"On board quality - I paid a High School/College kid in Sri Lanka to do the board; I will give him your feedback." the most beautiful thing i'll read today.
In other words, they aren't making six figures and yet still sharing a 2 bedroom apartment with 6 other developers.
It was inspired when me and my dirty, sweaty, budget beer-drinking buddies were hanging out at a 7/11 with a foreign engineer we had just met. He said he wanted to go to the club, we were like "dude cover is pretty expensive, let's just drink our 50 cent beers." He did a quick count of us, then said "ok, I'll pay for everyone's cover."
Rent was 250USD a month, 100mbps internet 20 USD... this on top of the fact that you're getting nearly equal healthcare because all the doctors are US school trained anyway, way better public transit (trains are automated! and CLEAN!!). I mean, it's the dream.
Just kidding haha. I mean their main language is Mandarin, so that can be a challenge, even though tons of people speak English.
If you want to work in a Taiwanese company, you may have to deal with a really shitty arbitrary work culture. Sitting on your phone till 8pm cause it looks good, such bullshit.
It can get absurdly hot in the summer, 40c levels, with high humidity, and usually you gotta get your own AC installed unless you're in a super new building (few places have central AC). Also taifun (how do you spell that in English...) can be really intense. Also the mosquitoes are a fucking nightmare.
If you're a vegetarian, forget about it lol. Nobody there understands or really cares. You'll only ever be able to eat at foreign restaurants which pretty much restricts you to Taipei or maybe kenting.
Hmm other than that it is literally paradise to me. Whatever you want is an hour train ride (for one USD) away. Surfing, hiking, bicycling through mountains, rock climbing, art meetup things, entrepreneurship stuff, hackerspaces, hackers... It's such an amazing country.
Oh you do have the constant fear that north Korea or China will nuke you.
> If you're a vegetarian, forget about it lol. Nobody there understands or really cares. You'll only ever be able to eat at foreign restaurants which pretty much restricts you to Taipei or maybe kenting.
This is NOT the case. Compared to mainland China (where it's like you say), Taiwan didn't have a cultural revolution and therefore more of the local Buddhist culture where veganism is strong. At most places when I say I am vegetarian or vegan they will ask me if I eat onion and garlic (since local Buddhist vegans will often not eat those either). Of course you'll find nothing vegan in a beef-noodle restaurant. It's not like in the west where all restaurants have at least one lacto-ovo-vegetarian option on the menu, but there are still plenty of options.
There are cheap local vegan restaurants littered across the city. Just look for the 素 sign.
I would also add pollution to the downsides, if you're near or in a big city. Nowhere NEAR as bad as cities in the mainland, but on the bad days you can definitely feel it.
Taipei is going to be SUCH a nicer place once most scooters are replaced with electric ones.
Taiwan is essentially a first world country at a discount. Their populace is largely well educated (last I checked at 99% literate) and there are tons of engineers and entrepreneurs for me to engage with.
It really is just a different class of country.
i have a side hobby of machining. i will only buy taiwan or german equipment.
You can get buy with just English but you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't spend your time picking up Mandarin. There's often free classes, plus everyone is friendly.
Here, I found some of my old blog posts. The articles are relatively short and go over some of the details:
http://taipeitips.blogspot.com
http://ablate.blogspot.com/2014/05/what-does-it-cost-to-live...?
Regardless, I was based in Taipei for about 1.5 years and if you just adapt your lifestyle it's still definitely doable to even save a significant portion of a $2k salary. Rough calculations below assuming a single person on a conscious but not frugal lifestyle:
* Rent: ~10000 NTD per month if you're not sharing (you can still find decent places for cheaper). This will put you central enough to have easy access to everywhere but not smack in Da'an.
* Food: ~8000 NTD per month
* Transportation: ~4000 NTD per month
* Other: ~20000 NTD per month
That leaves > 30% of your salary left over. If you regularly splurge on coffee shops and western-style bars and restaurants (all of which are relatively ridiculously pricey) you will have less of course.
I am guessing that in 2 months you might still have had a more of a "tourist life-style" (eating out at expensive places, paying much more for accommodation than if you have a proper contract or own your place, going to work at Starbucks, etc).
It's kind of ridiculous just how much of a luxury coffee shops really are. One coffee at hipster cafe will be more than twice of a good meal at the delicious vegan buffet next door.
Median salary in Taipei is somewhere around 2k USD IIRC.
I love Taiwan and only reason I left was relocating for building a team in Europe.
Just going to put this here for people who are interested: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Taipei
In short, my expenses were under 1,000usd monthly.
Like the other person that replied, I did that by not really eating out often, not going to foreign restaurants, and choosing cheap activities, which Taipei has plenty of. Rock climbing was 30c at the gym, hiking was free, a day trip to fulong for bicycling was like five bucks total. Etc.
So yea, putting 50% of income away to savings isn't exactly ideal I guess (we're supposed to do 70% right?) Hence my plans to move back as an engineer.
Edit: in hindsight, I don't know how the fuck I was spending 200$ on groceries lol. That's how much I spend here. I could definitely optimize that budget. Probably wasn't leveraging the morning markets enough and buying too much Nutella or something.
Have you presented your developers the opportunity to move to higher cost of living area for in increased salary (or vice versa, supposing you pay some developers much higher wages and you deem this a good deal)? Just because discriminating on geographical location is widely accept practice we should not pretend it is OK or worse, feel good about it.
https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...
In other words, salaries are set by supply and demand in that market, not by the arbitrary value that one might assign to a specific job.
So I should feel bad for paying employees above market rate in their area and giving them a better life than they could ever get by getting a local job? Sorry, not going to happen (me feeling bad about it, that is).
Do you think everyone should pay San Francisco salaries to developers no matter where in the world they live? Seems absurd.
How one should feel about discriminating people slightly less than socially accepted is indeed complex and somewhat up to taste, I can give you that.
On the flip side, I've also had more very bad experiences with outsourcing overseas and communication barriers. Cultural differences are often underestimated, and without dedicated oversight/management things can go off the rails pretty badly. It really depends on a lot of variables.
I have mixed feelings about globalization myself, living in a higher paying country for the work I do. But I don't fault anyone for offering or taking a good wage for one's circumstances. I just wish it worked a bit better for the consumer in some protective markets (medications mostly, but others too).
How do you know they were underpaid?
It's cheaper for me to have boards made in Colorado than in Santa Clara, and I'm certain the Colorado workers are paid less (the parts come from Digit-Key either way). Would you consider your statement true in that case too?
They amount paid (whatever it was) might have been enough for a nice lifestyle in Sri Lanka -- perhaps more so than the Colorado case.
[1] - https://twitter.com/oe1cxw/status/950083493073178625?lang=en
(Or... perhaps they weren't refurbished/reused, and we just discovered one manufacturer's test image?!)