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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 av

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.