3 ms·

before Brexit - a decent number of polish people in the UK doing all types of work. after Brexit - noticed polish engineers didn't want to be in the UK

by dzonga 5mo ago

alephnerd 5mo ago
Tbf, SWE salaries are constant across much of Europe, so anyone who is working in CEE feels less of a pull to work in London as a line-level engineer for roughly the same salary as they'd get in Warsaw. Funnily enough, even Bangalore salaries [0] are catching up to Italy [1] and Romania [2]. As a founder, it's a different story though - London is hard to beat from an entrepreneurship and capital access standpoint aside from parts of the CEE with strong ties to to American VC due to diaspora ties. Edit: can't reply > dzonga Completely agree. I've O-1'ed plenty of European and British founders. But London is better than the rest of Europe from a raising perspective, which shows how bad the situation is in the rest of the continent. [0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater-bengaluru https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater... [1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy [2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania
- nikanj 5mo ago
  For the ~500 million people of the EU, moving to Frankfurt means taking a train there, moving to London is a whole headache of visas, permits and permissions. Founder visas are generally suffering from a chicken-and-egg problem, where only a successful company can sponsor anyone
  - alephnerd 5mo ago
    Sure, but the entire VC and funding ecosystem that London has is nonexistent in much of the rest of Europe. It's easier to raise rounds with better terms in London versus mainland Europe, aside from CEE where diaspora VCs in the US tend to step in to build the ecosystem. But even then the entire ecosystem pales in comparison to the US.
- steve1977 5mo ago
  > SWE salaries are constant across all of Europe Sorry, but this is wrong. Cheaper labor is pretty much the only reason for nearshoring from more expensive European countries to places like Spain or Eastern Europe.
  - alephnerd 5mo ago
    As I've mentioned before, I've had intimate experience hiring across Europe and at the 75th percentile and above, the salaries tend to be extremely close when comparing Western Europe and CEE. The difference becomes attitude. A German SWE wants a 9-5. A Czech or Romanian SWE wants to build the next JetBrains or UIPath. I don't want to hire the former - they're useless and a headache. I want to hire the latter.
    - cowboy_henk 5mo ago
      Pretty sure salaries at large tech companies are way higher in places like London, Zurich or Amsterdam than in Warsaw or Prague for example. Berlin may be closer to the eastern countries. It might help to discuss actual ranges instead of "intimate experience" so we can tell if your experience matches reality.
      - wqaatwt 5mo ago
        I think Zurich is in a slightly different league than London or Amsterdam in that regard but especially if you go down to the median and below (low taxes are helpful as well)
      - Squarex 5mo ago
        Zurich is probably in a league of its own. London next. But then it is quite similiar in Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Frankfurt, ...
    - steve1977 5mo ago
      I cannot confirm your experience with the attitude of the latter unfortunately (I can confirm the former though). Edit: But as mentioned, the near-shoring resources also were quite substantially less expensive. So you could say we bought cheap and we got cheap.
- Squarex 5mo ago
  The taxation is not though. It may be better working from Warsaw or Prague due to tax rules. In Czechia it's a sort of fake, but tolerated consultancy and self employment and I have heard there is a similiar status in Poland.
  - alephnerd 5mo ago
    The biggest drivers for tech employment in the CEE aren't those consultancies but American and non-European FDI. Edit: can't reply > Having 10-20% tax rate really helps though to have comparable or better pay rate to western europe with about 50% tax rate At the employer end, if we offer enough FDI Western European governments do try to match support and subsidies that we could get in CEE. Additionally, when investing in USD and used to American prices, it's a rounding error. The drive to the CEE was partially government driven, but is now entirely due to the domestic ecosystem - you aren't going to find talent with the right attitude (business minded and independent) in Western Europe anymore.
    - Squarex 5mo ago
      Having 10-20% tax rate really helps though to have comparable or better pay rate to western europe with about 50% tax rate.
  - victorbjorklund 5mo ago
    Yea. In Poland everyone is a contractor even if they are not in reality. This year Poland had started to indicate they will crack down on it though so a lot of companies are now turning their contractors into employees instead.
    - Squarex 5mo ago
      Wow, that sucks. Here in Czechia the politicians talk about cracking it down all the time, but in reality it is now more common than ever with no signs of stopping. Only higher execs at banks or in other regulated industries needs to have a normal employment contract.
    - 5mo ago
- dzonga 5mo ago
