Soviet engineering wasn't sloppy. It was designed for robustness, loose tolerances and simplicity. It was well thought out design. In the same way that as much thought went into the cheap alarm clock than went into the Rolex watch, maybe even more so, the engineers just had different requirements.

It takes a lot of work to make cheap, low precision parts work together reliably. The Rolex has it easy, all the parts are precisely built at a great cost and everything fits perfectly. With the cheap alarm clock, you don't know what you will get, so you have to account for every possible defect, because you won't get anything better with your budget and the clock still needs to give you an idea about what time it is.

The parallel in software would be defensive programming, fault tolerance, etc... Ironically, that's common practices in critical software, and it is the most expensive kind of software to develop, the opposite of slop.

There's a narrative that gets passed around in physics circles about how the Soviets were better at finding creative and analytical solutions than Americans, because of the relative scarcity of computing versus intellectual labour resources.

It would make sense to me that a parallel mechanism could apply to Soviet engineering. If material and technologically advanced capital are scarce, but engineers are abundant, you would naturally spend more time doing proper engineering, which means figuring out how to squeeze the most out of what you have available.

> Soviet engineering wasn't sloppy. It was designed for robustness, loose tolerances and simplicity

aka "fitting".

I wrote a blog on why Soviet-style engineering is bad https://blog.est.im/2026/stderr-04