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Mix of both. You can't justify hiring a new grad for $130K when you can hire top tier mid-career talent in Warsaw, Cluj, or Bangalore for $50-80K and average m

Mix of both. You can't justify hiring a new grad for $130K when you can hire top tier mid-career talent in Warsaw, Cluj, or Bangalore for $50-80K and average mid-career talent for $20-40k In fact, companies like Infosys have begun adopting coding copilots en masse to reduce their own new grad hiring by 20%, but increase utilization rates from 70% to 85%. That said, most new grads were not getting substituted by Infosys freshers - they're getting replaced by mid-career H1Bs who were laid off during COVID and returned to the CEE or India Furthermore, a significant number of mid-career Eastern European and Indian engineers, PMs, and managers returned to the old country during the COVID layoffs due to visa status. A lot of those guys were rehired by their old companies to found GCCs abroad. Finally, state and federal governments in India, Poland, Romania, Czechia, etc provide tax incentives that reduce hiring costs by an additional $10-20k in aggregate.

ty6853 1y ago
80k in a rural area outside of Bangalore would be an absolute killing. The real hack here is to avail yourself of a digital nomad or engineer yourself an employment visa via some shell company and then live in the 3rd world while crushing the competition via 1st world education and language skills while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  > while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules There are significant insurance implications on an employer's side when dealing with employees remoting in random countries (first or third world). Also, you as a company cannot avail tax incentives if employees are digital nomads. For example, Czechia gives $20k per employee if you invest a couple million in office space, but conditions it with butts-in-seats.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    B2B. Use an employer of record type setup. You are an employee of a shell in the country you reside, the real 'employer' is just buying a B2B service.
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      That doesn't help with the tax incentives which is a major driver for why you are seeing significant offshoring. Plenty of major tech hubs in CEE and India give 80-100% tax rebates or PLIs to foreign companies opening and hiring locally IF they also mandate RTO in those offices. They tend to recover the cost through income tax and VAT.
      - ty6853 1y ago
        At worst your wage would be tax discounted by that margin. You're competing on real cost, all you have to do is operate on a competitive basis against people with similar level of education, skill, and the unfortunately highly valuable 1st world cultural and language integration. Might be racist but that is going to likely overcome the tax savings on some random guy of otherwise similar software skills in India.
        alephnerd 1y ago
        > Might be racist but that is going to likely overcome the tax savings on some random guy of otherwise similar software skills in India The model used by India is the exact same as that used in Romania, Poland, Czechia, Costa Rica, Israel, and other countries. Having a couple digital nomad contractors works fine for small organizations, but once you break the 300+ number, that's when you start seeing the kind of tax optimizations I mentioned above kicking in. > At worst your wage would be tax discounted by that margin. You're competing on real cost That's the point. Wages don't play a significant role inasmuch as the tax optimization. And that's where the issue kicks in at scale.

ty6853 1y ago

80k in a rural area outside of Bangalore would be an absolute killing. The real hack here is to avail yourself of a digital nomad or engineer yourself an employment visa via some shell company and then live in the 3rd world while crushing the competition via 1st world education and language skills while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules.

alephnerd 1y ago
> while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules There are significant insurance implications on an employer's side when dealing with employees remoting in random countries (first or third world). Also, you as a company cannot avail tax incentives if employees are digital nomads. For example, Czechia gives $20k per employee if you invest a couple million in office space, but conditions it with butts-in-seats.
- ty6853 1y ago
  B2B. Use an employer of record type setup. You are an employee of a shell in the country you reside, the real 'employer' is just buying a B2B service.
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    That doesn't help with the tax incentives which is a major driver for why you are seeing significant offshoring. Plenty of major tech hubs in CEE and India give 80-100% tax rebates or PLIs to foreign companies opening and hiring locally IF they also mandate RTO in those offices. They tend to recover the cost through income tax and VAT.
    - ty6853 1y ago
      At worst your wage would be tax discounted by that margin. You're competing on real cost, all you have to do is operate on a competitive basis against people with similar level of education, skill, and the unfortunately highly valuable 1st world cultural and language integration. Might be racist but that is going to likely overcome the tax savings on some random guy of otherwise similar software skills in India.
      - alephnerd 1y ago
        > Might be racist but that is going to likely overcome the tax savings on some random guy of otherwise similar software skills in India The model used by India is the exact same as that used in Romania, Poland, Czechia, Costa Rica, Israel, and other countries. Having a couple digital nomad contractors works fine for small organizations, but once you break the 300+ number, that's when you start seeing the kind of tax optimizations I mentioned above kicking in. > At worst your wage would be tax discounted by that margin. You're competing on real cost That's the point. Wages don't play a significant role inasmuch as the tax optimization. And that's where the issue kicks in at scale.