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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.