Comment by voytec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by voytec | Hacker News Reader

I've talked to several recruiters and HR people who were prepared for quite a different answer than I gave to this question.

I got the feeling that several interviews were carried out afterwards out of politeness or because the recruiter "had to" do it, but the interview ended before it began. Than, there's either ghosting or almost immediate (like up to an hour past the interview) copy-paste email along the lines of "we decided to go with another candidate".

A few recruiters however were open that they've checked the salary for similar position in my country's capital city (Warsaw) and it's much lower than what I'm asking. Pointing out 20+ years of experience and listing accomplishments seems less important for a lot of businesses, than paying as little as possible.

I got a few links to these "check salary for [level] [position] in [city]" websites from recruiters. All these seem to be crafted in a way that undervalues employees by artificially lowering country-wide salaries to ridiculous levels.

>Pointing out 20+ years of experience and listing accomplishments seems less important for a lot of businesses, than paying as little as possible.

If paying as little as possible wasn't that important to them, they wouldn't be hiring in Warsaw in the first place, but in the Bay Area, Seattle, Zurich, London, Sydney, etc

From my experience, this is not necessarily true. Some companies might have the budget to pay at the 50th percentile in New York, or the 95th percentile somewhere else, and would prefer to do the latter

I'm not interacting with companies seeking cheap labor in Poland - like Intel. Despite their quite active recruiters, all conversations with whom end up at "company policy doesn't allow me to discuss salary range".

I've set up a small business with EU tax id over a decade ago and I'm issuing invoices to European countries (EU and Schengen) and North America.

It's a trade-off of giving up European employment safety, pension, some quality of life when working in different timezone, benefits and job security, to work for higher salary.

But it only makes sense until some business decides that they would like a contractor from Poland with a Polish salary.

I agree with you but your locals need to be educated on this issue. Many may think it’s a good deal, especially if promises are thrown in. They would sabotage themselves but it’ll take some time for them to find out it’s a bad deal.

"company policy doesn't allow me to discuss salary range".

Walk.

Any company that puts policy over people isn't a good company.

So, the majority of companies?

Well, yeah.

But you are right that this is not actionable.

Giving up pension? Does that make good financial sense? I hear this a lot from people under 40, then they have an "oh shit" moment after 60 and regret it.

Presumably we're talking about remote roles here, in which case this is nonsense. A Zurich developer is not worth more in a remote role than a developer in Warsaw. The only reason large cities have inflated salaries is because that's what you have to pay someone for them to live within range of your fancy office. If it's a remote role anyway, the companies that aren't out to exploit you will pay the same salary band for all roles anywhere where they hire.

Location-based pay in remote roles is a major red flag that the company doesn't reward merit.

Companies aren't moving to Warsaw to find the best talent in the world. That talent is mostly already in the super expensive tech hubs where the top software companies have flourished for decades and cross-pollinated creating a supply of experienced talent in the area.

It's much more easy to find an experienced tech lead even remotely, around London or SF, than say in some village in Bulgaria or Poland because no F500 tech company ever came out of there.

Companies like Google that have the infinite money glitch don't care about finding the best bargain employees, but most SW companies aren't Google.

I don't know that it ever was true that "the best talent in the world" is concentrated in the super expensive tech hubs, but it's absolutely not true any more post-COVID. It's largely a myth that's understandably popular among Bay Area types.

What you do find a lot of in tech hubs is the type of people who move to tech hubs. This often means that in a certain type of company you get better "culture fit" by using a geographic filter (thus avoiding illegally filtering by protected characteristics), and you definitely get a higher percentage of people who are willing to structure their life around their career. And when you get enough of those people in a room together, they're certainly the types that will happily persuade each other that they represent "the best talent in the world."

Software is a potent leveler—all you need is a computer and you're on equal footing with the rest of the world—and I find that the best programmers are the ones who learned to do it for fun and only later made a career out of it. Those people are equally distributed across much of the world at this point, and if anything there are fewer of them (as a percentage of job applicants) in the tech hubs because the tech hubs attract those who chose software for the money.

Let’s be honest, you don’t need the best talent to build yet another SaaS CRUD app or most of the maintenance work done in BigTech.

Exactly. That's why you also don't need to pay US salaries or hire on the big tech hubs.

To play the devils advocate there are some justifiable reasons to try and hire international employees. Maybe some component requires some physical proximity or has some large benefit. Maybe someone is exceptional at a global level and doesn’t want to move.

With that said I tend to agree, most companies are shopping around for a bargain if they can find one.

Most of the software is more like landscaping than architecture, but software engineers want to build fancy bridges and gothic temples.

That's why they demand high salaries. You are paying so much to convince them to build boring software instead of the fancy bridges and gothic temples.

Rather than hiring architects as landscapers and paying them a lot to trash their skills, I tell candidates upfront that the job is to mow a lawn and the pay is appropriate for the job.

That's great transparency. And I imagine you get what you pay for. That's honestly not a bad thing as long as it's a living wage. You don't always need an achitect, especially non-tech .

But we should always keep in mind that these crazy salaries aren't all a result of impact software can make, but also as a bid to prevent other companies from hiring those architects. Paying someone an extra 200k/yr to potentially keep a new competitor from making 10m/year is an obvious bargain sale if you can afford it.

At least, that was the gameplan back in the '10's. I think we're past that point and those levels of salariesare only reserved for director+ level people in 2024/5.

I respect this approach.

I hope it reduces the mismatches of salary expectations in your hiring process. Less drama for everyone.

I would never apply, but that’s fine. I’m not a landscaper.

Aren't the landscapers still trashing their skills? They are giving up the opportunity to develop the architecture skills that they need in order to get better roles in the future.

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