> why should I pay "market rate" German salaries when I can hire someone in Cluj, Lodz, Brno, or Sofia in the €20k-40k range, and be given a €5k-20k per head tax holiday along with fairly low corporate taxes from these countries.

It's not all about labor cost. 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.

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.

> It's not all about labor cost

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.