I dunno what attitude russia's gen-z holds towards profession but in my time it was definitely considered a calling.
Americans: contact the vendor and report the issue. Then wait for the vendor to fix it, applying pressure as needed. Because of the delay, the product ends up being 6 months late, but then it works reliably.
Russians: curse the vendor, then use undocumented APIs and live code patching to work around the bug. The vendor is never told about the issues. The product is released on time, but it breaks in 1 year when the vendor makes an incompatible change that breaks the workarounds.
This mindset is very much a result of centuries of having to work around the government that is seen more as an occupying force rather than the will of the people. And it's very helpful when you're doing security research.
Incidentally, Jewish people also excel in security due to a similar cultural mindset.
How do you people come up with such stories?
Checkov, Gogol, Pushkin and Dostoyevsky all wrote novels with this exact plot, because it was so lifelike and tangible for all Russians (Soviets) to understand. If you're interested, check out The Bronze Horseman, The Overcoat, or Poor Folk.
Me and cyberax are both Russians, except I never wanted to emigrate
To add some color, here is my favorite hard-to-translate idiom in a Russian developer community:
"File away rough edges" ("доработать напильником") - adjust something to work in a way that its original creator never even realized is possible. And usually for a good reason.
Of course, all generalizations should be taken with a grain of salt. They can never be used to judge individuals or even individual companies.
There also was no centralized test system (like SAT) up until early 2000-s. People had to go and sit on entrance exams in each university where they wanted to apply. But winners of olympiads got automatic admission into good universities.
In addition, social sciences were a minefield in the USSR, especially subjects like political science or history. And hard sciences were safe.
Cheating was rampant, and a very common way for getting admitted was paying professors from that uni for tutoring - who would train them on the type of tasks they would do at that uni.
And it prevented you from attending unis far away a lot of time due to time contraints.
And in the USSR, if you failed to get into the university, you were drafted into the army for 2 years.
He hated that, he wanted to be a lawyer. But he didn't get admitted to studies, so he had to pick something close in order not to be drafted, and so he stuck with it.
also the salaries of scientists and engineers were notoriously shitty, so only those with passion for the subject studied it.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80...
>In the USSR, retail stores weren't allowed to promptly raise prices on popular items or lower prices on unpopular ones. One way to circumvent this was through "loading": stores would combine a popular (scarce) item with one or more unpopular ones into "food sets" on their order desks, preventing customers from purchasing the scarce item separately.
Higher education in the US, with the exception of scholarships here and there, requires you to come from a wealthy background to afford the best schools.
In other words, it's more about perpetuating class privilege than it is about developing the best and brightest of a generation. If you're a genius with poor parents, you have to really hope to get lucky enough to get a scholarship.
In socialist societies, despite the claims often leveled against them, things were more meritocratic. If you're a genius with poor parents, you got access to the best education as that's what's optimal for society.
If you never learned to read, good luck getting higher education.
I'm not defending communist societies like Soviet Union or China but I think "social democratic" countries like those in Scandinavia have shown generally good education outcomes.