As a Polish IT worker I feel that we enjoy hardwork too much. I'm talking here about "kultura zapierdolu" [0] which is what we call the specific Polish version of culture of unhealthy work/life balance.
I feel like one uberhard worker has an unhealthy return.
But a group of uberhard workers have a healthy return - they compound each others hard work and build a prosperous _environment_.
My wife and I work very hard, as do our colleagues. But together we've built a pretty healthy routine, home, and (for now at least) financial situation. This has enabled us to have kids more easily than most, travel, etc.
The hardest workers /busiest folks I know are farmfolk relatives, and they also have a level of social connection and family connection that I envy all the time. It's mostly from them showing up to help with _everything_.
They have a strong reputation as hard-working. After the liberation of Eastern Europe, Polish crews were all over Eastern Europe doing everything from restoring historic town centers to quickly and reliably putting a fresh coat of paint on apartments.
I guess it's anecdata. Polish engineers I've worked with weren't that good at technical stuff nor communication (in English). They're overprotective with "their" code and in general we've had more luck with western/southern Europeans.
I'm from Poland, but I worked in multinational place in Europe and I would rank polish people on average in the middle of pack in terms of working ethic.
Behind Germans, or Scandinavians, but ahead of most Mediteraneans.
I'm Polish, working for globally remote companies. I second the communication issue. Most Polish devs are so ashamed of their english(even if it's perfectly communicative) that it makes it hard to discuss technical ideas with them. As for technical knowledge, I guess that's cognitive bias, most Polish devs I met were far better at tech stuff than most f.e. Germans I worked with.
12% for software development, 8.5% for design/management. The caveat being, you can't deduct anything from tax, only VAT(under some assumptions). If you have actual expenses it's 12/32% progressive or 19% linear tax. Of course all of those are assuming you own a one man company and work B2B. Most devs here do. Otherwise regular contract of employment is progressive 12/32% tax, plus Healthcare and employer payments. Much less beneficial to both sides hence why it's not preferred by most.
This misses the obligatory health tax and pension fund contributions.
The pension fund is usually not considered a tax formally, but most people I know assume with our demographics and pension system we are just paying for current retirees (and our 'savings' will be impacted by inflation when it becomes impossible to maintain), so practically it's a tax.
Than there is 23% VAT (ofc much less than 23% because both the IT company and the contractor pass it to client and subtract some cost; so only a piece of it affects the contractor; it's a convoluted thing and I don't really know if I should treat it as ~22.9% or 2.3% tax on a contractor and it's client).
Which, to be fair, laid the foundation for the well-educated part.
The Soviets really valued STEM. They also quite valued emancipating women.
Just for context, in the 60s, around 5% of chemistry PhDs in the US were women. In the Soviet Union, it was 40%! [0]
Of course, that doesn't excuse all the other things they did, but the amount of badass female engineers from Eastern Europe I had the honor of working with is a direct result of the pipeline the Soviets built.
They don't if you mean STEM and emancipation, quite the opposite, actually (compared to West Germany).
In addition to the points of sibling comments, their respective starting posititions were drastically different: West Germany got the marshal plan, which benefitted their economy, the East had to pay reparations to the USSR, which meant whole factories, trains, even railroad tracks, all in all amounting to about a third of industrial capacity, were transferred to the USSR.
Without having firm data, I can see a few factors that are different. After the collapse of the GDR, it was easier for eastern Germans to move to west Germany than for Polish to move to a different country in the west. Mostly younger and educated people would have made that move, hampering future generations. With the Reunification also came the whole Treuhand issue which essentially sold off a good chunk of eastern Germany for pennies to western investors, because eastern investors had no capital. That meant the east lost out on the profits from its economy as they would accumulate in the west instead. Even today a large part of east German rentals are owned by western landlords or corporations. Then the industrial base of west Germany was setup far more for competing on the open world market with automotive companies in the NW (VW), SW (Daimler) and SE (BMW) plus the big industrial area Ruhrgebiet. So you naturally got an economic focus even after Reunification on the old BRD with the previous GDR requiring decades to hopefully catch up to the rest of the new country.
Quite a few educated East Germans have become West Germans as soon as they had the opportunity (or moved elsewhere in the world), but East Germany actually has a couple of high-tech 'hotspots' and good universities.
An East German state (Saxony) also consistently has the best education system among German states.
One factor in this may also have been the way the privatization of East Germany was handled. Its often overlooked, but the vehicle for it was called Treuhand[1]. Regardless of whether it was necessary or not or right or wrong, it did basically shift out a large amount of capital assets into West Germany (and still carries this sentiment of "opportunistic theft" today).
