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I disagree with you based on my personal anecdotal evidence. Our Ukrainian was paid the same (gross) as the Americans. The Viets too. There was no noticeable di

by crdb 12y ago

I disagree with you based on my personal anecdotal evidence. Our Ukrainian was paid the same (gross) as the Americans. The Viets too. There was no noticeable discount based on location. You get a discount for age (younger = cheaper; flattens out after 5-10 years), experience (probably why age is discounted), and things that are not politically correct to talk about but are very real effects affecting the labour market. Maybe my experience was biased by hiring for relatively specialist skills (Haskell, dev ops) which may make for more meritocratic markets.

duckingtest 12y ago
Probably the only developers that your company would hire are those that managed to market themselves as equal to Western ones, which are definitely far from average freelancers. Also, due to enormous cost of living and tax differences (~0 income tax in Ukraine) the same gross pay resulted in 2-3x times higher disposable income, so effectively the Americans were relatively underpaid, which is kind of funny.
- crdb 12y ago
  Or indicative of the crappy job market in the US for those specialist skills. The thing is, there's no such thing as an "average" developer. Every company and its tech stack has a unique set of conditions that will match better with some people than others. If your codebase is bog standard [insert popular framework], someone who has done it 4 times before, but couldn't make a relational schema because he doesn't know what an SQL constraint is and thinks functional programming is "academic ivory tower stuff" is going to be a lot more value adding upfront than someone with a PhD in category theory and 5 years AI experience; but the latter is the person you want building your search algorithm or trading technology. And then, as with academia, you have non-financial compensation; for example, we got a lot of people interested by offering Haskell jobs which are very rare today (at least in stable places); remote work was another plus, as many people have a comfortable situation and don't want to uproot their life for the sake of a new opportunity, and it allows people to arbitrage cost of living differences between cities. But Scala didn't work out for LinkedIn, which is rewriting all of it back to Java, and remote work didn't work out for Yahoo, so YMMV.

by crdb 12y ago

duckingtest 12y ago

Probably the only developers that your company would hire are those that managed to market themselves as equal to Western ones, which are definitely far from average freelancers. Also, due to enormous cost of living and tax differences (~0 income tax in Ukraine) the same gross pay resulted in 2-3x times higher disposable income, so effectively the Americans were relatively underpaid, which is kind of funny.

crdb 12y ago
Or indicative of the crappy job market in the US for those specialist skills. The thing is, there's no such thing as an "average" developer. Every company and its tech stack has a unique set of conditions that will match better with some people than others. If your codebase is bog standard [insert popular framework], someone who has done it 4 times before, but couldn't make a relational schema because he doesn't know what an SQL constraint is and thinks functional programming is "academic ivory tower stuff" is going to be a lot more value adding upfront than someone with a PhD in category theory and 5 years AI experience; but the latter is the person you want building your search algorithm or trading technology. And then, as with academia, you have non-financial compensation; for example, we got a lot of people interested by offering Haskell jobs which are very rare today (at least in stable places); remote work was another plus, as many people have a comfortable situation and don't want to uproot their life for the sake of a new opportunity, and it allows people to arbitrage cost of living differences between cities. But Scala didn't work out for LinkedIn, which is rewriting all of it back to Java, and remote work didn't work out for Yahoo, so YMMV.