Agreed. But do not underestimate how high corporate taxes and employer taxes are in Western Europe versus the CEE.
> For example some big companies opened large offices in Germany not because labor there is cheaper or smarter, but because they're the biggest regulator in Europe so hiring a lot of people there is a good way to gain political favoritism at EU level
Not in my experience. We can open a 20 person sales office and hire an outside GovRel consultancy to manage that.
> But yeah, if you want bang for the buck workers that take Jira tickets as input and churn out git commits, you can't beat eastern Europe
In my industry (cybersecurity, enterprise SaaS, DevTools), the ecosystem is largely clustered in Czechia, Romania, and Poland because of Sevices and IT specific FDI policies back in the 2000s and 2010s to attract those kinds of investments.
You can't find hundreds of engineers with internal knowledge of K8s internals or windows internals from an offense standpoint the same way you can in the CEE countries I listed.
At this point, the entire cybersecurity, DevTools, and Enterprise SaaS ecosystem is clustered in (no ranking) Israel, India, Poland, Romania, and Czechia.
This is in part why I have a job I'm overqualified for at a slow-ish moving corporate. To be fair, I fell into it and the job suits me better than being a software engineer. Being a software engineer isn't bad. But being a data analyst while having the same pay at a marketing department is infinitely easier. I'm the only technical person, so anything I make has more impact, despite the fact that it's easier. Also, one knows how long it takes so I can set my own schedule. Finally, because of this I'm hard to replace. It helps that the IT department is barely functioning, which is why I'm able to fill this gap anyway. It also helps that being multidisciplinary is my biggest source of strength. I'm an okay programmer, I'm an okay psychologist (academically speaking - I've neve worked in the field but published a paper and finished a bachelor in it), and a few other disciplines like that. Here most of that comes together.
I don't work the amount of hours I should, but no one bats too much of an eye since I have already saved them +250K within the first 3 months of working there (not due to my talent, the IT department really isn't functioning there). It was a bit of a lucky homerun to be fair, but I make enough impact for a normal Dutch salary.
So while I am overqualified, it's in part because there are some natural advantages I have in the role of a data analyst as it is a really generalist role. And in the Netherlands, it pays about as well as a many SWE salaries (unless you work for Databricks or Optiver - to name 2 very different but both high paying companies).
Big time! Almost all of my interesting knowledge came from toy projects I made to solve my own problems (or zero problem solved but it was fun so I did it anyway).
For example, I wanted to know if I can make 1 Kubernetes cluster span multi region, multi cloud. So I slapped TailScale for networking, replaced etcd with multi-region PostgreSQL Aurora, and span the Kubelets between my Raspberry Pi, Digital Ocean VMs, and AWS EC2. And then as the "customer app", I run CockroachDB, rqlite, and tiDB on it (one at a time, I don't want to burn money for this).
It was janky, zero SLA, I likely mis-tuned all the databases, and cost a bit of money :(. But it totally worked, all the db nodes can discover each other. I was satisfied and that's enough.
Another example would be writing my own Raft-backed database, similar to the ToyDB Rust project posted here. Is the DB useful? No. But it is so much fun and I learned a lot.
My AWS S3 bucket and private Git repo are a graveyard full of toy projects. My own Dropbox clone, Pinterest clone, Delicious clone, subset of Google Maps clone, etc. etc. are all RIP in there.
Another way to get a similar experience is by enabling the following options from the android developer menu:
* enable freeform windows
* force desktop mode on secondary displays
* enable non-resizable in multi-window
Then choose "simulate secondary displays" and choose the size (720p, 1080p, 4k)
Using https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy from your desktop and connecting to your phone allows you to choose the virtual display to connect to instead of your main phone display with the --display flag. It's similar to a chromeos feel and very performant
It being a "good" economy has little to do with your purchasing power or real income. That's the fatal flaw of pure capitalism: So long as economy activity is increasing, everything is good.
Doesn't matter if the benefits go to 1% of the population. Doesn't matter is it is at the expense of people's health or solvency. From a capitalist standpoint, more people in debt is good because it creates money out of thin air [1]. More people sick is good because that increases the size of the health market, et cetera.
Agreed. But do not underestimate how high corporate taxes and employer taxes are in Western Europe versus the CEE.
> For example some big companies opened large offices in Germany not because labor there is cheaper or smarter, but because they're the biggest regulator in Europe so hiring a lot of people there is a good way to gain political favoritism at EU level
Not in my experience. We can open a 20 person sales office and hire an outside GovRel consultancy to manage that.
> But yeah, if you want bang for the buck workers that take Jira tickets as input and churn out git commits, you can't beat eastern Europe
In my industry (cybersecurity, enterprise SaaS, DevTools), the ecosystem is largely clustered in Czechia, Romania, and Poland because of Sevices and IT specific FDI policies back in the 2000s and 2010s to attract those kinds of investments.
You can't find hundreds of engineers with internal knowledge of K8s internals or windows internals from an offense standpoint the same way you can in the CEE countries I listed.
At this point, the entire cybersecurity, DevTools, and Enterprise SaaS ecosystem is clustered in (no ranking) Israel, India, Poland, Romania, and Czechia.