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Educated AND motivated workforce will do the trick. All the polish I know that work in IT enjoy handwork as well. They are hard workers.
by ptdorf 4mo ago
Educated AND motivated workforce will do the trick.
All the polish I know that work in IT enjoy handwork as well. They are hard workers.
- olalonde 4mo agoWere they not educated and motivated before?
- petesergeant 4mo agoYes, but being occupied by Russia has not traditionally been a motor for growth
- cpursley 4mo agoThey 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).
- 10xDev 4mo agoYeah, 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".
- cpursley 4mo agoI 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.
- 10xDev 4mo ago"cutting deals" lol this was just yesterday: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m2wjlkzplo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m2wjlkzplo Going by your history, you clearly have a strong bias for China but adding spyware or putting countries into debt isn't virtuous.
- cpursley 4mo agoIrrelevant post, plenty of western spies working in China (and likely much better at it). Anyways, China never took a single dollar from my pocket nor bombed anyone in the last 30 years, so yeah - I’m going to push back on this idea of some inevitable clash with them that is being programmed into everyone.
- 10xDev 4mo agoYou can't look at the evidence and just dismiss it as "irrelevant' because you feel like it or because "the west does it as well" when your whole argument is the lack of foreign interference from China due to "wisdom". We can extrapolate from their hostile actions (even the non-physical ones) and how they treat their own citizens how they would further treat other nations if they could get away with more. China does behave in a very methodical way, but that does not mean it is not a hostile nation.
- victorbjorklund 4mo agoAccording to Russians they are the contineuation of USSR. heck they are celebrating victory day claiming they were the red army.
- cpursley 4mo agoNo, 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.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- distances 4mo agoRussians 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.
- kuboble 4mo agoBig parts of Poland have been occupied by a regime in Moscow for much longer than soviet empire existed, with roughly same outcomes. Most than century after Poland gained independence age WW1, you can still see the economical differences from being occupied by Germans and Russians.
- cpursley 4mo agoOh 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.
- kuboble 4mo agoWhat has one to do with another? 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."
- ponector 4mo agoAlso USSR was never an authoritarian communist state. They had elected leaders! Unless Moscow is not part of russia you can't say they weren't occupied by russia.
- rembal 4mo agoSo, who elected Stalin? He was the head of the USSR after all.
- MobiusHorizons 4mo agoAuthoritarian 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.
- yu3zhou4 4mo agoPoland was sort of occupied until 1989
- vrganj 4mo agoWhich, 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. [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/soviet-russia-had-a-better-record-of-training-women-in-stem-than-america-does-today-180948141/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/soviet-russia-had-...
- tomalbrc 4mo agoHow come eastern germany does so poorly?
- mireg 4mo agoQuite simple. They all left.
- vrganj 4mo agoI think mostly due to the bungled reunification that was basically an asset-stripping followed by enormous brain drain.
- pcrh 4mo agoIncomes in the former GDR are comparable to those of Poland. They still lag behind West Germany, however (as does Poland).
- rft 4mo agoWithout 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.
- p_l 4mo agoHonestly, 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)
- LaGrange 4mo agoWe 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.
- MyHonestOpinon 4mo agoDo you think the example of Poland is helping Ukraine resist and move towards the west?
- jacekm 4mo agoI 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.
- LaGrange 4mo agoI don't think we're Ukraine's "teachers," and our treatment of Ukraine was historically just as rough at times.
- mothballed 4mo agoMotivation requires incentive. Probably hard to do when you're a communist bureaucrat offering an extra potato.
- ozim 4mo agoMost 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. One of the examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Tabular-Iceberg 4mo ago[flagged]
- 10xDev 4mo agoThose IQ charts look very different depending on who is doing the sampling. One of the famous ones is from a self described "scientific racist". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn
- BigTTYGothGF 4mo agoI can't reply to the original comment but it's interesting how tunes change, because even into my youth a very different stereotype persisted: https://achewood.com/2007/02/08/title.html https://achewood.com/2007/02/08/title.html
- Tabular-Iceberg 4mo agoI suspect accuracy of any IQ test falls off the further you get from 100 in either direction, so I’m not married to any global IQ dataset in particular. But they all show the same trend. All the politically and economically prosperous countries show as high and the basket cases show as low. And if you sit in on their political discourse it increasingly sounds like you’re in an open air mental institution. (Though regrettably that model has been losing a lot of predictive power in the democratic West lately).
- 10xDev 4mo agoYour whole argument is that low IQ leads to an undeveloped country rather than impoverishment leads to lower IQ. I don't think it is entirely one way. IQ is also only one (mediocre) signal you are putting a lot of emphasis on. India does not score well, yet it is clearly emerging and has very successful individuals from mathematics to chess.
- Tabular-Iceberg 4mo agoI don’t think it’s entirely one way either. Someone mentioned malaria-afflicted test takers before. Of course better healthcare leads to lower disease load, which leads to higher IQ, but it’s only a weak link, simply not leaving old tires with water strewn about the place is free.
- Zigurd 4mo agoThey 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.
- zeafoamrun 4mo agoAll the Polish engineers I've worked with have been top notch.
- CodeNest 4mo ago[dead]
- praptak 4mo agoAs 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. [0] https://lubimyczytac.pl/ksiazka/5124728/czesc-pracy-o-kulturze-zap-dolu https://lubimyczytac.pl/ksiazka/5124728/czesc-pracy-o-kultur...
- jvanderbot 4mo agoI always take minor issue with this. 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_.
- sdfhbdf 4mo agohandwork != hardwork ;)
- dakiol 4mo agoI 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.
- kuboble 4mo agoI'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.
- atraac 4mo agoI'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.
- ozim 4mo agoLooking at other comments it seems like your experience is less representative.
- chatmasta 4mo agoThey also enjoy 15% tax, through some arrangement I’m still not convinced is legal for IT contractors… But yeah, some of the most skilled and passionate engineers I’ve worked with have been from Poland and the surrounding countries like Czechia.
- rembal 4mo ago15%? With some legal footwork you can get to 10 or 5%, depending if you count general medical I surance as a tax or not.
- orleyhuxwell 4mo agoSo called 'IP BOX', but it's very rare, as most people consider it risky and it requires a lot of paperwork. It's also frowned upon a lot.
- atraac 4mo ago12% 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.
- orleyhuxwell 4mo agoThis 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).
- reubenlavin 4mo agoYes, 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.