I had been optimistic about Krakow becoming a big tech hub, but the Polish government's shift toward authoritarianism makes that less likely.
It is also a lovely city to visit, which is always worth bearing in mind when it comes to where companies might open a satellite office...
At the diploma mills that are Polish universities. Google was unable to scale up in Poland for a decade. They opted for creating marketing & accounting offices in several Polish workforce hubs, while the man who organized Krakow tech office has resigned in frustration over mainship's final shelving of any plans for expansion in that space. Likewise the Warsaw tech office is mainly for the few smart people who don't want to leave for family reasons.
Students from the very few quality CS programmes emigrate in droves. Polish ministry keeps record of graduates entering national workforce and from the good programmes as much as 80% are missing.
Outside these, quality quickly falls off a cliff, even from the same school (Krakow local AGH has no less than 5 departments offering CS degrees).
Just last month a typical scandal in academic circles emerged where former president (rektor) of AGH advised a PhD thesis in CS that was plagiarized from another that itself turned out to be fishy. Moreover the reviewers from the more prestigious Jagiellonian University plagiarized verbatim their own reviews (and they were reviewers of both somehow). Things happen, but the main scandal was the body overseeing higher ed in Poland refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing. They've set up schools there to be diploma mills in the first place.
AFAIK, the problem with Krakow was not with lack of good programmers, but organizational setup - too many PAs in too small office.
My point being, teaching from an early age, while is an advantage, does not necessarily mean a good comprehension or ability to speak.
Edit: sausage fingers
The situation is terrible for many reasons but major 2 are ancient coal/junk heating (people won't upgrade to eco-friendly heating because most of them are dirty poor and their main problem is to find a cheaper coal substitute for next winter) and Germans flooding us with used diesel cars with particulate filters long not working (or removed). There is a lot of talk about CO2 but this is long term danger while used diesel cars are poisoning us right now at massive scale.
Source: I lived in Kraków for 4 years.
Another problem is GDPR. It sounds like the life of European startups is going to get much harder.
One potential upside is EU funding. Having used both VC and EU funding I am not sure if it's really worth it, even if it's equity free.
In case of Krakow I would rather worry about the awful air pollution. What you hear about Polish politics is a political war resulting with plenty of nonsense media content produced.
The decline shown is between 2016 and 2017. Trump wasn't President. Any decisions to attend in the US would have been considered well before it was even clear he would have a serious chance of winning.
There are two likely reasons for that dip. First, the cost of university education in the US is quite high. Second and in tandem with the first issue, countries like China that formerly would have sent a lot of students to the US, increasingly have the education systems and infrastructure - along with the post education opportunities - in place to retain their own talent pools.
Trump was, in fact, President well before the 16 April — 15 November period covered for the 2017 data.
> Any decisions to attend in the US would have been considered well before it was even clear he would have a serious chance of winning.
But would have had ample time to be reconsidered after he won, and even after the initial implementation of the travel ban.
> There are two likely reasons for that dip. First, the cost of university education in the US is quite high
That was true I've the 2012–2016 period of increase, too, it didn't change between 2016 and 2017.
> Second and in tandem with the first issue, countries like China that formerly would have sent a lot of students to the US, increasingly have the education systems and infrastructure - along with the post education opportunities - in place to retain their own talent pools.
That also didn't dramatically change between 2016 and 2017.
What did dramatically change between 2016 and 2017 was the visible attitude of the U.S. public and government to foreigners.
Yes?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/08/polish-mps-pas...