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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I am wary of the "gosh look how cheap we can hire developers in $latest_broken_country_with_maths_education"

Managing teams across distance and cultures is hard and requires commitment - commitment that seems to vanish when hard things happen - remember when hiring programmers in Ukraine was a no-brainer? How many development teams got pink-slipped and how many got airlifted out with their families? Which one is showing the commitment ?

I applaud andrei512 for his entrepreneurial edge and desire to bring some of the world's cash to his home town.

But I wish that all those companies seeing 10% of cost of a London team will have backbones in a years time. I doubt they will. Backbones are expensive and these guys are looking for cheap.

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Thank you! But I'm not offering cheap developers. I'm one of those kids who started coding by himself at age 10 and did really good at coding contests. I have a lot of friends like me. I can hook you up with one of them :)

edit: Also my plan isn't to bring cash to my town. My plan is to give power the real hackers of my town. Companies charge about $100/h and pay about $10-$15/h back to the developer. Money is already pouring in - it just goes the wrong way...

edit2: Yes. Romaina is a broken country. Cluj is not like that. I would have moved a long time ago if that would not be the case. Cluj is actually the only city in Romania that is growing in population.

  > Companies charge about $100/h and pay about $10-$15/h back to the developer.

Hurts to see this, but it's the sad truth unfortunately.

That's actually the same in most places with agencies, money are pouring in but doesn't go to devs. It's just the numbers might be higher in other countries. What you're doing is awesome, keep it up.

I'm from Cluj-N and I disagree with your following points: - "real hackers". I guess if you mean torrenting and refusing to pay for software products, then yes. - "Cluj is not broken". You need to take a walk through the city. Ahole drivers, bad infrastructure, bad services. Did I mention ahole drivers?

I think you might be from the bad part of town... where all the bad drivers and pirates where moved.

I usually rent an office 10-15 minutes from where I live so I can walk to work. No need to get in traffic or find a parking place and blame the system...

If you don't like Cluj then why didn't you move to Berlin, London, Amsterdam?

I am as wary as you of offshoring in general, but Romania is not that "broken". It has problems, yes; it's still quite poor, yes; but it's a relatively stable part of the world, raising very limited interests from movers and shakers (unlike the Balkans, Ukraine, Egypt or Israel, places with problematic geopolitical intersections).

> But I wish that all those companies seeing 10% of cost of a London team will have backbones in a years time.

To be fair, it's not a given that even London teams will have backbones in a year's time, given current property-price pressures and the easy access to global markets that London grants to local talent.

In that sense, the cold calculation is that you can pay £100 and have a 80% chance to have a backbone next year, or you can pay £10 and have a 50% chance; is that 30% extra worth 90% of costs to you? It's a legitimate question, and the answer might not be the same for every company.

That is a good point - the exact figures are devateabke but yes, thank you

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