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Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

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451–460 of 534 posts

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#451
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a winner takes all and the winners have been decided 20 years ago here in the west. You need something like what China did with a closed off garden where their own thousand flowers can bloom and grow strong enough to compete on the global market.

China has a huge internal economy. You won’t be able to replicate that in many a country. At all. You’ll end up with useless, expensive, outmoded products that seem to only ever get worse. (Speaking from personal experience.)

True but to have fall back option for US big tech is worth the "waste of" resources. Imaging if the US does to the EU what it did to Huawei the EU would break in 2 weeks.

Just like sovereignty is important the same counts in cyberspace, where being data sovereignty is as much if not more important in the future.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to be located in a place which pays relatively high in Europe, housing prices are adequate. 10-15 years ago it would be possible to have disproportionally large salary in eastern places like Prague, but that's history now. Even if it still costs less than SF, your paycheck now looks adequate. Covid era raised prices everywhere.

It's possible to work remotely in post-covid era, which allows living in nicer, cheaper locales. No longer it is necessary to move where jobs are.

If you have family, this becomes more complex. If your kids are older have already good friends and social circles, such a move becomes supremely selfish

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes both ways: local talent will learn from the biggest companies in the world without having to leave, meaning their know how can be turned to local entities as well. For the pay, eventually it settles down as more and more companies try to see what they can get away with. US companies won’t be paying boatloads of money eternally (they were already resorting to offshoring to skimp) and local companies will have…

> It goes both ways: local talent will learn from the biggest companies in the world without having to leave, meaning their know how can be turned to local entities as well. It really doesn't. You end up with a whole segment of engineers that effectively become invisible to the local tech scene, because they are way above the local rates. Local companies are, basically, a waste of time for them. Also, keep in mind th…

Unfortunately I agree with this - I'm currently doing some work in tech across sub-saharan Africa and what we're seeing is that local devs from Cameroon to Kenya to Tunisia (okay not sub-saharan but we happen to have an office there) who are any good are now working on the global marketplace and not available to local companies with rare exceptions (e.g. junior who haven't figured out how to compete globally yet or happen to both have the preference to work in person and don't want to move away).

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has the tech companies MASSIVE wealth to stop this. It is all well and good to subsidize local tech companies, but for a majority of junior/senior devs you can't compete with $250K/yr in pay from FAANG companies whose stock won't stop rising and whose name on resume basically sets you up for life (exaggerating, but its not that far from the truth for a non-US and even US developers) Your third point doesn't ma…

Europe undervalues their engineers - and it seems like it's some sort of cultural thing that favors management. Their tax structure isn't great either, there's a reason zero billion dollar companies were founded in Europe (with the possible exception of Spotify). There's also the cultural pessimism and ambition being 'uncool' - there's a similar thing in Australia/New Zealand (at least I've heard from immigrant frien…

> Europe undervalues their engineers - and it seems like it's some sort of cultural thing that favors management.

It's something that I observed as well.

> American optimism and ambition, really valuing engineers, generous equity and culture are a big part of this. Companies outside of America have been losing talent because they've been fucking this up, I expect things to get worse for them as geography is even less of an issue for working for American companies than it already is.

Don't forget that companies who may have been hesitant to sponsor a visa for an unknown dev might be a lot more willing after having him work for a year or two remotely. And this remote employment also opens the possibility of different visas (L1 comes to mind).

I actually think we might see a larger drain to the US in the medium term. And I'm all in for that, if Europe wants to pay to educate engineers then waste their talent not valuing them, send them here!

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#456

Except: - no country pay like the US. Worked for silicon valley companies remotely, and made twice the money I made in France, while being 3 times cheaper than local competition. - no country have the volume of hi-level coding gig job offers the US has. - few countries even have has many interesting projects. If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck. - the USA don't care about your diploma, only wh…

There are exceptions.

- There are plenty of smaller tech hubs with way higher quality of life like Zurich, Berlin

- Or others that are incredible affordable like Warsow, Bukarest, ..

- The USD is not looking healthy from CHFs perspective. I would have to expect to earn less every month.

- Getting paid from the US makes banking and taxes way more complicated. You can not even open a bank account without signing 3 times that your money does not come from the US.

- US companies have different values/ideas about social security/pension and co. Also work hours or more than 40 hour weeks

- I don't fully understand the diploma thing. You may think it is more important than it actually is in central Europe. It's common (because education is free or cheap), but by far not the only way to get in the Industrie.

My point is when you already live in modern place with high quality of living standards it's unlikely you'd find a US job, remote or not, tempting.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5K is normal pay in Poland? that's around 9 minimal wages

They mean a developer’s pay. Yes, the disproportion between the IT and other areas is significant.

20K PLN is still not normal pay.

You think devs in Silesia earn something even close to 20K and aren't giant outliers?

It's like saying that SF salaries are normal in US

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#458
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Austria for example, if you go freelance (self employed) you'll actually end up paying more tax than being a FTE (which has already one of this highest taxes in the EU) while losing all the benefits of being a FTE like PTO, overtime and such. This is the case everywhere in Europe. I don't know if it's a literal policy meant to discourage this or it's just that freelancers are easy political targets since they te…

>This is the case everywhere in Europe. It definitely isn't. In most of Eastern Europe, freelancers pay peanuts in taxes in order to attract foreign investment. Which is why there tech sectors boomed so much in the last couple of decades to the point devs in Poland or Romania can take home more than their counterparts from richer countries like Austria. Granted, they also get no benefits, but when you take home sever…

In Romania freelancers pay slightly fewer taxes but regular employees pay no income tax if their profile and the company profile match some rather easy to meet conditions.

I don't know about Poland.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#459
If anything, remote can strengthen US's monopoly on global talent in the short-term.

The friction for US companies to attract global talent is now even lower. Now you don't even need to apply for an H1B visa to be physically in the US to work for a US company.

However, since the talent is not physically based in the US, this can be a great thing for countries everywhere in the long-run. GDPs are created remotely for countries around the world, and the knowledge these global talent gain by working with US companies will be dispersed around the world.

Hundreds of ecosystems will bloom around the world, leveling the playing field.

This is a great thing.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#460
post #456

Except: - no country pay like the US. Worked for silicon valley companies remotely, and made twice the money I made in France, while being 3 times cheaper than local competition. - no country have the volume of hi-level coding gig job offers the US has. - few countries even have has many interesting projects. If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck. - the USA don't care about your diploma, only wh…

There are exceptions. - There are plenty of smaller tech hubs with way higher quality of life like Zurich, Berlin - Or others that are incredible affordable like Warsow, Bukarest, .. - The USD is not looking healthy from CHFs perspective. I would have to expect to earn less every month. - Getting paid from the US makes banking and taxes way more complicated. You can not even open a bank account without signing 3 time…

Don't get cocky. In Europe you literally can't get a job paying 200.000€ per year as an individual contributor, except for US companies.

I'd be very happy to be proven wrong and for the respective position to not be a beyond-senior-contributor thing (so maybe 0.0001% of jobs out there).

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