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’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 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.
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).