My best guess is that a part of it is replacing US (or in this case Israeli) devs with much cheaper Italian/European ones, earning ~a quarter of their US counterparts and working longer hours, as Bending Spoons has an extremely competitive hiring process, and is probably the highest paying tech company in Italy

▲ ragall 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Actually they're paying very competitive salaries. For example: https://jobs.bendingspoons.com/positions/67c6dc18c70c531d6db....

▲ throwaway2037 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

    > Typically, we offer individuals at the start of their career an annual salary of £85,797 in London and €66,065 elsewhere in Europe.

That would be excellent pay for a junior engineer in Italy.

	▲	nness an hour ago \| parent [-]
		An annual salary of £85,797 in London for a junior is impressive, too.

▲ IshKebab 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I can't see any salaries there but presumably they're going to be competitive for Europe, which is roughly half the competitive salary in America.

There are plenty of competent devs outside America. I can't see any reason why you'd want to pay American salaries if you're a global company.

▲ Beretta_Vexee 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They are also very good at pooling their infrastructure and software stack. This accounts for a significant portion of the costs.