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Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

Freeze? Both me and my friend from a previous project were recently approached by G's recruiters in Poland.

I wasn't pursuing new roles at the time, but my friend figured he'd try and found that the recruiter's calendar was filled up to the brim.

He asked what's going on and she replied that she has KPI to fulfill and this is the result. He followed up with a question about compensation and got a number which was... very close to the current market rate.

This is a major shift in policy comparing to just three years ago and with Poland being a popular outsourcing destination I suspect that this is what's happening, especially that due to the Russian invasion there's additional talent from Ukraine in Warsaw.

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We are indeed still conducting interviews (I had one just on Friday). Whether that transfers to actual offers extended during this time, I have no idea.

What I can say we are absolutely not doing at this time is rescinding offers, even for new grads.

There certainly have been some shifts over the past year or two to prioritize growth in cheaper markets (for lack of a better term) -- one manager I talked to mentioned that the headcount tradeoff was basically "one engineer in Mountain View, or 3-4 in Warsaw" (which is an accurate reflection of the salary disparity).

"We" being...?

(Without country the anecdote is not meaningful in this context)

Sounds like Google given the reference to Mountain View.

Are Googlers in general okay with the idea that their contributions are worth 1/4 as much if they live in Warsaw?

By then accepting their contract, yes?

if it's the best offer you can get, would you quit just because someone else on another continent is being paid more?

> contributions are worth 1/4 as much if they live in Warsaw?

Under the "free market", compensation isn't some objective number etched into a tablet somewhere in the universe. Instead, it is the result of market forces.

If they’re not they can apply for a transfer after 2 years to Mountain View and they’ll get it, unless US Immigration vetoes it. I hear the Zürich office pays pretty well too and if you’re Polish I believe immigration is very easy as they’re EU citizens.

Yes, usually rationalizing it as "but it's cheaper to live in Warsaw", which is true. That being said it is a reflection of market reality, where some (many) people are definitely unwilling to move for 4x the salary. This doesn't of course mean that SV is "4x worse", but rather is a pricing of their other activities/personal relationships.

There are definitely issues with Google's comp system, but the fact that pay depends on location is IMO not unreasonable.

Especially so given that there's often a lot of flexibility with regards to location.

For example, I chose to relocate from London to Zürich (without changing teams/project). I did it for quality-of-life reasons but the comp also increased quite significantly, even adjusted for cost of living.

And I am not some special snowflake: everybody around me who wanted to be based somewhere else had their relocation requests approved.

Pre-Brexit?

Post-Brexit. Why?

Same here. Approached by FAANG.

Judging from my perspective as a manager of a large department, I never ever experienced such a thing as an hiring stop. It always translates into tighter processes for approval, that's all.

For example Finance laid off thousands of workers years ago - however they were hiring IT stuff.

After all, great staff is still the most important factor aka resource.

> FAANG

It's MANGA now :P

Interviews are very different than hiring. They still cost the company money but not as much as headcount. Some companies still interview when they figure out the long term strategy. This is consistent with the article describing Google’s behavior.

When companies lay off recruiters you know the cuts are longer term.

When you say the compensation was very close to the current market rate, I assume you mean the market rate in Poland, correct? No fancy Silicon Valley salaries for devs in Poland, that is.

Polish salaries are maybe not SV high but they are climbing. $100k USD/year plus for a contract engineer. Not cheap.

The number my friend got was considerably less than that. Very concerning.

Of course this is all hearsay. I don't know how real that figure is, but it's not particularly inspiring so I don't see why would anyone lie about it.

The comment above mentions a contract engineer, so a consultant, presumably. Maybe the salaries are lower for regular employees.

Yeah can’t comment for local employees of local companies. Just have knowledge of UK & US companies hiring/outsourcing to Poland. It was cheap, not so much anymore.

Did you calculate in the weak Zloty into that sum?

remote contractor == likely paid in USD

Exactly.

If PLN depreciates against USD (as it has this year) and the contract is USD denominated (which is simpler for Google so likely the case) then you'll have actually received a gradual payrise!

Google in Poland doesn't pay in USD. Why would you think they want simpler solutions?

I left G in Ireland about 4 months ago for a fully remote position at a startup. Up until then, G's Polish salaries were low even by Western European standards (which is ~ >= 1/2 of SV pay).

In my opinion this makes sense, what would be the incentive to hire there if wages were the same?

If you're struggling to find talent anywhere, why not hire in Poland?

