My guess this is due to the remnants of the good soviet math/science program in schools and universities. Which was originally heavily influenced by Kolmogorov by the way.
There is a good number of product companies that have large offices there (Magento, Samsung, GitLab, Wargaming, Grammarly, Ubisoft and a ton more) plus large outsourcing companies pay well and are generally working on large scale serious products
Magento is a wordpress plugin, or similar enough. Hardly a large company.
Samsung is a big hardware company, I'm not sure what they would have in software job but why not.
GitLab is a fully remote company, they don't recruit anywhere specifically. Their full disclosure on their (low) salaries and losing customer data is certainly driving away the senior folks I know.
Game companies are the shithole of the industry, the worst conditions and pays, worse than Indian sweet shops and failed SV startups. There is no sane job or career to be made there.
Back to the point. You're going to work in a consulting shop, soon enough.
I am not sure I follow :) the logic. This is a random list of product companies that I remember it's a small fraction of companies with large dev. offices in Ukraine. GitLab was a Ukrainian startup and has a large number of developers in Ukraine. Samsung had about 700 developers as far I remember.
The compensation trends have very low correlation to how things are in US. The largest local $ making companies are mainly gambling, crypto and porn but they are not very public although many of them a really huge.
I mean that good developers will migrate toward local companies that have good work conditions, good money, good projects, and good co workers.
The companies you quote are not better than a middle grade outsourcing company in these regards, so they're not stealing their talents. If they are the best companies you could think of, that explains why you can find decent developers in the local outsourcing firms.
Well the above to one extent or the other have all of the above but outsourcing companies are on par as far as perks. I am working for fairly large public US company and all of the above mentioned have nicer offices and more perks :). The reason I mentioned these is because they are to some extent well known.
Exactly you can see that in the eu the former WP countries with poor economies - causes a massive brain drain. I seem to recall seeing a quote that one of the Baltic stats some huge % f hat years graduates where working abroad.