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by jajko 706 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.

> 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.