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Absence of oligarchs has nothing to do with this. Belarus and Russia have very different political situation but IT industry is strong in both countries, even s
by ivan_gammel 6y ago
Absence of oligarchs has nothing to do with this. Belarus and Russia have very different political situation but IT industry is strong in both countries, even stronger in Russia. There are several reasons for it: strong educational system and engineering culture, piracy and almost no law enforcement of copyright, favorable taxation, government policies. It’s hard to underestimate the effects of investment in digitalization of government services in Russia and influence of it on the Russian-speaking IT ecosystem, including neighboring countries - to the point where Russian speaking conferences or meetups are way more interesting than English speaking ones.
- eternalban 6y agoYou forgot to mention that Russia happens to have a lot of brainiacs. It's rare event to meet a dumb Russian in IT. I've never met one. I have worked with and managed outsourced engineers from Russia, India, and South America. The Russians were consistently the best: effective combo of smart + hard working. The only negatives were a reluctance to disclose bad news before SHTF, which was quite annoying, but I've always put that down to residual USSR culture. In other words, I question the early appearance of the term "piracy" in the list of reasons of why Russians excel at software engineering.
- ivan_gammel 6y agoLook at the first item in my list.
- eternalban 6y agoYou can’t educate dummies.
- avmich 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon
- ivan_gammel 6y agoThis statement is racist.
- eternalban 6y agoNo it is not, unless saying "Russians are smart" is "racist". You can not read English effectively. Work on it and stop with the ad homs.
- chupasaurus 6y agoCheers from Urals. > It's rare event to meet a dumb Russian in IT. I've never met one. I have worked with and managed outsourced engineers from Russia Survivorship bias. There are a lot of dumb engineers here (in absolute numbers, the country is still 9th by population) mostly because of the IT industry growth in 2000s required more workforce, but they wouldn't be hired by the outsource companies since there is no shortage of better recruits (as of now).