[ptsch]

As a Russian programmer living in the west, I know of at least one strong reason:

Harsh climate, forces you to stay more in-door during the winter and autumn. This naturally pushes people to be more involved with computers. I am sure anyone who live in the area with strong winters can emphasize.

I disagree with the answers that about good schooling or teachers. Teachers and professors are strongly underpaid, bribery in universities exists, IT teachers in pre-university levels frequently can’t even touch type, rely on outdated curriculum, use old textbooks that break apart. Certainly I learnt nothing from IT lessons in school except how to do arithmetic on binary and other things of little practical use (and also boring.)

And about the answer that good grades are emphasized. A-students who dedicate most of the time to studying can be bullied like in the west. Being socially outgoing is definitely more valued in school, just like in the west.

You also have to look at the following dynamic: immigration system in the west creates a situation where if an immigrant is fired from his job, he will lose his visa. Which is very hard to get in the first place. And obviously western people don’t _need_ to be to good programmers: all they need to be is to be good managers, who can exploit the opportunity of getting cheap talent to work for you.

[a008t]

Can confirm - Russian schools and universities, at least before the last decade, perhaps with very few exceptions, were really awful at teaching computer science/programming.

Programming, and to some extent maths, were seen as somewhat cool among certain circles of kids.

I suspect widespread piracy might have also helped - it gave you access to cheap software (Visual Studio, 3DS Max, Delphi etc.), shoddy pirated copies of games that you sometimes needed some technical expertise to get to run, made it easy to play with loads of different software/games/ideas.

[ejanus]

>Teachers and professors are strongly underpaid, bribery in universities exists, IT teachers in pre-university levels frequently can’t even touch type, rely on outdated curriculum, use old textbooks that break apart

I am disappointed with your above statement. Has programming really changed in the last 4 decades ? The answer is no. Anyone who understands Pascal inside out and masters it enough to build anything with it would excellent in any language. So nothing is outdated here . And using pen and paper to learn programming may make abstraction easier to understand. If what you said is correct , ACM collegiate competitions tell a different story. If the system is broken and it still produces the best Olympians, then it is worth copying .

I am not from Eastern bloc