>Russia is kinda actually like that. Tech usage is relatively good in Russia. Internet is cheap and fast, mobile coverage is good and mobile internet is relatively cheap, internet banking & mobile banking is better than most of Europe and USA. There's also such thing as "Gosuslugi" which is country-wide services internet portal and is actually pretty convenient innovation.

Yet, but the prime majority of all that wonderful digital cornucopia is being developed by underfed and underpaid devs with level of technical comprehension comparable to people called "jquery monkeys" in the West. By the time most of them reach late twenties, more experienced ones will move on to become professional devs abroad, another will, sadly, join the socioeconomic construct/caste of "going to nowhere 30 somethings." You guys in the West complain about age discrimination and skill obsolescence only by the time you hit forties, fifties, if not sixties, but here people hit the same stage much earlier. Companies do not pay for skill even 1/10th of what an American Dotcom would.

What makes a seeming difference in the level of quality is that experienced tech people are found more evenly distributed than in US where Dotcoms and well funded companies vacuum significant portion of any much senior developers on the job market, or in China where Alibaba and Tencent literally employ double digit of all tech workforce and almost all real talent. Here, the fact that a software developer is just yet another "nothing special" white collar occupation somehow, counterintuitively brings some benefit.

If you tried to make a point you kind of failed.

I make $40k after tax, in Russia, employed locally, and while that doesn't sound like much to an American ear, I've bought my apartment for $90k a year before. I seriously doubt anyone is going to pay me $400k before tax in the US as you suggested. I'm 32 by the way. And I never work more than 40 hr/week.

I don't see how you can underpay a dev in Russia. Maybe you can by hiring in really small and depressive towns? Or promising rocket science job?

>I make $40k after tax, in Russia

That makes you a rather expensive employee if the company hiring you actually pays your pension contributions, EI, medical bills, and other quasi-tax charges (which are much higher than in the West.)

24k a year is what a good grad can expect in a company that pays taxes in full. The full cost of employing such a guy will be right about $40k

In Estonia the employee doesn't have to pay any taxes what-so-ever. The employer is the one that pays taxes from your bruto salary, which is required by the law (health insurance, pension, etc). In fact most people, when negotiating salaries, simply ask for how much they want in NET, because nobody besides the company cares about bruto.

In Russia, you pay 13% in direct tax (deduced automatically) and also your employer pays an additional ~30% to health insurance, pension, etc.

It's frequent nowdays to be cited your salary before 13% tax.

Not sure it's much higher, I'd say roughly the same when you consider tax bracket and things like 401k. But sure, it's not cheap.