In Ukraine it can not be inflated by definition as there is basically 0 vc money. The companies are profitable and are paying market rates.

isn't a lot of the outsourcing connected to western markets and that very VC money?

i think it's all connected you'll find.

I'd say very little of that work is for startups it's more for large financial companies, large established software companies, telecoms, hollywood etc.

Even in my limited consulting experience, it's not uncommon at all for a sizable org to have a small team in Ukraine.

A couple of times, even though that team does not have an officially important role, you would see stalls on major decisions until the remote team had a chance to weigh in.

> In most of the US outside of the major cities it can be a struggle for experienced engineers to break 80K

A senior dev can make 80k USD in India (before taxes) working for American, non IT services companies

Why wouldn't you just work remote and solve that problem?

This is what I chose, but there are some tradeoffs: there was a biomedical engineering in Cincinnati, OH company who recruited me that I interviewed with that wanted to hire me (and I was very interested in the work seeing as it was stuff that I did but in another field), but they wanted me work onsite…

After a couple of more years working remote, I may just go work for another lab again because its not too hard to find very interesting work, but the pay sucks (for non-degreed folks).