You'd be earning about 50 000 USD per year as a senior developer, but that's plenty enough to live a very good life here. Outside IT people earn about 10 000 USD per year, food and services are very cheap, and there's a comprehensive welfare state.
That’s already a good salary for a mature dev in France (Paris +20%), and going above requires being intrapreneur/team lead/low manager. Americans usually say it’s shit pay.
Impressed to hear that Poland pays well for developers compared to other jobs. 50k for a senior role would definitely be a good salary even in other EU countries
https://www.reed.co.uk/jobs/react-jobs?contract=True
In the UK the rate is between 400 and 600 (450/650 euro) and is one of the market that pays the most in Europe. Many other countries are offer half that amount for a "react" guy
And it is not as expensive as it seems. If you live in a country with strong social safety nets hiring someone is crazy expensive.
The few contractors I know that work normal software jobs have lower rates, but they still make good money.
It's very hard purely on cost of living to match a salary of 500k anywhere in the world, because at some point the extra items / investments all cost the same regardless of geography.
With 100K in Prague you can retire/never needing to work for money after 3 to 10 years Depending on your habits. Not sure how many Bay Area employees can do that staying there.
I am somewhere close and earn 300K which is about 30 times of what you need per year. One year of works covers all my expenses living like a local for the rest of my life in capital returns even at a modest 3.5% SWR.
I take that over 500K Job (of which over 30% goes to US Gov, while i pay max 10%) any time, heck I take it over a 1000K Job in SF/NY etc.
I'd propose that you should also calculate how many years of 300k in the Bay Area it'd take to retire in Prague vs years making 100k in Prague.
I ran these numbers a couple years ago, and it was costing me about ~$8000/month to live in the Bay Area. I estimated we could live in Tokyo or much of the USA at a similar quality of life for $4000/month. With $310k/year (taking home $190k) that meant I was able to save about $90k a year. In Tokyo, I could only get companies to offer about $140k at the time, and it was about the same for remote work in the USA. That meant I could save about $50k/year.
You can make a strong argument that saving $50k and living in one location is better than saving $90k in another, but it's good to have all the data at hand to make the best decision for yourself.
Hard to know this 30 years ahead of time. Maybe after 30 years in the Bay Area you retire to Hawaii? Or lower COL like Portland? Or even a town in Japan? You have tons of choice if you’ve been saving at 500k. If you’ve been saving at Eastern Europe salaries, your options narrow
Retirement/healthcare and education is paid by taxes already in most countries so there's less things to save for. Also cars are optional and distances are smaller.
I agree about the rest (but I wouldn't want to live in US anyway, no amount of money can buy you a walkable city or safety for your kids).
Something similar happened in Ukraine. I had friends in Europe that were running companies in there till when the wages became comparable to the original country. They still kept the Ukrainian office but eventually reduced the growth in favour of other locations
Doubt it. Everybody in my current team has several offers to change jobs with 5-15% increase in salary. Some from the same (American) company for which we work right now (but they don't know that cause we're hired through 2 subcontracting companies ;) ).
Low Cost of living is true if you find a cheap enough place to live, but due to Russia's invasion, housing just isn't that cheap unless you know where to look for and are from Poland. I called 20 people just to be able to check a single apartment out.
50k isn't good for a senior role either; new grad salary in Germany in 2020 was around 60k gross.