> You can also look at the proportion of field leaders. Are more from the developed nations or the developing ones?

Lower cost of living does not imply developing nation.

Czhech Republic or Poland or Taiwan are developed nations, all with the cost of living a fraction of Bay Area.

I see Ubiquiti dev center apparently moved to Latvia. You can argue it's a depressed region of the EU but it is not a developing country by any metric.

Latvia? That's home to Mikrotik, this sounds quite dodgy. Prolly it was a move aimed at draining some talent from them.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Czech and Poland, and while someone could argue they’re developed countries when looking at the wider gamut, it doesn’t compare well Canada, USA, UK, etc engineering talent.

A lot of the engineering talent you find there is extremely limited in quantity, but it is untapped.

Overall I think it’s a step in the right direction as compared to other countries we’ve outsourced work to, but let’s not pretend Poland is an exemplary ray of developed industry and society.

As somebody who founded and ran R&D-heavy companies in Czech Republic and in Bay Area - this is complete bullshit. Arguably the per-capita amount engineering talent is much higher in Eastern Europe, and it is untapped because the target market is small and there's lack of entrepreneurship tradition.

Sure, if you take 300M market like US and pool all the best talent to west-coast, there is a lot of engineers. But the market is saturated, and it's nigh-impossible to hire a team of the magnitude you can get in Eastern Europe. Canada? Oh please...

Well, if you look at teh rsults of the CS Olympiads, you will see Poland as teh 5th overall (http://stats.ioinformatics.org/countries/?sort=medals_desc)

Having worked (as a French) with dev teams over there, I can assure you they have a whole bunch of A+ devs and the market is very competitive.

Developed in "developed country" customary means certain things. Like a decent standard of governance, sanitation, education, healthcare, welfare and quality of life. All these countries I mentioned are roughly on the same level.

You don't have problems with access to clean water in Poland. You ain't going to die from hunger in Czech Republic. There are no issues getting education in Latvia.

And mythical Anglo engineering talent, please. They are approximately the same anywhere you mentioned.

I guess in reality the opposite can be said. In 'poorer' countries actually more folks want to work in IT or software. Hence a possible perception of a bit worse talent.

And i suppose it can become/seem important to embellish ones resume, to land a job and get "food for the day" for one's family -- if there's no functioning social welfare system

But I wouldn't think of the Baltics as such a place?

Instead, just hanging over the code and infra to new people, is risky in itself and can easily make security problems happen?

Look at the US health system and the declining life expectancy in the US if you believe that higher cost equals better.

Clearly false unless you think a fresh graduate in a high cost area is let's say twice as skilled as someone with decades of experience in a low cost area? Salary is a good proxy of bargaining power, not a good proxy for skill.

As a developer from a lower-cost country: all of this is true.

If living costs does equal quality code, most quality logically must be from Scandinavia. If that is fact or not I won't try to judge.

They didn't write "equals", but "correlates".