[thraway180306]

The sheer number of graduates being produced

At the diploma mills that are Polish universities. Google was unable to scale up in Poland for a decade. They opted for creating marketing & accounting offices in several Polish workforce hubs, while the man who organized Krakow tech office has resigned in frustration over mainship's final shelving of any plans for expansion in that space. Likewise the Warsaw tech office is mainly for the few smart people who don't want to leave for family reasons.

Students from the very few quality CS programmes emigrate in droves. Polish ministry keeps record of graduates entering national workforce and from the good programmes as much as 80% are missing.

Outside these, quality quickly falls off a cliff, even from the same school (Krakow local AGH has no less than 5 departments offering CS degrees).

Just last month a typical scandal in academic circles emerged where former president (rektor) of AGH advised a PhD thesis in CS that was plagiarized from another that itself turned out to be fishy. Moreover the reviewers from the more prestigious Jagiellonian University plagiarized verbatim their own reviews (and they were reviewers of both somehow). Things happen, but the main scandal was the body overseeing higher ed in Poland refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing. They've set up schools there to be diploma mills in the first place.

[dannylandau]

I've had pretty amazing experience working with polish developers and designers. Definitely very top notch. Found them through Github mostly. Romanians, Belarussian and Bulgarians also turned out to be smart and hard working.

[thraway180306]

They are amazing and one of, no, in fact the best in the world, both Poles and Russians. But that's a selection bias. Don't expect to drop there and find streets overflowing with such people eager to work for you in the actual Poland and Russia. The best already found their cozy spots and are not trading them for your offer whatever it might be (and let's face it: you're not going there after the talent but a cheaper talent), given their fears and insecurity (and exploitation) of the local labour market. Or otherwise, found their way out of the country or are actively looking (will I get promoted to your UK HQ in a year or two?).

[kozikow]

> Google was unable to scale up in Poland for a decade.

AFAIK, the problem with Krakow was not with lack of good programmers, but organizational setup - too many PAs in too small office.

[thraway180306]

Offices are not an issue in Krakow, there is oversupply and the space is cheap. What I heard there is a lot of sour grapes and back-and-forth blame (still) going on about that Krakow failure. But what is clear for a bystander: the office stayed at the same headcount since being opened. They changed buildings and were mulling over expansion for many years. Some Warsaw people were generously compensated to move Krakow, then the other way, then the manager jumped ship prompting a wave, and then management gave up on Krakow entirely. And Warsaw doesn't grow either. Facebook too explored growing a tech branch in Warsaw and backed up. Samsung decided to make a sweatshop approach, they are big, pay peanuts even for Poland and have a lot of churn. There is a large, established for decades and recently quickly growing Intel office in Gdansk, that's where all the buggy drivers allegedly come from.

[kozikow]

My previous post might have been confusing - it was a problem with too many PAs relative to number of people, not with the office space size.