A while back (22+ years) I worked with a vendor on a very specialized amazing image processing workflow product. I noticed at the time that all of his devs wer

A while back (22+ years) I worked with a vendor on a very specialized amazing image processing workflow product. I noticed at the time that all of his devs were these older guys from former Soviet nations. I figured it was a cost thing but over beers he told me that even though they were cheaper than US devs…they were significantly better devs because they were used to squeezing every drop of computing resources to the max because they had too back in the old days. The hardware they worked on back in the day was already “obsolete” in the west but they needed to maximize it. They were just used to writing super fast high efficiency code. They worked small and that product screamed in comparison to other vendors out there. To a degree I think we have gotten soft and complacent…relying on shit libraries with great hardware to make up for it.