Timezones still play a huge part here as well. My team has several engineers who are at par compared to the rest of the team but they're a pain to work with due to a 10 Hour time difference.They may be paid 50% less but they're 50% harder to work with to no real fault of their own

Engineers in LATAM are increasingly popular for that reason; the timezone difference is about four hours from PST and about one hour from EST.

> Engineers in LATAM are increasingly popular

It's because of the tax holiday Costa Rica is giving [0][1][2], and VMWare's acquisition by Broadcom (they had a massive engineering campus in San Jose, Costa Rica) leaving a lot of Support Engineers and C++ Engineers on the market.

Czechia, Romania, and Poland did the same thing in the 2010s, Israel and India in the 2000s, and Taiwan and South Korea (in electronics) in the 1990s.

[0] - https://www.thegreenparkfz.com/

[1] - https://afz.cr/v5/en_us/about-us/

[2] - https://www.procomer.com/wp-content/uploads/Guia-Zonas-Franc...

50% of the price is quite nieve It’s much less than that. No health care no benefits no pension. No employer side costs, currency conversion to your advantage. 15-20 % is the number that makes it worth it. Bell Canada achieved under 10% in the early 00’s offshoring support to India

50% is often the number talked about in public while its much higher in reality as you are saying.

Numbers I work with are ~45k for a senior software engineer in Hungary, Spain, Italy, Greece vs ~85k in France, Germany, the Netherlands. Fully loaded cost (tax, insurance) adds about 20-30% on top in West. South and East are considerably less.

You can find even cheaper staff but you're still competing for talent. I can pay someone in South or East a premium against their market and still save big compared to an average salary in West.

This is ignoring any other benefits you have as employer in South and East. Try to fire or lay someone off in France - it'll cost you.

I think your numbers for France are off. When I tried to hire there last year the burden of employer taxes and levies was ~70%.

That wasn’t the part that killed the deal though. My employer’s real worry was around how hard they believe it to be to fire someone who isn’t doing well in France.

Saw Suncor try the offshore to India on their major app around 2014. Commit history a few years later barely changed.

The benefit of living in a HCOL area isn't just salary. If you own property you've been getting huge gains in value.

That's a loophole, though, hopefully it'll close in my lifetime