Eastern Europe: Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Serbia
Common culture and close language throughout the post-Soviet space, still low competition for talent in Russia and Ukraine, low wages. That is why CIS countries are the foundation of major outsourcing centers for tech companies like HP, IBM, CISCO etc. So, there is no shortage of tech talent there.
Doist engineer recruitment chart
Cloudbeds engineer recruitment chart
DataRobot engineer recruitment chart
Toptal hire in Eastern Europe (Serbia, Russia, Croatia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine etc.) a lot.
X-team engineer recruitment chart
All these countries pride themselves on good education, great knowledge, and their ability to produce quality code. As such, outsourcing companies use and sell development services from Eastern Europe to you. So, why not hire the same strong engineers and make them part of your team?
Russia’s size means that it covers many time zones — from UTC+1 to UTC+12. If you want your engineering team to work 24/7 — hire from Warsaw to Yekaterinburg. If you want the development team to be in the same time zone and cultural context — limit the hiring to Eastern Europe.
The Philippines and India offer lower rates, but Eastern European countries are also attractive for those who are looking for a smaller time difference and regular communication.
There is high competition for talent in some Eastern European countries. CIS countries are not perceived as IT hubs, because few people know that IT companies like EPAM Systems, Wargaming, and Viber are Belarusian and accumulate a large number of talent.
According to data from English First (EF), Russia and Ukraine are among the countries with Low Proficiency in English. On the contrary, we have three arguments:
the study was not conducted among developers, and as our interviews show, English levels are much higher amongst those in the IT field than across the general population;
if you hire only in Eastern Europe, problems with communication between developers do not arise as there is no linguistic or cultural barrier;
Percentage of company employees hired in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Serbia
Total number of medals on Google Code Jam since 2003
Average monthly base salary of a software engineer in the leading Russian internet companies is almost 5x lower vs. US.
Average monthly base salary of a software engineer ex. bonuses, USD'000 (Glassdoor):