> their offices, available hardware, policies, laughable benefits, annual leave, create a perfect package for miserable professional and private life

I am from an Eastern European city with a major outsourced IT industry, and I often associate with these IT workers and I visit their offices for local programming language or Open Street Map meetups. I don’t agree with your comment. Available hardware is fine. Benefits include generous private healthcare in addition to the universal public healthcare, as well as reimbursement for taxis so no one ever has to use public transportation or drive. For lunch, companies order good food from local restaurants. Furthermore, the employees all get the minimum holiday set by European Union and local law, and they do use it; I have never heard of a culture here of not being able to take holiday like in the USA. Yes, salaries are smaller than in the USA, but by local standards they are very generous and people are starting to complain about the IT sector pushing up prices of housing and restaurants beyond what most non-IT workers in this city could pay, just like your San Francisco.

I agree that local call centers, another big outsourcing industry, are exploitative. But devs? No. Maybe that is only further away, outside the EU. Within EU countries, if you don’t treat your devs well, they won’t stay; they will leave for Western Europe.

Absolutely. I also live in an Eastern European country with a large (and growing) IT outsourcing industry, and from my experience here, that statement couldn't be farther from the truth. These companies are some of the best employers in the country, with far above-average benefits, salaries and work conditions. Of course, some are worse than others, but that's true for any industry.

? Total misinformation. As applicable to Ukraine salaries are US salary - US tax -(20-30)% take into account cost of living and special tax treatment (3-4%). Workday is normal workday and not some unknown number of hours offices are way nicer then in US minus the usual suspects (Google FB etc.). You get way more time off plus there are like 3X official holidays in Ukraine. Running recruiting biz. on the side we had real trouble finding people for senior java dev. remote product work 60K/year (tax rate 3%) + all the usual benefits good candidates wanted 70K.

Another cool thing about Ukrainian market due to competition interview to job offer is generally few days often offer is made on the spot and you will have in person interview most often same week you applied. Another cool feature all recruiters have bonus structure so they created informal skype channel where they "trade" candidates and then split bonuses. So even if you were not a good fit for a particular position or company their recruiters will often find you an appropriate position in a different company :)

> As applicable to Ukraine salaries are US salary

> remote product work 60K/year

60k USD gross anually in Ukraine? No. Sorry, but it doesn't exist. An unicorn salary, dozen of those lucky perhaps have.

To reiterate we had trouble hiring at that rate good senior Java engineers. Not sure what you are basing your opinion on I lived and worked there for over 10 years including running my own company and working for other companies. I also know good number of founders/owners of the top outsourcing outfits.

> good senior Java engineers

duh! they left for Germany

Some did, but they did not win as far as after tax $, it's mostly for better infrastructure and security. At the time we were trying to fill the positions a large UK based company closed down dev. office in Ukraine they had 120 dev's about 40 were senior scala/java within 1.5 weeks only one was without a new job he didn't take 60K offer either as he got a better competing offer.

Compensation is also heavily tied to the stack Java & C# -highest (outside of niche things)

Ruby

Python

PHP

Good Java middle can make more then good senior PHP

"Java pays the most" is the curse of the industry. That's why we have plenty of these dull corporate Java projects possible to setup only in Eclipse and people neurotically sticking to them with a hope for this fat salary.

Given that USD 40K is a pretty decent salary in most of Southern and Eastern Europe, as other people have pointed out, US companies tend to be pretty good employers, and why not ?

They can pay a fraction of what you would pay US based engineers, have more or less the same quality of work done, and still have happy employees.

These are salaries much below the market rate. The same companies oftentimes have massive profits in these countries, profits which are tightly funneled out through IE/NL/LU/British overseas regions.

"These are salaries much below the market rate."

Are you really comparing US market rate, which even varies inside the US, with that of Eastern Europe ?

Or are you saying that USD 40K is much below market rate in Eastern Europe ?

In the latter case I'll have to ask for sources, because my experience differs greatly.

So Eastern Europe deserves low salaries? Mind you - cars, clothes, petrol, electronics there are more expensive (sic) than in US and cost the same as in more developed EU countries. Social security net and healthcare in Eastern Europe are awfully underfunded and are more comparable to American than to those from more developed EU countries.

We (actually you) are talking about "market rate".

The Eastern Europe "market rate" is lower than the US because cost of living is.

I assure you that people earning USD 40K in Eastern Europe have a quality of life comparable to their "market rate" paid US engineer (as people in the same thread are saying).

