[alephnerd]

> If you wanna improve your economy you want to attract companies and investors who fund companies and create well paying jobs

That takes effort, and within the EU all the major regional consultancies like KPMG, PWC, McKinsey, etc have already been hired by Czechia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, etc to build and manage a mixture of Tax Holidays and FTZs/SEZs for tech companies.

For example, if I as a foreign tech company open a tech hub in Prague that hires at least 10 employees and spends $200k on assets, the Czech govt gives me a $8k per employee and gives me a 10 year corporate income tax holiday (so I end up saving an additional $8-10k per employee).

Romania, Poland, Estonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, etc all have similar programs as well.

Eastern Europe also benefited from immigration from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine - ime at least 30-40% of headcount in these EU CEE offices are from those 3 countries.

Portugal is too late in the game. It isn't attractive enough for white collar immigrants in the Lusaphone (they can always immigrate to higher paying Boston) nor can it compete with Spain's support for industrial and pharma manufacturing and R&D. Nor can they compete with the Eastern European programs above which are already extremely generous because they are trying to compete with similar Israeli and Indian programs from 20-30 years ago.

[jajko]

Yes but in Prague tech salaries are on par or sometimes even higher than most of western Europe. And they are still rising, faster than western Europe.

Don't get me wrong, folks there are smart and know how to work hard for Europeans (at least those I've worked with), but low cost paradise it isn't, by quite huge margin. Prices of properties often equal to smaller places in ie Switzerland (live/lived in both so easy to compare). If you move out of Prague (and second biggest city Brno) salaries drop significantly, but so does availability and often also quality of the talent.

[alephnerd]

When I'm making a decision, it's not UK vs Czechia - it's America vs Abroad.

Salary doesn't play a major role when I decide where to build a foreign office.

Developer Salaries at the 70th percentile and above have mostly converged all over Europe (the countries I listed), Asia (Israel, India, China, Singapore), and the Americas (Costa Rica) and that anyhow gets offset by around $20-30k in tax credits, as all the countries above will give 10-15 year tax holidays, subsidizes, free land, etc depending on the size of FDI.

The choice to open a foreign office is simply because it makes it easier for me to ship more features and products in parallel.

This isn't old school outsourcing anymore where you'd ship off back office - now mid-level management and product decisions are made at those offices abroad.

This means all I care about when deciding on a foreign location is good tax incentives, a large software talent base, and local administration that is extremely responsive.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Salary doesn't play a major role when I decide to build a foreign office

Seconding this. A side effect of sky-high Bay Area developer salaries and tech’s gross margins is the difference between Prague, Portugal and Hyderabad cheap is not super relevant for the highest-calibre companies.