As a Polish engineer, we all know that companies are struggling to hire anyone. If you think you can hire a local instead of me for the same money, good luck. From my perspective, if I'm delivering the same value as someone from another country I should not be paid less. My cost of living is my own business, whether it's the lease on a car, the number of kids I have or, in this case, the country I choose to live in.

Part of the hiring in cheaper countries is the possibility to exploit the wealth disparity and cut costs, sure. But in case of remote IT jobs, IME it's more of a fact that companies can't find anyone so they'll hire from anywhere, including cheaper countries. Doesn't mean that the employees should let themselves be played though, it's a seller's market after all (for now).

I'm no expert and try to judge based on what I personally experienced, and I get your point. But I also know this is not how businesses operate. Having seen it from the inside, hearing those conversations, I know business decision makers would rather hire somebody locally than from abroad (from different jurisdiction) - if overal cost of hire was the same. But if you can get the same work done and pay less, then this is objectively worthy thing to be done. I have seen huge corporation pivoting towards outsourcing everything to India (software development, accounting, customer support, everything) because it was way cheaper than run those centers locally. This is becoming less and less fruitful since India had seen their wages going up in the past years, so at some point this trend may reverse.

I bet there are others who have different and maybe more grounded opinions, I only share what I experienced myself.

Oh, I absolutely agree – there is an overhead to hiring remotely (especially if you need to operate another business there, like Google does in Warsaw), so if you have to pay someone the same and cover that overhead then it's a bad business decision to do this at all. Timezone/cultural issues also come into this.

So yeah, I'm not surprised that businesses (try to) do this – but in the current situation it's worthwhile (and possible) for the hires (especially contractors) to try to go against that and argue for higher pay. Even if the actual SV salary is not within reach, you can at least try to stay within the same order of magnitude – and more often than not, especially at the end of the interview process, it'd be cheaper for the company to hire you anyway than to start over with someone else.

That's all in my narrow experience of working with smaller companies – in megacorps with strict levels/salary rules like Google it's probably another story. And that's also why Google is not (any longer?) the holy grail for Polish workers.

I’ve worked with a Polish dev team (in Wrocław). They were really great. However, for the same price I’d much rather work with local people. The Polish people we worked with came to California for months at a time. Being in the same time zone and room was really helpful.

Their English was generally good, and what they lacked in spoken English was usually made up for in good written documentation. But the time zone means remote work not as valuable (same goes for our English colleagues).

I'm curious did you move from Poland to Ireland then for the salary bump? I'm guessing Google Ireland pays similar to Google SV, is that correct?

Lol. No they dont for l6-l7 ull get 200k TC a bit more if u negotiate well. For ny Ill get 500k. Trust me nyc is not twice as expensive as dublin paris or london. Also in usa they will give me 401k and free healthcare. In france or dublin ull get almost 50% tax and u will put money into a public pension that you will likely never see and that is shit

Yes, the local market rate.

Your bog-standard senior role clocks in at $65k, but that's something you can get around here without going through many hoops. From a company with such an infamously convoluted hiring process I would expect no less than $90k - apparently that's not the case here.

Fancy Silicon Valley salaries are naturally out of the question. Highest number to date in my social circle was $150k/yr - a brief, beautiful moment for one senior front-end developer working remotely as a contractor.

I'm contracting remotely out of Poland and $150k-$170k is definitely doable, especially if you're willing to work for an US company (and adjust to their timezone a bit).

I'm curious - are you an American yourself?

Nope, native Polish. Never really lived outside of Poland.

If you don't mind me asking, what's your legal setup and way of landing US contracts? Most I've seen require a US-based legal entity (which is the tricky bit I can't figure out, as to the best of my knowledge there's no way to set one up without having existing ties/citizenship in the US).

I've contracted remotely for 10 years with US companies while living in different countries. I've never had a US based legal entity and it hasn't been a problem. It does make things slightly more complicated for them though and I'm sure that I lost some potential contracts due to this. In some cases (HK company while living in Asia), not having a US legal entity is a huge plus tax-wise.

To my knowledge you pay for invoices, you are not actually hiring. It's quite similar to buying other goods from abroad (like cheese, or printer ink). There are plenty US companies 'hiring' in Poland, where in reality they don't really hire- they come to agreement to buy your time with no tights.

I just have a company in Poland, sign a contract with US company and send them invoices every month (which, to my knowledge, they don't really always even need?). I don't know how it's set up on their end. No one yet has asked for a US-based entity.

