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Comment by higeorge13 | Hacker News Reader

Most HN posts always compare with FAANG jobs and salaries, while there is a whole different world out there.

For instance, in Europe and especially low-paid countries in the south or eastern Europe, i foresee zero chance that top talent will stay in their countries to be given low salaries for jobs with local/low impact. These people are already working or looking to work remotely to companies in richer countries (e.g. UK, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland) and are already profiting for this. I personally switched to a remote-only job and got the biggest raise of my career, with a salary that no local company can match unless we are talking C-level manager position.

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What's happening here is disintermediation - the employees in SEE and EE have realized that they can cut out the middleman (their local employer) and work directly with foreign clients. This makes the lower cost of living the employee's, rather than the employer's, competitive advantage. It also means that these local employers now have to compete on two fronts - for labor with their foreign competitors who have greater purchasing power and for gigs with their former employees who can offer the same services but with lower overhead.

The next step will be that these newly minted freelancers will realize they can charge more and raise their rates. Lower CoL is a huge advantage here - you can wait for months for the right gig to come along while your competitor in NYC can't. In the end, I think the rates in the WE and the US will drop all around the board while simultaneously rising in cheaper areas until an equilibrium is reached.

Sounds like a giant sucking sound of programming jobs departing to lower waged labors. Then higher waged laborers will need to lower their wages to compete.

Economists call that a comparative advantage and a net win.

If you’re claiming an equilibrium point will be reached, then I think the equilibrium point will be $40/hr for Senior, $30/hr for Mid, $20/hr for Junior.

I'm not so sure. Obviously, more competition means lower prices, but software has proven very resistant to that bit of conventional economic wisdom, with a few exceptions of course (namely, places with very high CoL).

I doubt that a large amount of programming jobs will be outsourced to cheaper countries. Having a good understanding of the problem domain in the same language and time zone as the employer is extremely valuable.

I guess that local extremes for wages in areas with high living costs like in silicon valley will drop when it's possible to work remotely. But I don't see why rates would drop across the board as long as demand stays high.

> Having a good understanding of the problem domain in the same language and time zone as the employer is extremely valuable.

Sharing a common language is not a problem at all, nor is sharing (or meeting) in the same time zone.

I'd point the exact opposite regarding timezones, in fact. Not sharing a time zone means you can post a question to get yourself unblocked at the end of the day, and you'll already have the answer waiting for you once you log back next morning.

I'm curious, what sort of salary range would there be for engineers in your country?

For Czech republic, based on seniority and skill level I would say between ~$2.5k and ~$7k salary per month before tax. But you lose like a half to the various taxes.

That's why you're supposed to be a contractor at that pay level.

In lot of cases that is illegal. Of course does not mean people do not do it.

It’s illegal if the employer has a local entity and could hire you as an employee and they’re your only gig, but if it’s a foreign company with no way to employ you in your country, what else are you supposed to do? Decline the job because of that? I don’t think that situation would be illegal because there is no legal alternative.

There's still a pretty large tradeoff by not being protected with labor laws.

What's the difference with being a contractor? You still have to pay taxes, right?

Probably the contractor gets to pay lower taxes than an employee.

You have to pay for two things: taxes and insurance. The taxes stay the same, but the difference in insurance is drastic.

Gross salaries for juniors is usually in the range of 20k annually, in certain companies or software (slave) houses even less. For seniors it should be around 40k. For lead or principals, even managers, around 60k. Consider that net salaries might reach 60% of gross for certain amounts and above (e.g. 60 gross is 36 net). And of course, these are anecdotal data, probably covering 99% of local companies.

My current salary which is close to 6 figures for a tech lead job would be an instant disqualification in probably every local company. To be honest, a few years back it would be a dream for me, unless i had to relocate somewhere. But now and for the next few years, i really cannot see how i can work onsite again in my country.

Are the amounts in your post in Euros or some other currency?

Correct, i forgot the currency. It’s EUR.

The rates in Poland have really risen as of recent (so has the inflation, but that's a different story).

There's a lot of offers in the 120-150 PLN/h (26-33 EUR or 31-38 USD) range; not long ago I had three offers from the top of this range to choose from, and I eventually stayed at my current place since they equalled this rate.

And yes this is wage per hour, because self-employment/B2B is highly popular in IT, for financial and fiscal reasons. After all the deductions, you'd pocket roughly 70% of it.

Once you factor the living cost in: eg. "you would need around 2,827.20€ in Warsaw to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 5,670.18€ in London (assuming you rent in both cities)" (according to Numbeo), it becomes pretty clear how living and working in Poland can be an attractive deal.

That's a bit less dramatic than I would expect; $37.50 USD/hour is the wage I made as an intern in San Francisco 5 years ago.

It's a bit more dramatic if you look at cost of living again as GP did. Numbeo again:

> You would need around 3,309.51$ (12,912.27zł) in Warsaw to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 8,500.00$ in San Francisco, CA (assuming you rent in both cities).

I mean from the employer's perspective. I wouldn't have expected a "cheap" foreign labor market to be anywhere in the range paid to US workers, but maybe like 20-30% of the cheapest US worker.

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