4 ms·
The USSR had no shortage of brilliant technical talent, although they did have a habit of imprisoning them even after they had had a major success.
by bigDinosaur 4y ago
The USSR had no shortage of brilliant technical talent, although they did have a habit of imprisoning them even after they had had a major success.
- borissk 4y agoThey had like 300 million people population and for a long time were the country training the largest number of engineers every year. So yeah a small percentage of these engineers did turn out to be brilliant.
- me_me_me 4y agoIts not only the populations size. Technical people were precised as prestigious and well paid. After soviet collapse, this changed causing exodus of talent to west and overall decline in numbers. Apparently noways a lot of industries are loosing institutional knowledge/expertise built and past down by each generation. because there is no one to pass it down to.
- lnsru 4y agoTechnical people were never prestigious nor well paid. That was not desired in communism where workers were presented as ruling class. Engineers salary was 110-130 rubles, casual worker ~70 rubles and small caliber boss ~200 rubles. Depending on workplace engineers could steal way less than workers (who had direct access to product) and resourceful bosses. Edit: a car in comparison was going for 7000 rubles.
- borissk 4y agoI believe (not an expert) that during Stalin times technical people were very well paid. But Khrushchev returned to the policy of leveling (uravnilovka) and tried to make worker and engineer salaries the same.
- bigDinosaur 4y agoFair enough. I'm not saying they were necessarily unique. And they did do a good job of doing horrible things to much of the talent that got to the top.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoNo shortage, but no surplus either. They just sank a ruinous portion of their GDP into that stuff.