In my experience, the software can be crap because the companies tend to only hire technical people over here in Poland, while business guys remain in the HQ. The highest business person you'll see in Poland is typically a PO, while a PM and people above him are in the headquaters. This has the effect of not keeping the Polish team tightly in the loop, which translates into worse software.
The second problem is that the companies tend to hire a lot of people at the same time when they open their offshore/nearshore center in Poland - often going from zero to hundreds, or even thousands over the span of just a couple of years. Having such large organization of effectively people with no previous institutional history is akin to a herd of only young elephants, who don't have any elders and don't know what and how they should be doing exactly. The "elders" are in the HQ obviously, but building company culture exclusively over Zoom, especially on the scale of hundreds/thousands new hires, is a bad idea.
This isn't a mistake or overlook. They treat the office like a sweatshop. No you are not exceptionally skillful. Within weeks they're able to move to a cheaper location and they will once their Excel will say so. It's so funny seeing devs on B2B in Poland thinking they are some entrepreneurs while for HQ they are in the same league as another office in Pajarumbad.
They don’t move to cheaper locations though, because the work quality would suffer. So far, I’ve only seen one group of people laid off in Poland and their jobs moved to India - DB admins. The company deemed the job simple enough to risk moving it to an outsourced Indian sweatshop. The results were terrible BTW.
Also, your experience is very different than mine, I’ve never meet anyone working in Poland doing coding for a company abroad thinking they’re some kind of entrepreneur. They’re not delusional, they know that they’re just doing a job, selling themselves to a highest bidder like everybody else.
The second problem is that the companies tend to hire a lot of people at the same time when they open their offshore/nearshore center in Poland - often going from zero to hundreds, or even thousands over the span of just a couple of years. Having such large organization of effectively people with no previous institutional history is akin to a herd of only young elephants, who don't have any elders and don't know what and how they should be doing exactly. The "elders" are in the HQ obviously, but building company culture exclusively over Zoom, especially on the scale of hundreds/thousands new hires, is a bad idea.