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by alephnerd 705 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.