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Presumably we're talking about remote roles here, in which case this is nonsense. A Zurich developer is not worth more in a remote role than a developer in Wars

Presumably we're talking about remote roles here, in which case this is nonsense. A Zurich developer is not worth more in a remote role than a developer in Warsaw. The only reason large cities have inflated salaries is because that's what you have to pay someone for them to live within range of your fancy office. If it's a remote role anyway, the companies that aren't out to exploit you will pay the same salary band for all roles anywhere where they hire. Location-based pay in remote roles is a major red flag that the company doesn't reward merit.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago
Companies aren't moving to Warsaw to find the best talent in the world. That talent is mostly already in the super expensive tech hubs where the top software companies have flourished for decades and cross-pollinated creating a supply of experienced talent in the area. It's much more easy to find an experienced tech lead even remotely, around London or SF, than say in some village in Bulgaria or Poland because no F500 tech company ever came out of there. Companies like Google that have the infinite money glitch don't care about finding the best bargain employees, but most SW companies aren't Google.
- lolinder 2y ago
  I don't know that it ever was true that "the best talent in the world" is concentrated in the super expensive tech hubs, but it's absolutely not true any more post-COVID. It's largely a myth that's understandably popular among Bay Area types. What you do find a lot of in tech hubs is the type of people who move to tech hubs. This often means that in a certain type of company you get better "culture fit" by using a geographic filter (thus avoiding illegally filtering by protected characteristics), and you definitely get a higher percentage of people who are willing to structure their life around their career. And when you get enough of those people in a room together, they're certainly the types that will happily persuade each other that they represent "the best talent in the world." Software is a potent leveler—all you need is a computer and you're on equal footing with the rest of the world—and I find that the best programmers are the ones who learned to do it for fun and only later made a career out of it. Those people are equally distributed across much of the world at this point, and if anything there are fewer of them (as a percentage of job applicants) in the tech hubs because the tech hubs attract those who chose software for the money.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Let’s be honest, you don’t need the best talent to build yet another SaaS CRUD app or most of the maintenance work done in BigTech.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    Exactly. That's why you also don't need to pay US salaries or hire on the big tech hubs.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago

Companies aren't moving to Warsaw to find the best talent in the world. That talent is mostly already in the super expensive tech hubs where the top software companies have flourished for decades and cross-pollinated creating a supply of experienced talent in the area. It's much more easy to find an experienced tech lead even remotely, around London or SF, than say in some village in Bulgaria or Poland because no F500 tech company ever came out of there. Companies like Google that have the infinite money glitch don't care about finding the best bargain employees, but most SW companies aren't Google.

lolinder 2y ago
I don't know that it ever was true that "the best talent in the world" is concentrated in the super expensive tech hubs, but it's absolutely not true any more post-COVID. It's largely a myth that's understandably popular among Bay Area types. What you do find a lot of in tech hubs is the type of people who move to tech hubs. This often means that in a certain type of company you get better "culture fit" by using a geographic filter (thus avoiding illegally filtering by protected characteristics), and you definitely get a higher percentage of people who are willing to structure their life around their career. And when you get enough of those people in a room together, they're certainly the types that will happily persuade each other that they represent "the best talent in the world." Software is a potent leveler—all you need is a computer and you're on equal footing with the rest of the world—and I find that the best programmers are the ones who learned to do it for fun and only later made a career out of it. Those people are equally distributed across much of the world at this point, and if anything there are fewer of them (as a percentage of job applicants) in the tech hubs because the tech hubs attract those who chose software for the money.
scarface_74 2y ago
Let’s be honest, you don’t need the best talent to build yet another SaaS CRUD app or most of the maintenance work done in BigTech.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  Exactly. That's why you also don't need to pay US salaries or hire on the big tech hubs.