
How communist Bulgaria became a leader in tech and sci-fi - sagamore
https://aeon.co/essays/how-communist-bulgaria-became-a-leader-in-tech-and-sci-fi
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velzevur
Bulgarian here. It is probably a long story but the IT industry is one of the
very few not-heavy-regulated here and it flourishes. There is a growing start-
up culture, companies are fighting over talants and people with various
backgrounds are just pouring in the industry. I know a few dosens of
architects, layers and medical doctors that made that step. Also a flat 10%
tax certainly helps :)

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growtofill
Is there a data on the average salary? Do employees forced to work as
contractors like in Ukraine?

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leandot
I don't work there but do know several people working in Sofia for startups or
corps like VMWare, SAP, etc. I'd say that you'd get about 2-2.5k euro net if
have 5+ years experience. Junior is probably 1-1.5k

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velzevur
Since the lack of talent is a huge problem, there are tons of _academies_ that
claim to be producing developers in just a few months. This generates a lot of
people with no experience, close to zero knowledge but yet eager to join the
industry. A viable strategy for companies is to hire as many of those as
possible, hoping that there are just a few diamonds there. That's the main
reason Jrs are terribly underpaid. If one prooves to have potential - it is
not uncommon to have a salary doubled in a few monthsm, otherwise other
organization might snatch the person.

I had interviewed a little more than a hundred people for regular and senior
roles only to eventually give up and train a couple of juniours.

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Koshkin
Interestingly [1], Bulgaria was a major supplier of computer tech to the
entire Eastern block. (I wonder if anything’s left of its technological
leadership...)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_in_Bulgaria)

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apatheticonion
Bulgarian here, my mother used to work in a factory that produced hard drives.
Specifically a company called DZU.

She told me about a joke the president made when they opened:

"Today we are proud to have developed semi-conductors, we look towards
tomorrow, when we will have full-conductors"

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Mediterraneo10
I am sure that your mother’s tale is apocryphal. A similar apocryphal tale
that goes around the former Eastern Bloc countries is a Communist official
boasting that his country “has now built the world’s largest microchip!”

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doombolt
Naturally, soviet microchip would have four pins and two handles to lift it
up.

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beerlord
I've been to Sofia. Its a good place to start a business and has the best
coworking space in Eastern Europe (look up Puzl Coworking).

Downside is that English is not at all widespread (except among the IT elite
and some young people), air pollution can be pretty bad, and there are
problems with street dogs. They use the Cyrillic alphabet, so you at least
have to learn that to get by.

Like most European countries you also have a byzantine mess of taxes if you
want to hire a worker or pay yourself. You also have royalty withholding taxes
if a US company pays you.

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abenedic
I have found from the opposite way that the English alphabet is not so
dissimilar to the Cyrillic. Once you get past that a bectop is a vector, and
everything is nearly the same. I find there is a vitality in the region that I
cannot find anywhere else, but it feels like living when I am there. I have
been to many countries in the region and they all feel close to home.

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acqq
> bectop is a vector

BEKTOP (K everywhere where you’re used to C) just like the use of B,K,P in
modern Greek, e.g. coma is κώμα rho is ῥῶ, B, βήτα (beta character) is
pronounced "vita."

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Eli_P
Pinkos or not, sci-fi writers have been emerging independently of latitude and
longitude just because of tech progress: Stanisław Lem, Boris Strugatsky,
Isaac Asimov.

I wanna share my tiny observation.

Typical USSR-originated sci-fi story tells you about space travels, space
ships, interstellar journeys, aliens, valuable resources discovery. This
aligns well with USSR and Russian space achievements and ambitions and fossil
deposits development, and treating cybernetics as a pseudoscience or just
funny crap.

On the other hand, non-pinko sci-fi is biased to soul, thinking machines,
different lifeforms, artificial intelligence, coexistence of human and robot.

Interestingly, the concept of Information Society emerged in Russian Empire
before revolution by Pitirim Sorokin[1], he was expelled from USSR to USA. He
wasn't sci-fi writer per se, but the point is the way of thinking renders
itself into everything including fiction.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitirim_Sorokin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitirim_Sorokin)

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int_19h
I don't think it's that simple. If you look at the Golden Age of Western sci-
fi, it was so full of spaceships and travels that a space rocket - as seen on
countless book covers - became the symbol of the genre. Western sci-fi was
also much heavier on aliens, and especially on conflict with aliens -
thousands of alien races bustling around is very much a Western trope with no
equivalent in Soviet sci-fi.

On the other hand, the closest sci-fi prediction of something like Wikipedia
was the Grand All-Planet Informatory from Strugatsky books, complete with an
index and search queries and pervasive use in day-to-day activities to "look
things up".

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deltron3030
I've associated Bulgaria with 3D rendering and graphics (V-Ray)

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rurban
And I'm associating it mostly with expert assembly masters.

The best early virus writers were all Bulgarian, esp. the advanced polymorphic
ones. With advanced electronics HW in the Eastern block I would mostly
associate the GDR (rev. engineered the 8086 and 80286>, and Russia, not
Bulgaria who did mostly only the peripherals. But in SW and hacking techniques
they outshined the GDR and Russia.

