I am from an Eastern European city with a major outsourced IT industry, and I often associate with these IT workers and I visit their offices for local programming language or Open Street Map meetups. I don’t agree with your comment. Available hardware is fine. Benefits include generous private healthcare in addition to the universal public healthcare, as well as reimbursement for taxis so no one ever has to use public transportation or drive. For lunch, companies order good food from local restaurants. Furthermore, the employees all get the minimum holiday set by European Union and local law, and they do use it; I have never heard of a culture here of not being able to take holiday like in the USA. Yes, salaries are smaller than in the USA, but by local standards they are very generous and people are starting to complain about the IT sector pushing up prices of housing and restaurants beyond what most non-IT workers in this city could pay, just like your San Francisco.
I agree that local call centers, another big outsourcing industry, are exploitative. But devs? No. Maybe that is only further away, outside the EU. Within EU countries, if you don’t treat your devs well, they won’t stay; they will leave for Western Europe.
> remote product work 60K/year
60k USD gross anually in Ukraine? No. Sorry, but it doesn't exist. An unicorn salary, dozen of those lucky perhaps have.
duh! they left for Germany
Ruby
Python
PHP
Good Java middle can make more then good senior PHP
They can pay a fraction of what you would pay US based engineers, have more or less the same quality of work done, and still have happy employees.
Are you really comparing US market rate, which even varies inside the US, with that of Eastern Europe ?
Or are you saying that USD 40K is much below market rate in Eastern Europe ?
In the latter case I'll have to ask for sources, because my experience differs greatly.
The Eastern Europe "market rate" is lower than the US because cost of living is.
I assure you that people earning USD 40K in Eastern Europe have a quality of life comparable to their "market rate" paid US engineer (as people in the same thread are saying).
As quality of life improves (also helped by US companies paying above-average rates, compared to the local ones), so will wages and cost of living in general.
It's basic economics, it has nothing to do with "deserving" something.
If you expect US companies should pay US wages where the market rate is well below that, your expectations are simply not realistic.
It's the other way around.
But housing is much cheaper, and that leaves a lot of money left over to buy all those other stuff. In my Eastern European city, I can rent a three-bedroom house with garden for 300€/month. I probably would struggle to do the same with an IT job in Western Europe. Furthermore, it’s strange that you talk about cost of petrol, because IT firms here generally reimburse employees for taxi fares, so that they never have to drive (or use public transportation) unless they live unusually far away.
> Social security net and healthcare in Eastern Europe are awfully underfunded
Which is why most IT firms here attract employees with nice private healthcare.
This is not a major eastern European city, certainly not one where IT jobs are available.
> here attract employees with nice private healthcare.
These private health insurances are hoax. The only thing they cover is a consultation and high five with the doctor, for anything serious involving a stay in the hospital one fallbacks into public health insurance.
Cluj is Romania’s second city and home to buzzing IT sector. Granted, my house is a little farther away than the most popular suburbs for those wanting a whole house, but it is still possible to easily and fairly quickly commute into the city centre each day. Rents will rise even here at some point, but they haven’t yet, and for the IT sector (though unfortunately not for most local people) rises in rents tend to keep pace with rises in salaries.
> These private health insurances are hoax. The only thing they cover is a consultation and high five with the doctor
Getting even a consultation here from the public sector is unpleasant enough that an opportunity to freely visit the much nicer private clinic is a wonderful thing.
Honestly, these are quite extraordinary claims, subpar as Eastern EU social infrastructure might be, I cannot imagine large foreign companies cutting benefits and eschewing work practices that are required by local and EU law. If anything, in my experience multinationals tend to scrupulously follow regulations to the letter, sometimes paralyzingly so.
It's not like American developers are faring much better in those items you listed--offices have become crap, hardware middling, policiies, Ha! Whatever they can geta away with, typically mental torture. Benefits and time off have been historically good but are dropping, pure misery, you betcha!
In the conditions you described, it may be worth it to take a small pay cut to get away from a soulcrushing job that makes you question your existence. Money really isn't everything.
Why?
If x is the number of dev jobs available in the world, and 0.4x is the number of dev jobs that are not laden with bullshit...
I'm willing to bet the number of qualified devs looking for work is more like 0.8x, implying 50% will be SOL