I paid the company for their "work" and never considered outsourcing again. Sometimes cheap means horrendously expensive.

Out of curiosity and related to another HN topic, have you ever hired freelancers directly?

1. I got hardware electric engineer to help me with a design of PCB. Guy was worth every cent.

2. Got embedded developer on separate project. Guy pretended that he can do a lot. I tried to explain to him, that I need a USB CDC device driver in MCU which has USB PHY and I want Windows to recognize and use usbser.sys (generic COM driver) or something similar. He told me that he understand what he is doing, I sent him the dev kit and then he ghosted me and I have ended up doing it myself with TinyUSB.

So as I said, really hit and miss on Upwork. Some people are writing lofty skillset so they can get more per hour and then failing miserably.

So I feel like you may have just read the definition incorrectly (granted article could also have been more clear).

The thing is, you can't suppress the wages unilaterally for someone who knows how to do things. There's always going to be some other firm offering them a similar deal, with the same capital (equipment, IP, support, trading capital etc) for them to use. So even if you know they only need a tenth of what a Western quant needs to live well, you can't just offer them that, they will end up taking an offer very similar to what they'd get if they moved to NYC or London.

The $300 people are victims of supply and demand. Often it's cookie-cutter type contract work that many people know how to do, and the real problem they have as a supplier of that knowledge is how to get in the front of the queue to be the guy to help a western small-time entrepreneur build his website. When this is the case, the organiser, basically the owner of the outsourcing company, has all the negotiating leverage and sets the price accordingly.

The difference is that the firm with very specifically exploitable capital needs specific knowledge to operate that capital. You need devs with certain skills, and there's only so many of them, especially as your process gives a lot of false negatives. As such devs are rarely identified, you are wasting a lot of money not splitting the pie generously when you find one. I was talking to someone the other day and the agent told me there were 40 candidates interviewed for three roles, which is a huge amount as I had 5 one-on-ones plus a takehome.

Firms that don't really have anything special will not pay anything special, in relation to where the employee is based.

Implicit here in benchmarking globally is that you want the kind of devs that can move around globally. The engineers working at Vietnamese companies for $300/month aren't that.

Due to current events someone could say the dregs of reproductive rights include the USA. They’re not making a value judgement on the entire country.

I’ve worked with very talented offshore developers. They had good English, good CS knowledge, and good work ethics. Results were always crap anyway. And their number one complaint was always “they don’t tell us enough, and we have to guess things”.

It is very simple - cost of insurance. It is much easier to persuade a worker making $300 a month to leak company secrets than someone making $20k a month.

Plus workers in such countries may be incentivised (or have no choice but to do it) to spy on behalf of their government.

If your company is doing something remotely serious, you can be almost certain someone you don't want will get hold of your IP.

(Sorry I have to ask this) but what types of companies are you talking about?

Uber? Netflix? Spotify?

For those maybe, just maybe, the secret sauce isn't actually secret any more, it was simply cheap VC money subsidising all our rides/viewing/listening.[0][1][2][3]

[0] https://slate.com/business/2022/05/uber-subsidy-lyft-cheap-r... [1] https://financialpost.com/investing/investing-pro/investors-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/technology/farewell-mille... [3] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-uber-ip...

They produce better product.

When I studied in Vienna a fellow student of mine returned to Poland after uni because his wife wanted to & we both started our first jobs as juniors at the same time with comparable positions, me in Vienna and him in Gdansk. His salary was almost exactly 1/3 of mine & I don't believe there was any performance component to that, I was simply earning according to Viennese standards and he according to Gdansk standards.

Equating for standard of living (eg upper middle class) you'll likely be 3x in Vienna. Although I'm just guestinating on Gdansk, maybe it's a really expensive place.

Let's keep Vienna for comparison, but benchmark it against Warsaw (also substantially more expensive than the rest of the country). According to the data on Numbeo, "you would need around 2,562.64€ (12,036.56zł) in Warsaw to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 4,000.00€ in Vienna". Making Warsaw only 1.5x cheaper.

