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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

From my experience, writing software in 3-rd world country is a reliable way to get out of the poverty. Some example numbers for Kazakhstan: average salary for many low-skilled labour workers is around $100-$200 per month. Average salary for junior software developer is at least $500 and you would quickly reach $1000 and very skilled developers might get $2000+ per month.

The same is true for Russia or Belarus or Ukraine, AFAIK. Wages are even higher there.

And I'm talking about building software for internal clients. Outsourcing or remote work allows for even higher salaries.

I'm not entirely sure why the market works this way. It's not like any random software developer can go remote and compete with the rest of the world. But it works.

I'd really be interested to learn whether Indonesian situation is similar or not.

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There is a lot of people from US here on HN so you should clarify that you talking about salaries after tax. E.g $1000 in Russia would be the same as $2000 in the US since employer pays 33-49% of salary as taxes.

In my home town called Rostov-on-Don (10th largest city in Russia) I have friends who make $2500-3000 after tax for their software engineer and devops positions. Some of these people are far from being a rockstar developers, just have well-paid positions at large companies. Average salary is somewhat lower, but it's still good money here since living costs are low.

PS: Family of 3 can basically live there for $1500 / month with rent, food and entertainment and if you single even $600 is quite sufficient.

Another interesting fact: if you're freelance software developer in Russia who work remotely for western company and register as entrepreneur then your efficient tax rate at most is 8% for fees and taxes. Then let's say 1% extra for banking and accounting, etc. So you basically keep more than 90% of income.

And there is even lower tax rate options available if you work alone and earn between $10,000-80,000 / year. You just pay fixed amount of taxes every year for special "patent" which cost e.g $400 / year in my home city. Then efficient tax rate gonna be like 1-5% depend on how much you earn. Though unlike when paying 7% of income this might require more detailed accounting since tax department can always ask you to show some documents. Officially "patent" allow you to pay $400 just once for income up to $600,000 / year but obviously in real life you gonna get some tough questions from tax department.

In any case tax rates for freelance software developers in Russia are very very low. Also unlike what western person might expect all government services are available online and accounting is no-brainer because Russia have some of the best fintech in the world.

Anyone doubting the fintech claim, have a look at this https://www-ft-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/content/38967766-ae...

TLDR: Russia's IRS/HRMC equivalent digitized VAT collection (similar to sales tax). Basically every 90 seconds all tills/cash registers across the country report back the sale to the taxman, so you don't even have to manually submit any VAT returns.

Russia started with 20% tax gap between revenue due and revenue collected (while e.g. UK is at 9.1%), and now after this they are on 1%.

My understanding it's almost real-time tax reporting with millions of tills acting as IoT devices sending data up.

Russia also have instant payments for consumers between all major banks which are free for first ~$1400 / month (100,000 RUB) and it's should be soon available for businesses as well. It's all run by central bank.

For fintech there is Tinkoff bank which is more advanced than Monzo / Revolut / N26 / etc as well as two "virtual" B2B fintech banks that even do accounting for entrepreneurs on their own. And to be honest even Russian largest state-owned Sberbank is far more advances than most of institutions in US and EU.

So as long as your business can't be forcefully taken away and there are no political risks it's quite comfortable to be freelancer when it's come to taxes.

As a developer in a third world country, I have to disagree that it is a reliable way for everyone. Not everyone has the programming skills, communication skills, confidence to reach out and negotiate for jobs above cost-of-living wages, and there is immense competition. Prospective employers will start out assuming you're not as good as programmers in the first world, you will get lowballed and the odd unscruplous employer will skip out without payment. It's a hard slog; not impossible if you're lucky enough to be born into better circumstances than others and have enough support to go the rest of the way; but definitely not something that anyone can do.

Out of poverty, but probably not into the incredible wealth that American software work can generate. For example, see the commenter saying their house is paid off and they can live off passive income. I’m not in a third world country so I don’t know for sure what salaries are there, but I find it hard to even imagine having so much money!

> It's not like any random software developer can go remote and compete with the rest of the world

This is actually becoming more and more of an option. At my last (small) company, we hired several individual remote developers from various parts of the world that most would consider "third world".

We were introduced to them via referrals from contract work done elsewhere, and we did a paid trial period at first.

Not all of them worked out, but the ones that did were quite good, and we were paying them an excellent wage for their cost of living.

> > It's not like any random software developer can go remote and compete with the rest of the world

> This is actually becoming more and more of an option.

To do this though, you generally have to know how to market yourself, put together proposals, gather requirements, design and project manage, on top of coding. Not every coder is good at this or wants to be.

This is not necessarily true. In a large enough organization you can have a lot of that done for you, and you just basically "pull tickets" (to be reductive about it) and deliver the work.

You have to be able to interview well of course, but do design and project management? I'm not talking about a freelancer who delivers an end-to-end project here, I'm talking about hiring a remote developer to join an existing team and deliver features.

It would be a bit higher in Indonesia, but not too far off. FWIW somebody earning $1500 USD/month, living in Jakarta, would be very comfortably middle class.

Couldn’t agree more. A fellow Kazakhstan native here with a similar sentiment.

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