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Comment by machiaweliczny | Hacker News Reader

I was waiting for that as don't want to move my ass. I guess they want to poach some of Ukraine contractors (AFAIK lots of people work for around $50K with 5% tax there and they are quite good). Rates in Google Poland seem to be $7K/month which is upper market but you get 32% (+ recent 7%) tax >= $40K (progressive)). But it's much better if one needs mortgage.

It also helps that Warsaw Uni is quite good [0](13th this time but they are often 1st). I was scared to go there and be forced to study too much xD but seems like Wrocław Uni is also strong (5th). TBH if I knew better back then I would probably go to MIT instead (or maybe not).

[0] - https://icpc.global/worldfinals/results

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Google salaries in Poland are below market rate, actually. They probably think that people will come to work for them for free just because they want to have "Google" on their resume. Source: I was approached by a Google recruiter once, but did not even schedule an interview because of the lowball offer presented (total comp, including stock options, was way below what I make currently). $7k is not a market rate in Poland, unless you're talking $7k after all taxes.

You must be talking about some senior positions right? No one at my large corpo earns more than 15k PLN.

Yes, I was contacted regarding some Cloud Architect position, shortly after GCP opened their region in Warsaw.

Then you are being underpaid big time. These days 15k pln is a nice salary for a solid mid level backend engineer.

https://bulldogjob.pl/readme/frontend-developer-praca-i-zaro...

According to this article majority of people don't earn 15k PLN as a mid. I hope you are not confused with the range on job offers on the bulletins.

Average salaries from these types of aggregate reports are misleading since they are mostly representative only of the low-end local range. The median salary for senior engineers (5-10 years of experience) in Warsaw, according to levels.fyi, is 91k USD. I find that to match my experience in a different large city in Poland.

I am talking gross/contract to be clear and yes, senior.

I find it hard to believe that 7k USD / month would be a below market salary in Poland.

Depends on location and experience. 7k USD/mo gross is below market for senior/staff positions in larger cities.

And senior/staff people at Google don't get 7k either. This is yet again a case of myopic lense where someone can't see beyond their own special little island and does invalid comparisons.

Certainly, that's why I responded. Tech salaries are becoming bimodal (or even "trimodal" [1]), and different types of companies are targeting different segments of the talent market. This skews the perception people have on what is actually a market rate, so it's important to spread awareness...

[1] - https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

yep. I try to gauge early whether an potential employer wants the best programmer, or cheapest. because they pay wildly different. one gives me a better personal ROI than other. The new trend of shops being coy about telling you a job's pay makes it harder. no point wasting everybody's time

Surprisingly at the moment for senior positions in Warsaw it is:

Open positions offering more than $7k at the current exchange rates in Warsaw:

https://justjoin.it/warszawa/all/all/32k

Some are in USD.

Also, current exchange rate (4.5 PLN per dollar) is unusual, only caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Average rate over last couple years is probably 3.9 PLN, which would make $7k closer to 28k PLN, not 32.

There’s also lots of talent in neighboring Belarus, where Google indirectly has a presence through their acquisition of Fitbit (or had, not sure if their office is open anymore after the recent events in there). Sort of glad though that they didn’t decide to expand their small office they have here in Bucharest (also through the Fitbit acquisition), the local real estate market was getting quite heated regardless so extra gentrification brought by behemoths like Google extending their presence wouldn’t have helped.

AFAIK Google also has EPAM employees from Belarus as external contractors.

epam, akveo, luxoft... cheap workforce under authoritarian rule is too sweet to resist. Now kryndrylyl is trending, or whatever is its name.

Yep, lots of EPAM contractors working for Google

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