The headline figure of the article is purchase power (PPP) adjusted. I couldn't find any numbers for east German states where the purchase power adjustment happens per state.
Since housing is the largest component and housing costs differ between east and west Germany using a nation wide PPP adjustment factor gives wrong results for individual states.
Most educated and motivated Polish people were slaughtered by Germans and Russians in WW II then ones still alive working for or heavily oppressed by puppet soviet state.
We were. And “hard workers” is code for “easily exploited.”
Anyway the trick to explosive growth as a country is who you trade with and how you count things. We now sell things to Germany instead of USSR, of course there’s “growth.” There’s also some very real growth, quite a bit of it - but I wouldn’t put one bit of care in a “top 20 biggest economies” ranking. NL is one of the biggest food exporters in the world because it sells mediocre tomatoes to Germany instead of selling rice to Brazil and food exports are counted in euros, not calories.
I know that Ukraine takes Polish experiences into account and consults with Poles on what went well and what not during our post-communist transformation and later the EU membership. They are keen on not repeating our mistakes. There were many Ukrainians working in Poland long before the full scale work so naturally many Ukrainians were looking at Poland hoping that their country could eventually replicate polish success.
But I don't think our example has an effect on morale and spirit of resistance.
They weren’t occupied by Russia, but the USSR which was an authoritarian communist state. That entire economic system failed for a reason, and the Chinese were wise to pivot (and not try spreading its ideology by force).
Yeah, I really don't think this is why China doesn't try to spread its ideology by force. I don't think a passive authoritarian state exists, just ones that don't have the military power or background / weak enough targets to achieve this. The US very much keeps them in check from invading not "wisdom".
I get it, we are being gaslit and pyoped at a massive scale across all channels about China and their supposed intentions. But proof is in the pudding, China is cutting deals all over the world, building infrastructure - all without forced regime changes or ideological prerequisites nor bombs.
Oh let’s just ignore the times Poland/ Lithuanian empire occupied east Slavic lands and force converted a large number of Orthodox in the West to Catholicism. And the kingdom/regime before soviets was quite different than Soviets or modern Russian setup in terms of ideology.
Again, that economic difference from last round was due specially to the failure of communism. And don’t forget that the US poured money into west Germany intentionally to show off their system. Look, I get some people don’t like Russia right now, but you can’t judge history through a modern lens; only through the zeitgeist of the time it occurred in.
So to counter my argument about Russian occupation from up to 1914 being irrelevant you bring Polish Kingdom from the times of The Holy Roman Empire?
And I assume that polish literature from 18 hundreds was already deeply prescient anti-soviet? Because the russian occupant in 18 hundreds had exactly same flavours as those during the communism.
Also the German occupation was in many regards as bad as Russian one but they had absolutely different face. But that is not part of the discussion really.
And the fact that russian communist occupation of Poland had been absolutely awful was fully clear in Poland as soon as late 1940s (according to my old family members). In parcitular - some part of my family was ended war in some prisoner / working camps in western europe and had a choice of staying in the west or going back to Poland. How terrible idea to go back it was - became clear in the first few years after stayed so until the end in 1989.
I remember vividly an interview one of the russian soldiers was giving in polish television on the day when Soviet Army was leaving Poland.
"You don't even understand what you're losing. You will soon realize how big of a mistake it is and regret it deeply."
Guess what? We don't.
Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady, 1823
"Nie dziw, że nas tu przeklinają,
Wszak to już mija wiek,
Jak z Moskwy w Polskę nasyłają
Samych łajdaków stek."
No, they don’t claim that - but they do see it as a continuous thing (Russian civilization and the genocidal threat they overcame). Also, it’s not just them who celebrate.
Russians are always conveniently forgetting that they were the other major aggressor of the European WW2 theater. Heck, the so-called "Great Patriotic War" starts in 1941, skipping over their alliance with Nazi Germany and invasions of neighboring states.
Authoritarian has nothing to do with elections, it has everything to do with the ability of people without positions of power to influence those in power without retribution. Most countries have elections, these days, but there is no lack of authoritarian rulers staying in power for decades and jailing or murdering their opposition.
Honestly, a lot of issues was that we needed to build up the necessary infrastructure in the first place.
And the transformation to market economy involved at least two periods of suicidal decisions in name of ideology that regressed the economy (by the same person, even)
Yes, I agree. I believe cultural norms dictated their rate of expansion. Without so many people who enjoyed hard work they like would not have been able to expand their economy as much.
[0] https://lubimyczytac.pl/ksiazka/5124728/czesc-pracy-o-kultur...