>He’d been surprised to find that in at least one way he fit in: more than half the programmers at Goldman were Russians. Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: they had been forced to learn programming without the luxury of endless computer time. “In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes,” he says. “When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work. Consequently we learned to write the code in a way that minimized the amount of debugging. And so you had to think about it a lot before you committed it to paper. . . . The ready availability of computer time creates this mode of working where you just have an idea and type it and maybe erase it 10 times. Good Russian programmers, they tend to have had that one experience at some time in the past: the experience of limited access to computer time.”
Even while he was in prison he managed to code:
> A few months into Serge’s jail term Masha received a thick envelope from him. It contained roughly a hundred pages covered on both sides in Serge’s meticulous eight-point script. It was computer code—a solution to some high-frequency-trading problem. Serge was afraid if the guards found it they would deem it suspicious, and confiscate it.
That kind of discipline and meticulous thought is very hard to build in to someone who has never had these kinds of constraints but it is certainly an admirable goal.
[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol...