Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

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>I've noticed a downwards trend in almost all manners of living here over the past 10 years, and can't really see what any government could do to change course.

Everyone I talk to from several EU countries feels the same: today we're an a much lower point than 10 years ago. Hell, where I am now in Austria, the country is the only one in EU with a GDP decline compared to last year, and a stagnation like UK would actually be an improvement lol.

Salaries in general have barely grown since 10 years with inflation adjustments, but housing is up several times compared to 10 years ago. Those I know who bought houses around 2014 keep thanking their lucky star since they admit they wouldn't be able to purchase the same home at the value of today on their wages of today.

I think the situation in Canada is exactly the same or maybe even worse.

So nobody in the west that I know of, thinks the situation is better now than 10 years ago. UK is no different than the rest of the west but they have this feeling that they are.

> Salaries in general have barely grown since 10 years with inflation adjustments

I've previously opened offices within the EU, and this is one of the downsides (for you guys) of the single market - why should I pay "market rate" German salaries when I can hire someone in Cluj, Lodz, Brno, or Sofia in the €20k-40k range, and be given a €5k-20k per head tax holiday along with fairly low corporate taxes from these countries.

> I think the situation in Canada is exactly the same or maybe even worse.

Canada is also a resource economy, and they got hit by the commodity glut really badly over the past few years.

> why should I pay "market rate" German salaries when I can hire someone in Cluj, Lodz, Brno, or Sofia in the €20k-40k range, and be given a €5k-20k per head tax holiday along with fairly low corporate taxes from these countries.

It's not all about labor cost. For example some big companies opened large offices in Germany not because labor there is cheaper or smarter, but because they're the biggest regulator in Europe so hiring a lot of people there is a good way to gain political favoritism at EU level.

But yeah, if you want bang for the buck workers that take Jira tickets as input and churn out git commits, you can't beat eastern Europe.

> It's not all about labor cost

Agreed. But do not underestimate how high corporate taxes and employer taxes are in Western Europe versus the CEE.

> For example some big companies opened large offices in Germany not because labor there is cheaper or smarter, but because they're the biggest regulator in Europe so hiring a lot of people there is a good way to gain political favoritism at EU level

Not in my experience. We can open a 20 person sales office and hire an outside GovRel consultancy to manage that.

> But yeah, if you want bang for the buck workers that take Jira tickets as input and churn out git commits, you can't beat eastern Europe

In my industry (cybersecurity, enterprise SaaS, DevTools), the ecosystem is largely clustered in Czechia, Romania, and Poland because of Sevices and IT specific FDI policies back in the 2000s and 2010s to attract those kinds of investments.

You can't find hundreds of engineers with internal knowledge of K8s internals or windows internals from an offense standpoint the same way you can in the CEE countries I listed.

At this point, the entire cybersecurity, DevTools, and Enterprise SaaS ecosystem is clustered in (no ranking) Israel, India, Poland, Romania, and Czechia.

Are you hiring by any chance? Asking for a friend.

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