Hacker News Reader

Comment by PTheR | Hacker News Reader

What about Russia?

Here's a good article and the HN discussion about Russia. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1409194

Basically, you would probably want to stay away from it. You can find decent engineers there but everything else is terrible for business: corruption, taxes, banks, cost of living, visas, etc.

Thanks for your tip, I will read it. I've asked because I recently found a popular .Net webstore software called nopCommerce (I think it's even the most popular open source solution for .Net) from a startup located near Moscow.

Alas, Russia has not embraced Capitalism the way, say, Estonia has.

+1 for Estonia - even in the mid nineties they had already cleaned the whole country up. I recall that they even considered moving to an e-money system for all of its citizens.

Another (albeit rough) possibility is Ukraine, if only for cheap prices, cheap programmers, etc. However, there's only slightly better policies concerning immigration/visa policy (EU/USA can show up there with no visa for 90 days but then you have to leave for 90 days), and difficult language issues. So, even though I live there, I wouldn't recommend it for people without some link to the country already.

Ukraine is not bad for outstaffing to - the're a lot of US and EU companies doing so. Outsourcing business is about $300MM/year (http://www.bughuntress.com/files1/ITOUkraine2007.pdf). Internet is everywhere in Kyiv, cheap food, low rental prices, decent programmers for $25-40K/yr, nice city, no visa needed to come for up to 90 days. However establishing headquarters in Ukraine is bad idea because of totally corrupted government and local authorities. Also sometimes simplest things like getting money from PayPal to Ukrainian bank account unexpectedly appear very cumbersome to do. (Disclaimer - I live in Ukraine).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com