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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

Krakow is a big tech center, is in the EU, and it's not obvious why moving jobs there would have anything to do with a drop in quality.

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It's not about Krakow per se. But when a company works towards specific targets like "90/10 supplier offshore ratio", rather than metrics based on quality or efficiency, I don't think quality comes first.

I agree with you on that. But I had to stick up for Krakow!

Relax, it's better if everyone thinks Krakow (and Poland) is a "third world shithole". Nobody's worried about it until it's too late :D

On the one hand I've never seen a successful project with non-colocated teams, whether 300km away or 10.000km away. On the other hand, I'm surprised a airplane company is so much localized in UK.

Basecamp

Any distributed startup. There are thousands.

if the offshored personnel work via a bodyshop then the incentives are completely different compared to direct employees, and the resulting work is considerably lower quality (at least in my experience)

if offshored personnel are direct employees it's a completely different story

given the main cost saving comes from being able to "ramp the size of the pool up and down to meet demand" most large companies opt for the bodyshop solution...

replace a long established (expensive) team on a complex app who know all the bear-traps with an offshore team of rent-a-coders with a 6 month average turnover rate but at half the price - wcgw

What makes Krakow inherently better than say, Bangalore?

Not snark, just asking.

Much more friendly timezone (1 h from London, 6 h from East Coast). I'd also say the accent is easier on the ears, but I might be biased since I'm Polish ;) Also, it only takes 2-3 years on average in Polish civil courts to resolve a dispute (as opposed to supposedly decades in India) - in case you want to sue your services provider.

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