As quality of life improves (also helped by US companies paying above-average rates, compared to the local ones), so will wages and cost of living in general.

It's basic economics, it has nothing to do with "deserving" something.

If you expect US companies should pay US wages where the market rate is well below that, your expectations are simply not realistic.

This sounds like a recruiter/HR person/manager: "in Germany we would have to pay you 60-80k EUR, in the country you are currently in 40k USD is generous... why? look at Numbeo - it cannot lie!"

> The Eastern Europe "market rate" is lower than the US because cost of living is.

It's the other way around.

> Mind you - cars, clothes, petrol, electronics there are more expensive

But housing is much cheaper, and that leaves a lot of money left over to buy all those other stuff. In my Eastern European city, I can rent a three-bedroom house with garden for 300€/month. I probably would struggle to do the same with an IT job in Western Europe. Furthermore, it’s strange that you talk about cost of petrol, because IT firms here generally reimburse employees for taxi fares, so that they never have to drive (or use public transportation) unless they live unusually far away.

> Social security net and healthcare in Eastern Europe are awfully underfunded

Which is why most IT firms here attract employees with nice private healthcare.

> three-bedroom house with garden for 300€/month

This is not a major eastern European city, certainly not one where IT jobs are available.

> here attract employees with nice private healthcare.

These private health insurances are hoax. The only thing they cover is a consultation and high five with the doctor, for anything serious involving a stay in the hospital one fallbacks into public health insurance.

> This is not a major eastern European city, certainly not one where IT jobs are available.

Cluj is Romania’s second city and home to buzzing IT sector. Granted, my house is a little farther away than the most popular suburbs for those wanting a whole house, but it is still possible to easily and fairly quickly commute into the city centre each day. Rents will rise even here at some point, but they haven’t yet, and for the IT sector (though unfortunately not for most local people) rises in rents tend to keep pace with rises in salaries.

> These private health insurances are hoax. The only thing they cover is a consultation and high five with the doctor

Getting even a consultation here from the public sector is unpleasant enough that an opportunity to freely visit the much nicer private clinic is a wonderful thing.

Do you have source about post communist programmers being exploited by American companies and presumably unable to change job?

The other opportunities are not any better. Better opportunities are in more developed EU countries. It's a perfect environment for corporate America to thrive in. You will not find any exploited programmers there because the signs of underperformance are picked up early (mid level management is so efficient!), the employee labeled as "unhappy", and let go. There are only fulfilled and happy people working there.

You still didn't provide a source, so you may as well be pulling this out of your ass.

Honestly, these are quite extraordinary claims, subpar as Eastern EU social infrastructure might be, I cannot imagine large foreign companies cutting benefits and eschewing work practices that are required by local and EU law. If anything, in my experience multinationals tend to scrupulously follow regulations to the letter, sometimes paralyzingly so.

The super efficient middle management in EU companies is even more extraordinary claim then the exploited poor eastern European programmer.

Middle management is oftentimes remote, in another EU country with higher salaries and job security (Sweden, Germany, Netherlands). "Efficient" is sarcastic - meaning more "manipulative" and "micromanaging".

Out of curiosity, are you talking about Accenture? Cause they have quite bad reputation around here ...

Thomson Reuters did this using Belarus. Any systems in "maintenance mode" get sent to code monkeys in former Eastern Bloc nations. The quality is fair, but a lot better than what happened with India (sorry, India, I still love some of you guys, but the frustrations have left deep scars, too).

It's not like American developers are faring much better in those items you listed--offices have become crap, hardware middling, policiies, Ha! Whatever they can geta away with, typically mental torture. Benefits and time off have been historically good but are dropping, pure misery, you betcha!

What quality are you expecting?! The salaries aside, the policies (VPN only with permission, only Windows allowed, problems with remote working, getting paid to sit on chair 9-5, some weird virtual machine setups motivated by "security") are killing creativeness in the most talented people.

The complaints being so specific, it feels like you're having some discontent with your workplace and feeling that you're trapped there because "there's nothing better out there anyway." Well, don't despair, look around more, you might find that there are places you could actually like.

In the conditions you described, it may be worth it to take a small pay cut to get away from a soulcrushing job that makes you question your existence. Money really isn't everything.

I agree with you, but unfortunately not everyone who is qualified can work for a good employer.

Why?

If x is the number of dev jobs available in the world, and 0.4x is the number of dev jobs that are not laden with bullshit...

I'm willing to bet the number of qualified devs looking for work is more like 0.8x, implying 50% will be SOL