Damn, your post came across as extremely crunchy. I get that you think all of us on the west coast of the US are expecting $XXXk a year, but that both is and is

Damn, your post came across as extremely crunchy. I get that you think all of us on the west coast of the US are expecting $XXXk a year, but that both is and isn't the case depending on where & what you do. For example, in Seattle F5 Networks will pitch a fresh out of college grad somewhere around $85k a year, whereas most other firms will pitch them $10k higher minimum. That being said, you have groups like Uwajimaya who pay their IT people on the order of $40k, and expect them to have comparable skills to what the aforementioned companies expect. Not saying that it isn't unreasonable to tell indie devs they should bundle the incidental costs (cabling, office supplies, etc) and plan for non-consumable items to outlive the current project, but its just a matter of how you present those costs ultimately if you are pitching your first project. Onto international developers, yes, you definitely shouldn't limit yourself to high cost US based locations if you can avoid that limiting factor, but many managers & organizations are just not up to handling remote working, hence why Google, Adobe, Aliyun, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are all actively sucking up every bit of talent they can hire in this market right now. They need these employees stateside and ASAP, either due to legal/compliance requirements or due to their own organizational reasons. If you don't want to compete against them, there are great Russian devs you can hire for $12k a year, while also having much better local & international connectivity than many other locations (Manila, anywhere in India, China, etc). I would not try to touch most of those locations having dealt with connectivity issues in the past, just not worth the hassle to save a few grand a year, only to deal with PLDT providing substandard connectivity that is forced to have a 300ms penalty tacked onto it for transport outside their network.