Gdańsk is probably in the top 5 most expensive ones (meaning cheaper than Warsaw), more or less at a level you'd expect from a city of that relative size (at roughly 450k inhabitants it's the 6th most populous in the country).

Dont worry, old tech will always tend to become cheaper. Once countries such as austria take the lead on new tech pay will follow. The us and uk have invested massively in modern technologies. Actually the uk started the trend with its industrial revolution and the us overtook it thanks to its size and dna engraved appetite for risk and innovation.

To increase your pay, austria would have to be less rigid and more open to risk. That will lead to the creation of more modern startups and more demand for your skills. Dont give into anti globalisation conspiracy theories as globalisation is benefiting austria by giving it access to vast markets. But since austria is mainly relying on old tech its now losing ground as it hasnt got much to sell.

Checked at one of known tour operators, for the same hotel and destination in the Caribbean, same duration and dates you will pay ~£2900 when going out from London and £4900 when going out from Cracow.

Things like tech products will also cost broadly the same.

Also engineers these days don't live like upper middle class (unless they come from such background). It's more like upper working class. Progressive taxation prevents workers from amassing capital and climbing the class ladder.

People from upper middle classes get paid in ways out of scope of progressive taxes designed to keep working class in check.

But that's my point - as you get more experienced your net salary levels by remoting and you have lower cost of living - you actually have larger discretionary budget for vacations.

>Also engineers these days don't live like upper middle class (unless they come from such background). It's more like upper working class. Progressive taxation prevents workers from amassing capital and climbing the class ladder.

>People from upper middle classes get paid in ways out of scope of progressive taxes designed to keep working class in check.

True as well, which is why moving to Western Europe never made sense to me - as a freelancer I get to claim most of my income as company profits - taxed ~20% locally - vs. ~50% if it was income tax. And I can afford private health care/kindergarten/schools so the shit public care isn't an issue either.

For example in the most recent PISA rating the average score of mathematics, science and reading is 513 for Poland (11th in the world) and 491 for Austria (28th place).

It's the work culture in smaller cities that'll probably make the population differences.

Disagree on "much higher standard of education" - even if Austria comes on top, it's just barely, not by a lot.

Definitely not an isolated case. Austrian tech companies generally pay shit and are usually pretty backwards and burocratic due to the management heavy culture from the 20th century factories (WFH is frowned upon and your time in the office is tracked instead of looking at employee output) and highly conservative culture in general (everyone still uses cash). Also they put far too much value in having advanced degrees from their local universities rather than looking at experience and practical skills, so you end up in credential inflation town with colleagues who scuff at your code or technical opinions, because they "have a PhD from TU Sturmfart, and you don't".

That explains why they have virtually no internationally successful local SW companies (unlike other small EU companies like Netherlands or Finland, or even poorer Estonia), and instead have just a bunch of mom and pop webshops, crusty ERP boyshops for local factories, and their outdated banking industry that can't even get stock trading and banking apps right and instead need to rely on the German Flatex and N26. Their only unicorn, Bitpanda, recently fired half the workforce, which they easily could because Austrian employees have virtually no protection against termination, so your employer can fire you without any reason with the 1-3 month notice period. The cherry on top is that non-competes are legal here and employers can choose to enforce them, which, as we know, is what made SV the cradle of innovation. /s I rest my case.

QOL is generally good there and you can live well there, provided you do anything but tech, ideally work for the state or government enterprises and coast till retirement on your inherited real estate.

There is a lot of inefficieny in the market, some of it inherent, some of it due to artifical constraints like location, but over time those tend to naturally get normalized. What I'm trying to say is that if it really were better for software to be built in Vietnam for 10% of the cost, that would just happen.

It may be that companies have not figured out this neat trick or it might be that there are some inherent issues with developing software based purely on the cost.

The end result is that many jobs don't get opened at all in Europe but the ones that do tend closer toward US rates as this is what they were planning to pay but could not find the one high cost head the manager wanted.