A personal anecdote. I know a pretty good PHP developer from Portugal who moved to Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine recently. He started dating a girl from there some time before and visited the country several times. So, when they decided to move in together he preferred to move to Ukraine himself since he could find a much better pay here. For a record, Dnipropetrovsk is not a capital but still a fairy large IT center (one of the top 5 cities) with about 2000 software developers employed in total (growing by 500 each year).

Ukraine might seem a surprising choice to somebody but the tax burden is generally much lower and as a result one can get a pretty good deal salary-wise. For example, right now I'm making significantly more in Kiev than I used to do in Oslo, Norway, which is considered to be a pretty lucrative place to work and live in Europe. The development community is pretty large and thriving. Large part of positions is in outsourcing but there are a plenty of product companies or research centers, too.

The company where I work now started hiring people form US and Western Europe. We are working on NLP systems and there's a lack of local talent with ML and AI skills. For example, we recently hired a machine learning specialist from Spain and we are very happy to have him on board. We also work with linguists from the US.

The world is sure a very different place now!