taxes are low, but a dazzling assortment of different welfare charges effectively amounted to extra tax. That's not much different how it's typically done in other ex-bloc countries.

Before that, during my years freelancing, ePAM systems tried to bring me there on a very competitive package, comparable to what I had in Canada.

When the talk came to taxes, I just got that "don't worry, we have good tax consultants," and then when I persisted on getting to know how it all is gonna work, I was told of a dizzyingly complex scheme where they were to setup 2 companies on my behalf and "lease intellectual property" from one, while I would've been getting near zero interest loan from another, owning a stake in it.

After hearing that, I firmly changed my mind.

My advice to Eastern European taxmen would be to stop disguising tax as welfare charges. Plainly admit that the net tax rate closes on to 40%, and work from there.

> I researched Bulgarian market when we were looking for a place to open an EU branch.

Which EU country did you end up choosing, if you don't mind me asking? Or, at least, what were the top three / five?

Germany, as one of our C-levels was German. Despite of all taxes, bureaucracy, scarce microelectronics talent. All that wasn't as important as the ease of initial setup.

For top five, those were your expected Eastern European countries strong in programming: Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Bulgaria. In the end, purely going there for tax advantage didn't worth the effort. We calculated that net difference for an office of 5~7 people was no more than 17% as long as we repatriated the revenue. All our senior staff has contracts with fixed net income exactly because we expected that they will be moving around a lot. Were they to receive their net salary in Bulgaria as regular salaried employees, their net tax would be approaching 50%. There, we would be clearly not gaining much over Germany, even if we were to include corporate tax into calculation.

I have found from the opposite way that the English alphabet is not so dissimilar to the Cyrillic. Once you get past that a bectop is a vector, and everything is nearly the same. I find there is a vitality in the region that I cannot find anywhere else, but it feels like living when I am there. I have been to many countries in the region and they all feel close to home.

> bectop is a vector

BEKTOP (K everywhere where you’re used to C) just like the use of B,K,P in modern Greek, e.g. coma is κώμα rho is ῥῶ, B, βήτα (beta character) is pronounced "vita."

> I find there is a vitality in the region that I cannot find anywhere else

> I have been to many countries in the region and they all feel close to home.

That was my feeling, as well. I felt much more at home in the Balkans than I felt living in the UK, even without knowing the language.

If you know Greek alphabet already (which many people do from math & science, or heck, even Greek societies in the USA), looking the shapes of the capital letters in it gets you almost all the way to explaining the differences between Latin and Cyrillic, since Greek is the common ancestor of both.

Street dogs (and cats) are not a problem. They roam around happily and cause no trouble outside of perhaps being "barky" at times. Additionally, getting around knowing only English is super easy. Not knowing Bulgarian is a non issue especially in the bigger towns.

Source. I literally just petted a street dog in Sofia 3 hours ago. I'm a Canadian who moved to BG from Vancouver Canada for a better life. I love it here.

Out of curiosity, what does a Canadian work in Bulgaria?

The water was pretty fantastic though, I'll admit. Particularly after coming from Poland, with its gritty, hard water that turns all of your surfaces brown with iron rust or white with calcium deposits.

Pinkos or not, sci-fi writers have been emerging independently of latitude and longitude just because of tech progress: Stanisław Lem, Boris Strugatsky, Isaac Asimov.

I wanna share my tiny observation.

Typical USSR-originated sci-fi story tells you about space travels, space ships, interstellar journeys, aliens, valuable resources discovery. This aligns well with USSR and Russian space achievements and ambitions and fossil deposits development, and treating cybernetics as a pseudoscience or just funny crap.

On the other hand, non-pinko sci-fi is biased to soul, thinking machines, different lifeforms, artificial intelligence, coexistence of human and robot.

Interestingly, the concept of Information Society emerged in Russian Empire before revolution by Pitirim Sorokin[1], he was expelled from USSR to USA. He wasn't sci-fi writer per se, but the point is the way of thinking renders itself into everything including fiction.

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

I don't think it's that simple. If you look at the Golden Age of Western sci-fi, it was so full of spaceships and travels that a space rocket - as seen on countless book covers - became the symbol of the genre. Western sci-fi was also much heavier on aliens, and especially on conflict with aliens - thousands of alien races bustling around is very much a Western trope with no equivalent in Soviet sci-fi.

On the other hand, the closest sci-fi prediction of something like Wikipedia was the Grand All-Planet Informatory from Strugatsky books, complete with an index and search queries and pervasive use in day-to-day activities to "look things up".

I've associated Bulgaria with 3D rendering and graphics (V-Ray)

And I'm associating it mostly with expert assembly masters.

The best early virus writers were all Bulgarian, esp. the advanced polymorphic ones. With advanced electronics HW in the Eastern block I would mostly associate the GDR (rev. engineered the 8086 and 80286>, and Russia, not Bulgaria who did mostly only the peripherals. But in SW and hacking techniques they outshined the GDR and Russia.

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