  but London VCs are poor quality compared to what you find in the States. having had my run around with London VCs - poor terms, slow moving (btw this is at seed stage) - it's better to bootstrap unless you're in deep tech (which London VCs can help out) bootstrap and either deal with US VCs once you have numbers to back you up - if you wanna redo & do the VC route.
- dukeyukey 5mo ago
  At the same time though, out of 6 developers, my team in London has two Brits (including me), two Eastern Europeans (Hungarian and Romanian), and two South Asians (Indian and Pakistani). My last team had two Poles and two Scandinavians (Swedish and Norwegian). It's been a _very_ long time since I've had a team that didn't have significant Eastern Europeans representation on it.
- steve1977 5mo ago
  > [0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater... > [1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy > [2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania Both Italy and Romania are at the lower end of salaries though. Compare to say Finland https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/finland https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/finland (almost twice) Denmark https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/denmark https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/denmark (more than twice) Germany https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/germany https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/germany (around twice) Switzerland https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/switzerland https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/switzer... (more than three times, although this is an outlier)
HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago
Poland has been booming for a long time even before Brexit. I think it was a latent force just waiting to be set free by Perestroika and free market forces. I'd travelled to Warsaw a few times maybe 20 or so years ago, and you could feel the vibrancy and energy in the air.
- inglor_cz 5mo ago
  Poles do have a business sense, much stronger than Czechs, I would say, and even stronger than Germans.
graemep 5mo ago
Before and after Covid. It made a lot of people (in general - not thinking about Poles in particular) think about where they wanted to live. it was a pretty bad time to be away from home, family, etc.
throw0101c 5mo ago
> before Brexit - a decent number of polish people in the UK doing all types of work. The comedian Omid Djalili (a Brit of Iranian descent) had a number of "Polish plumber" skits: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vppmzUZENfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vppmzUZENfc * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8mjzu0Runo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8mjzu0Runo
gib444 5mo ago
God I miss Eastern European tradespeople. British tradespeople in my experience are duplicitous, lazy, unmotivated, low quality, cocky and expensive.
wqaatwt 5mo ago
To be fair the gap has been tightening for quite a while and it’s likely that adjusted by living expenses it’s not that hard for those engineers to find higher paying jobs in Poland compared to the UK.
marek77 5mo ago
Why would they want to bear the burden of an "hostile environment" (as the UK Home Office named their policy towards foreigners) AND declining economic prospects due to an economic suicide they had no say in?
varispeed 5mo ago
This is because big corporations supporting Brexit figured out it will be better for their bottom line if they could source labour from wider pool and have it tied to visa. Something EU workers would never be comfortable with. Hence you had the so called Boriswave - an influx of workers paid below market rates supporting big corporations able to navigate Home Office corrupt system. Conservative party never told the public what it was really about - bringing in very much slave workforce to exploit - at the expense of working class and SMEs. By the looks of it, Conservative party will never recover from this betrayal and soon followed by Labour who decided to maintain the status quo.
- gib444 5mo ago
  Ding ding ding
- aembleton 5mo ago
  We could have issued visa to countries outside the EU before Brexit. There was no need to leave the EU to push wages down.
lo_zamoyski 5mo ago
I mean, it makes things more difficult, right? I think the bigger factor is that Polish immigration has effectively ended. We're seeing more Poles returning from abroad than leaving. With the prosperity and stability of Poland, coupled by living in your home culture, immigration is simply not that attractive. (Traditionally, much of Polish immigration was meant to be temporary. A good number of Poles stayed abroad and assimilated, because immigration tends to be "sticky".)
DrBazza 5mo ago
Before 2004 there used to be a decent number of antipodeans working in finance in London. After 2004, the numbers dropped noticeably. This feels apt: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
znpy 5mo ago
I’m not polish (but still european) and i wouldn’t go to the uk anymore. The UK used to be “the dream” when i was a teenager, now it’s the empty shell of what it used to be.

