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Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

We've tried hiring in these locations (Italy and Spain) with some success, but it's pretty tough because the talent pool is so small. At some point, you weigh whether the lower cost of the salary is worth the extra time/effort spent adding headcount. Which is funny because we have no shortage of Italian and Spanish devs applying for our expensive European city offices. I don't know European urban dynamics that well, but it certainly seems to me, off the cuff at least, that Europeans want to live in high COL European cities as much as Americans want to live in high COL American cities.

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> We've tried hiring in these locations (Italy and Spain) with some success, but it's pretty tough because the talent pool is so small.

Are you at Facebook? Because local talent doesn't matter as much. It's not like the Dublin or London office relies on local talent. I've had tons of colleagues from Romania move there. And when they get there, there are a ton of folks from India, Ukraine, China, Estonia, whatever, a huge chunk of them freshly arrived from their home countries.

If Facebook would go to Spain and Italy, even in the more expensive cities, salaries would be so huge that they would completely dwarf the higher cost of living compared to the rest of the country. But places like Madrid or Lisbon would still be cheaper than for example, London. And with definitely better weather :-)

The point is high value DBA from those places do not want to get jobs in those places. They want to get jobs in high COL places like London because they are nicer places for young well off engineers to live.

I'd be super shocked if this were the case for, say, Barcelona vs London.

My guess is that the language barrier is the killer. Everybody in IT outside of maybe China and Japan learns English so London is kind of easy mode.

> Europeans want to live in high COL European cities as much as Americans want to live in high COL American cities.

Makes sense. There is a reason that its high COL

>We've tried hiring in these locations (Italy and Spain) with some success, but it's pretty tough because the talent pool is so small.

Is it a question of language skills, technical skills, or both?

maybe because people on those countries are not idiots and they know they will be paid better if they move to northen countries?

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