[honkdaddy]

Russia has a long history of producing excellent programmers and software engineers, I'm not sure where you get the idea this is where they were outpaced by the rest of the world.

If I had to attribute one thing to Russia's downfall, it would be its geopolitical decision to align itself with China and Iran in global anti-Western sentiment, rather than moving towards joining the rest of the West and the EU as some countries hoped they would back in the 90s.

[spaceman_2020]

Russians make for great programmers and software engineers.

Russian economic systems and state/societal incentives unfortunately aren't conducive to helping these engineers build world-class companies and products at any appreciable scale.

[sharikous]

Russians are a highly educated population that produces excellent engineers. But Iranians too are in this position.

But they are sanctioned off from the technological advanced world and they can't even import modern chips. Add to that that the corruption and lack of freedom are impediments to building a thriving economy.

I think we will see a huge brain drain towards the West. Germany had top notch excellences too, before the Nazis took power.

[spaceman_2020]

I was pretty impressed with Yandex when I was in Russia. The maps were far better and the image translations faster and more accurate than Google. Maybe its because they have access to better local data, but it definitely felt like a well-engineered product suite.