before Brexit - a decent number of polish people in the UK doing all types of work. after Brexit - noticed polish engineers didn't want to be in the UK

by dzonga 5mo ago

before Brexit - a decent number of polish people in the UK doing all types of work. after Brexit - noticed polish engineers didn't want to be in the UK

alephnerd 5mo ago

Tbf, SWE salaries are constant across much of Europe, so anyone who is working in CEE feels less of a pull to work in London as a line-level engineer for roughly the same salary as they'd get in Warsaw. Funnily enough, even Bangalore salaries [0] are catching up to Italy [1] and Romania [2]. As a founder, it's a different story though - London is hard to beat from an entrepreneurship and capital access standpoint aside from parts of the CEE with strong ties to to American VC due to diaspora ties. Edit: can't reply > dzonga Completely agree. I've O-1'ed plenty of European and British founders. But London is better than the rest of Europe from a raising perspective, which shows how bad the situation is in the rest of the continent. [0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater-bengaluru https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater... [1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy [2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania

nikanj 5mo ago
For the ~500 million people of the EU, moving to Frankfurt means taking a train there, moving to London is a whole headache of visas, permits and permissions. Founder visas are generally suffering from a chicken-and-egg problem, where only a successful company can sponsor anyone
- alephnerd 5mo ago
  Sure, but the entire VC and funding ecosystem that London has is nonexistent in much of the rest of Europe. It's easier to raise rounds with better terms in London versus mainland Europe, aside from CEE where diaspora VCs in the US tend to step in to build the ecosystem. But even then the entire ecosystem pales in comparison to the US.
steve1977 5mo ago
> SWE salaries are constant across all of Europe Sorry, but this is wrong. Cheaper labor is pretty much the only reason for nearshoring from more expensive European countries to places like Spain or Eastern Europe.
- alephnerd 5mo ago
  As I've mentioned before, I've had intimate experience hiring across Europe and at the 75th percentile and above, the salaries tend to be extremely close when comparing Western Europe and CEE. The difference becomes attitude. A German SWE wants a 9-5. A Czech or Romanian SWE wants to build the next JetBrains or UIPath. I don't want to hire the former - they're useless and a headache. I want to hire the latter.
  - cowboy_henk 5mo ago
    Pretty sure salaries at large tech companies are way higher in places like London, Zurich or Amsterdam than in Warsaw or Prague for example. Berlin may be closer to the eastern countries. It might help to discuss actual ranges instead of "intimate experience" so we can tell if your experience matches reality.
    - wqaatwt 5mo ago
      I think Zurich is in a slightly different league than London or Amsterdam in that regard but especially if you go down to the median and below (low taxes are helpful as well)
    - Squarex 5mo ago
      Zurich is probably in a league of its own. London next. But then it is quite similiar in Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Frankfurt, ...
  - steve1977 5mo ago
    I cannot confirm your experience with the attitude of the latter unfortunately (I can confirm the former though). Edit: But as mentioned, the near-shoring resources also were quite substantially less expensive. So you could say we bought cheap and we got cheap.
Squarex 5mo ago
The taxation is not though. It may be better working from Warsaw or Prague due to tax rules. In Czechia it's a sort of fake, but tolerated consultancy and self employment and I have heard there is a similiar status in Poland.
- alephnerd 5mo ago
  The biggest drivers for tech employment in the CEE aren't those consultancies but American and non-European FDI. Edit: can't reply > Having 10-20% tax rate really helps though to have comparable or better pay rate to western europe with about 50% tax rate At the employer end, if we offer enough FDI Western European governments do try to match support and subsidies that we could get in CEE. Additionally, when investing in USD and used to American prices, it's a rounding error. The drive to the CEE was partially government driven, but is now entirely due to the domestic ecosystem - you aren't going to find talent with the right attitude (business minded and independent) in Western Europe anymore.
  - Squarex 5mo ago
    Having 10-20% tax rate really helps though to have comparable or better pay rate to western europe with about 50% tax rate.
- victorbjorklund 5mo ago
  Yea. In Poland everyone is a contractor even if they are not in reality. This year Poland had started to indicate they will crack down on it though so a lot of companies are now turning their contractors into employees instead.
  - Squarex 5mo ago
    Wow, that sucks. Here in Czechia the politicians talk about cracking it down all the time, but in reality it is now more common than ever with no signs of stopping. Only higher execs at banks or in other regulated industries needs to have a normal employment contract.
  - 5mo ago
dzonga 5mo ago
but London VCs are poor quality compared to what you find in the States. having had my run around with London VCs - poor terms, slow moving (btw this is at seed stage) - it's better to bootstrap unless you're in deep tech (which London VCs can help out) bootstrap and either deal with US VCs once you have numbers to back you up - if you wanna redo & do the VC route.
dukeyukey 5mo ago
At the same time though, out of 6 developers, my team in London has two Brits (including me), two Eastern Europeans (Hungarian and Romanian), and two South Asians (Indian and Pakistani). My last team had two Poles and two Scandinavians (Swedish and Norwegian). It's been a _very_ long time since I've had a team that didn't have significant Eastern Europeans representation on it.
steve1977 5mo ago
> [0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater... > [1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy > [2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania Both Italy and Romania are at the lower end of salaries though. Compare to say Finland https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/finland https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/finland (almost twice) Denmark https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/denmark https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/denmark (more than twice) Germany https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/germany https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/germany (around twice) Switzerland https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/switzerland https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/switzer... (more than three times, although this is an outlier)

HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago

Poland has been booming for a long time even before Brexit. I think it was a latent force just waiting to be set free by Perestroika and free market forces. I'd travelled to Warsaw a few times maybe 20 or so years ago, and you could feel the vibrancy and energy in the air.

inglor_cz 5mo ago
Poles do have a business sense, much stronger than Czechs, I would say, and even stronger than Germans.

graemep 5mo ago

Before and after Covid. It made a lot of people (in general - not thinking about Poles in particular) think about where they wanted to live. it was a pretty bad time to be away from home, family, etc.

throw0101c 5mo ago

> before Brexit - a decent number of polish people in the UK doing all types of work. The comedian Omid Djalili (a Brit of Iranian descent) had a number of "Polish plumber" skits: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vppmzUZENfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vppmzUZENfc * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8mjzu0Runo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8mjzu0Runo

gib444 5mo ago

God I miss Eastern European tradespeople. British tradespeople in my experience are duplicitous, lazy, unmotivated, low quality, cocky and expensive.

wqaatwt 5mo ago

To be fair the gap has been tightening for quite a while and it’s likely that adjusted by living expenses it’s not that hard for those engineers to find higher paying jobs in Poland compared to the UK.

marek77 5mo ago

Why would they want to bear the burden of an "hostile environment" (as the UK Home Office named their policy towards foreigners) AND declining economic prospects due to an economic suicide they had no say in?

varispeed 5mo ago

This is because big corporations supporting Brexit figured out it will be better for their bottom line if they could source labour from wider pool and have it tied to visa. Something EU workers would never be comfortable with. Hence you had the so called Boriswave - an influx of workers paid below market rates supporting big corporations able to navigate Home Office corrupt system. Conservative party never told the public what it was really about - bringing in very much slave workforce to exploit - at the expense of working class and SMEs. By the looks of it, Conservative party will never recover from this betrayal and soon followed by Labour who decided to maintain the status quo.

gib444 5mo ago
Ding ding ding
aembleton 5mo ago
We could have issued visa to countries outside the EU before Brexit. There was no need to leave the EU to push wages down.

lo_zamoyski 5mo ago

I mean, it makes things more difficult, right? I think the bigger factor is that Polish immigration has effectively ended. We're seeing more Poles returning from abroad than leaving. With the prosperity and stability of Poland, coupled by living in your home culture, immigration is simply not that attractive. (Traditionally, much of Polish immigration was meant to be temporary. A good number of Poles stayed abroad and assimilated, because immigration tends to be "sticky".)

DrBazza 5mo ago

Before 2004 there used to be a decent number of antipodeans working in finance in London. After 2004, the numbers dropped noticeably. This feels apt: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

znpy 5mo ago

I’m not polish (but still european) and i wouldn’t go to the uk anymore. The UK used to be “the dream” when i was a teenager, now it’s the empty shell of what it used to be.