As to finding them, I've found some here on HN in Who's Hiring thread. One of them (I'm a notorious job hopper, so there were many) found me on LinkedIn.

The "employee" creates a single-person company in Poland (or any other EU country, I guess) and sends invoices monthly. Honestly, it's trivial to set up. I'd say it's even easier than the standard employment process in the EU.

it depends on the EU country. this would be illegal in france for example, considered a "hidden employment contract" (which it is)

How is it solved in France then? I dont' think it's possible to have an trans-national employment contract (which labor laws would the contract observe? The French ones or the US ones?). So, how do French people work remotely for US companies? I don't think most countries' laws are set up for a situation where a company employs a worker that does not live in the same country.

I wouldn't take namday's comment at face value without some kind of citation.

It could be that it works similarly to Croatia - it's not illegal, but if you are found to be "a hidden employee" you simply owe taxes and retirement/healthcare contributions as if entire income of your single-employee company was your salary.

It could be that it's actually illegal in France. But many people are confused about how it works here in Croatia, so it wouldn't surprise me if it were the case in France too.

I completely agree with what you say, it depends on the specific setup (specifically, whether a judge will consider that it was an employment relationship). My statement was in response to someone who was clearly describing an employment relationship:

> The "employee" creates a single-person company in Poland

Yes, I was also referring to a scenario where you create a single-person company and have a single source of revenue from a de-facto employer.

Is it really illegal in France or do you just owe more taxes/contributions than if you had multiple clients (which would allow you to take part of the revenue as company profits, instead of having to channel it all as a salary)?

Looking at your comment [0] it sounds like it might not be illegal (provided you pay the required taxes/contributions)?

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32320422

It would be illegal in France to do it without declaring yourself as an employee, and therefore paying contributions . “Illegal” as in if you get caught you’ll get a fin and back-taxes, not jail or anything

OK, so it sounds like it’s possible in France too, you just need to employ yourself (and then pay employment-related contributions). In Poland, this is a little simplified, as there’s a company structure called “single-person company” (I’m sorry, this is my own translation of the term, it’s probably not the best) which combines these two things (i.e. after creating this type of company you pay social security for yourself, without any extra employment contract).

There are two legal ways to do this:

1) The company opens a branch in France, with as director and sole employee the person in question. Employment contributions are collected on the money that the French branch pays to its (sole) employee. Very simple to set up, does require a bit of work from an accountant for the yearly accounts (I'd say to budget about 1kE/year)

2) The employee joins an IT contracting company that already has a commercial presence in both countries, they will take 10% of the take (known as "portage salarial")

> I dont' think it's possible to have an trans-national employment contract (which labor laws would the contract observe? The French ones or the US ones?)

Those contracts are of course possible and exist - although rare due to paperwork hell you need to go through. The labor law of the employee's country is observed and they usually need to handle pension/health contributions on their side. In most of EU at least.

It is true though that most EU countries also demand that you open a local subsidiary once you have a certain amount of employees there (~5-10).

Not sure about France, but in Poland, if you’re sending invoices to an entity that has no presence in Poland, is not incorporated there, has no offices etc, it can hardly be legally seen to be a legal “employment” relationship.

But, assuming the situation above, even if it is illegal (which I strongly doubt), so what? What can the system do here to you? Will it jail you or fine you, or otherwise stop you, the worker, for “illegally” working on a wrong type of contract? After all, it cannot do anything to the company, as it has no jurisdiction over it.

> What can the system do here to you? Will it jail you or fine you, or otherwise stop you, the worker, for “illegally” working on a wrong type of contract?

It can charge additional taxes and pension/healthcare contributions (which is how it works in Croatia).

What could happen to the company: is that the Polish government or courts could deem the foreign company to be illegally operating in Poland (by virtue of employing you through a hidden contract), and require the company to set up a local legal entity, make corporate filings, pay taxes, etc. Or else pay fines. Or else get banned from operating in your country. You may also be entitled to rights under local employment laws regardless of what it says in your contract, which could also lead to the company being fined or banned.

What could happen to you: you get billed for the unpaid taxes and payroll contributions you should have been making. And possibly charged penalties or even fined for tax evasion.

Depends on the country’s specific laws and their government’s willingness to pursue things like this.

> require the company to set up a local legal entity, make corporate filings, pay taxes. Or else pay fines.

They can require it all they want, but if the company has no presence in Poland, they cannot actually make them do so.

> Or else get banned from operating in your country

Which is fine with many companies.

> You may also be entitled to rights under local employment laws regardless of what it says in your contract, which could also lead to the company being fined or banned.

Sure, but entitlement under local employment law is worthless against company in a different jurisdiction.

Sorry, I’m not really sure what you’re trying to add here?

Yes, the foreign company can obviously decide to ignore the Polish government. As a consequence they will have to stop employing all their “contractor” employees in Poland. If they’re happy with that situation then… congrats to them?

They will not have to do anything of the sort. The can continue to buy services of the Polish resident, and pay their invoices. The Polish government cannot and will not do anything to the company.

What it can do, however, is that it can go after the worker. Is the government of Poland so vindictive to actually go after individuals who commit a crime of working for a foreign company?

Based on many of my friends having this exact arrangement for years, I think the answer is, in fact, no: they happily send invoices every month, get paid, and (less happily) pay taxes and ZUS contributions. It all works out just fine.

In France (and Germany too apparently), if you are found out - usually by a random tax audit - they will ask you to back-pay employee and employer contributions on the money that you received (so about 60% total)

the issue isn't really the company, as you pointed out, they are not in France, they're not subject to French law. The issue is that as a French tax resident, if you are meeting the criteria for employment (single company representing more than 80% of your revenue, everyday work relationship that is based on subordination etc etc), then you have to pay employment contributions

Why? For the same reason as every other mandatory insurance. If everyone who has a stable, well-paying job is skipping out of employment contributions, it makes the contributions for the others even higher, pushing more people out of the system etc until you have no-one left with employee protections

It sounds like if the single member company invoices the foreign company and then pays you as an employee, with all the payroll deductions, that's fine?

That seems reasonable, the only thing is that you have to compare the foreign company invoice rate as a gross payment to salaries offered by domestic companies which are generally quoted as net payments? As I understand it, European salaries are usually quoted fully net --- you get exactly that amount, in contrast to US salaries which are mostly gross, there are a lot of deductions that start from the quoted amount, but some that are employer side and not usually quoted.

indeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32320295

european salaries are usually quoted "semi-gross" (or semi-net, according to your optimism). there is an arbitrary distinction between employer contributions and employee contributions, the figure you will be given is after the former, before the latter. and always before income tax of course (because that isn't solely based on your salary)

As a datapoint, in Germany it is not considered "hidden employment contract" unless it is more than 80% of your income. I could imagine some similar rules in France, but I do not know.

An alternative way that probably works in France too is to have a limited company and invoice from that.

ah yes of course, if it really "one of many" jobs it's fine in France too. What I understood from the conversation was people trying to do this for a "100% job"

Yeah, I have a few friends who reached this level of compensation working remotely. It's a nice life - I can't say I'm not envious. I had to travel to Switzerland and deal with the costs of living there to have such a rate and the project was timeboxed.

Interestingly nowadays you don't need to work for a US client. Switzerland, Norway and Ireland(out of all places) offer similar salaries without the zombifying difference in time zones.

Isn't Ireland stuck in 5-figure?

Not really no. But it certainly feels that way after tax + Dublin rent

> Interestingly nowadays you don't need to work for a US client. Switzerland, Norway and Ireland(out of all places) offer similar salaries without the zombifying difference in time zones.

Yep, that's my experience as well. I've quit the $170k US West Coast job (because of time zone differences, plus it sucked in other ways) in favor of slighly less paying German job (it used to pay the same, but EUR has shit the bed and now the money is way less when expressed in USD). I'm way happier now - they money in my accounts still keeps accumulating at a great rate, but now I'm not angry and tired every day.

I have 15+ years of experience, some in recognizable Tier 2 tech company, some in tech lead and architect position. I'm also working with a niche and hot tech stack that companies have troubles hiring for. This translates into good jobs, good money and good working conditions, even in a tech backwater such as Poland. Took a lot of time and effort to get here though.

Market rates? Oof, I thought they were still more competitive. They flat out refused to discuss comp with me before passing the interviews.

Fascinating that now VC-funded companies are suddenly getting more and more competitive by not discriminating by region. Everyone tries to beat the market and they're more flexible regarding the employment contract, so eg. you can be self-employed and save 20% of your income from taxes.

I was approached by both companies in Germany recently too, freeze doesn't mean full stop, just tightening it.

One detail I haven't mentioned is that remote roles were also on the table. I don't know how remote, but it's telling that Google is ready to make such concessions.

I do not know if they are still hiring or not, but to me a hiring freeze means exactly that: a full stop.

P.S. If a police shouts "freeze" I will fully stop :)

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