> IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved

> IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field. People in the Soviet Union had much less access to computers than in the US. And the first years after the fall of the USSR were quite lean for the vast majority of the population. Only by the late 90-s people in the xUSSR started getting enough money to buy computers en-masse.