As a SWE from Slovakia, not sure how representative is my experience, but...
One big problem cooperating with companies in Germany is that when you apply for the job, they tell you “knowledge of German is not needed, all internal communication in our company is in English”, and that in my experience is never true. (This sucks for me, because my brain somehow rejects the German language.)
Hiring people from other countries is somehow complicated from the legal and/or tax perspective. I don’t understand all the relevant details, and in theory the EU exists to prevent this, but in practice… my tax form gets more complicated when I have a foreign income, and I don’t know how complicated it gets for the company, but I suspect that it might be a lot. Maybe enough to compensate for the 60% cheaper people?
Some people have strong patriotic/union/whatever feelings that make them sabotage people from other countries to protect their own jobs. Especially when those other people are cheaper, and not bad at their jobs; that is when they are a greater threat. I had an experience in a Swiss company, when the Swiss employees collectively sabotaged the Slovaks in various ways; for example they always made a “mistake” of sending us wrong documentation and/or forgetting to give us access to the product database; so the work that was estimated to take three days, and would actually take me one day, took five, because I had to spend the first four days repeatedly asking for the correct documentation, and repeatedly telling them that they gave me database access to a wrong table, not the one I requested. Many people on both sides were aware that this was happening, but the Swiss company simply couldn’t fire half of their employees, so they had to accept that the Slovaks cost half as much per day, but everything takes them twice as many days.
I guess, if you want to exploit the cheap Eastern European brain power for a company in Germany, you should probably not hire local people at all? And probably make sure that every team member is from a different country, to avoid the unpleasant surprise of finding out later than all informal documentation to your project is in Slovak.
Yeah, I guess there is just more friction than one would expect. I also found out that Slovaks are now more like 66% of the price of Germans, so either the margin is great or the income gap is smaller than I thought.
Also: Ease of communication is hard to overrate. I always enjoy working with people who have a very similar background compared to me (i.e. similar milieu growing up, not just same country), communication is so smooth.
Do you hire them directly, or through some “body shop”? Because sometimes the intermediaries add an insane markup. Though it is probably less dramatic these days.
As a SWE from Slovakia, not sure how representative is my experience, but...
One big problem cooperating with companies in Germany is that when you apply for the job, they tell you “knowledge of German is not needed, all internal communication in our company is in English”, and that in my experience is never true. (This sucks for me, because my brain somehow rejects the German language.)
Hiring people from other countries is somehow complicated from the legal and/or tax perspective. I don’t understand all the relevant details, and in theory the EU exists to prevent this, but in practice… my tax form gets more complicated when I have a foreign income, and I don’t know how complicated it gets for the company, but I suspect that it might be a lot. Maybe enough to compensate for the 60% cheaper people?
Some people have strong patriotic/union/whatever feelings that make them sabotage people from other countries to protect their own jobs. Especially when those other people are cheaper, and not bad at their jobs; that is when they are a greater threat. I had an experience in a Swiss company, when the Swiss employees collectively sabotaged the Slovaks in various ways; for example they always made a “mistake” of sending us wrong documentation and/or forgetting to give us access to the product database; so the work that was estimated to take three days, and would actually take me one day, took five, because I had to spend the first four days repeatedly asking for the correct documentation, and repeatedly telling them that they gave me database access to a wrong table, not the one I requested. Many people on both sides were aware that this was happening, but the Swiss company simply couldn’t fire half of their employees, so they had to accept that the Slovaks cost half as much per day, but everything takes them twice as many days.
I guess, if you want to exploit the cheap Eastern European brain power for a company in Germany, you should probably not hire local people at all? And probably make sure that every team member is from a different country, to avoid the unpleasant surprise of finding out later than all informal documentation to your project is in Slovak.
Yeah, I guess there is just more friction than one would expect. I also found out that Slovaks are now more like 66% of the price of Germans, so either the margin is great or the income gap is smaller than I thought.
Also: Ease of communication is hard to overrate. I always enjoy working with people who have a very similar background compared to me (i.e. similar milieu growing up, not just same country), communication is so smooth.
Do you hire them directly, or through some “body shop”? Because sometimes the intermediaries add an insane markup. Though it is probably less dramatic these days.
Claude says that the salary ratio is like this:
I guess I should ask for a raise.
Directly. Given that they are then priced at roughly 66% for our customers I guess the insane markup goes to my company.