Poland and Italy are interesting examples to consider for an analysis on where high-paying companies hire, and why.
The insights go beyond just these 2 countries.
I work full time on this kind of stuff, and I hope this will be useful/interesting for some of you!
Let’s start:
1. What are “high-paying tech companies”?
High-paying tech jobs, like those paying €100k+ in Poland (or Italy) are, in ~95%+ of cases, not local companies.
It’s in ~70%+ of cases American companies, with either subsidiary offices (e.g. Google Poland etc) or hiring remotely (common for startups).
In anther ~25% of cases it’s high-paying European companies, often from the UK, in some cases from other countries. Again: either through a subsidiary or hiring remotely.
2. Do high-paying tech companies hire in Italy?
Some data:
On EuroTopTech (my site on high-paying tech jobs/careers in Europe), in the onsite/hybrid high-paying tech jobs section, there’s 600 roles for Poland, and 300 for Italy.
If we filter for engineering/data/product roles only, Italy lists 75 roles, while Poland 350.
Italy also has a population of 60M people, while Poland 37M: so per capita you need to 2x the above differences (basically Poland has 10x more high-paying product roles than Italy, per capita).
High-paying tech companies, by and large, only hire in Italy for sales roles, whereas they hire substantially for engineering and product roles in Poland.
High-paying remote companies often hire everywhere in Europe, but sometimes they have country preferences.
Within the remote section of EuroTopTech, we see 60 remote roles in Italy, and 220 in Poland, so per capita it’s a ~8x difference.
Filtering for product roles, it’s 7 roles in Italy and 40 in Poland.
3. Do engineers and tech workers cost more in Poland, or in Italy?
Looking at EuroTopTech salary data from our community (/data page in the site, Financial tab, ‘country details’ section), with over 1600 entries, we see that the average gross total compensation in Poland is €100k, whereas in Italy it’s €58k (2nd to last in Europe, better only than Hungary, worse than Portugal).
Note: The community this data comes from is tech workers in Europe, usually in the top 20-50% of the market (aiming at the top 1-10%); not the absolute country averages.
The gross compensation mentioned here doesn’t include employers costs (social security employers pay to hire you).
If we include those, the pay gap (also known as the ‘cost of hiring’) across Poland and Italy shrinks a lot.
This means that for a company it costs roughly the same to hire in Italy and Poland, while tech workers earn, save, and have a higher purchasing power in Poland than Italy.
This means that it’s also much better to work in tech in Poland than in Italy.
As shown also on EuroTopTech data page: Poland ranks 3rd in Europe, and Italy 25th.
4. Where do high-paying tech companies hire, and why?
As seen in point 2 above, they hire much more in Poland than in Italy.
But, if point 3 is true and it costs them roughly the same to hire in either place, then why do they hire much more in Poland than in Italy?
For this, I have no data, only hypotheses I formed over the years pursuing high-paying tech careers in Europe myself and years working on it full-time as the founder of EuroTopTech:
A) Better talent
Poland produces more and higher quality tech talent than Italy:
better English
more hard-working
good technical universities
tech/IT historical “appeal” as one of the few high-paying careers in the region (there’s an excellent article on this dynamic by the founder of startup Viktor, which you can look for by googling ‘The best trade we ever made fryd’)
B) Can hire higher-tier talent with the same money
Talent might cost the same, but since tech workers keep more in Poland, you get higher quality talent.
This is mostly because Poland, in addition to generating a lot of high quality talent in itself (as shown in A), also attracts tech talent from abroad.
The conditions to work in tech in Poland are great:
you can work b2b with ~15% total tax
you can work an onsite/FTE job and tax will rarely go above 30-35% because stock options, usually more than half of a comp package in high-paying tech companies (especially for senior+ roles), are taxed at a flat 19%
Great quality of life, safe and clean cities, good cost of living
C) Better employment and more business-friendly laws
Italy is not a great country to do business in: impossible to fire people, high-taxes, high bureaucracy. Poland is much better in this sense.
D) Stability
Before the current Meloni government, Italian governments struggled to last more than 1 or 2 years.
If you’re doing business, you love stability (one of the reasons why companies like to operate from and sometimes also hire in Switzerland, despite the very high costs).
I hope this helps clear some doubts and maybe be useful to someone out there!
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