[xor1]

>The secret ingredient is a culture of cheating. Its absolutely fine to cheat on any level of exam (unless you get caught, obviously). This makes students think about the weak points of any system, gives them a chance to train their skills etc. The side effect of this culture is much higher level of corruption and financial crimes

If your theory was true, Chinese devs and hackers would have the same reputation for prowess as their Russian counterparts.

I like Sergey Aleynikov's explanation:

Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: they had been forced to learn programming without the luxury of endless computer time. “In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes,” he says. “When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work. Consequently we learned to write the code in a way that minimized the amount of debugging. And so you had to think about it a lot before you committed it to paper. . . . The ready availability of computer time creates this mode of working where you just have an idea and type it and maybe erase it 10 times. Good Russian programmers, they tend to have had that one experience at some time in the past: the experience of limited access to computer time.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...

[digi_owl]

There was perhaps also the aspect that when the microcomputers showed up on their side of the curtain, they didn't get a market for boxed software to go with it. So either they wrote their own, or cracked western software. Either way they got intimate with software innards.

[Stranger43]

It could be interesting if we could measure the damage done to computer literacy skills by the huge spending on easy to use well managed edutech like one to one deployments of chromebooks, or worse iPads, compared to forcing the students to wrestling with obsolete poorly managed systems in order to hand in computer typeset term papers.

It might be that the economic constraints imposed on the former USSR states by their failed experiment with reagonomics is in fact themselves the reason why they produce more programmers and fewer failed athletes and actors then America.