With contractors you deal with overhead of managing contracts, and American employment law increasing views tech contractors as de facto being FT employees deserving of the same benefits packages as FT employees.
At that point your best option is to open an office in India/Israel/Eastern Europe because at least people don't complain as much, you get similar productivity (depending on what you pay), and you don't need to deal with a lot of these headaches.
The same thing happened to the CPA/Accounting industry in the 1990s.
Well, I'm from Eastern Europe and your observations match mine. There is still a huge amount of skilled devs here but USA companies skip them almost automatically.
> There is still a huge amount of skilled devs here but USA companies skip them almost automatically.
English fluency and/or Employment Laws are a big issue as well.
Most companies have already had an Israeli or Indian subsidiary since the 1990s-2000s.
Most didn't start entering Eastern Europe until the 2010s, and much of that was in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus thanks to EPAM and the massive Soviet Diaspora in the US.
Poland, Czechia, and Romania are known quantities, but newish (late 2000s/early 2010s), and the larger ecosystem (not just engineers but lawyers, bureaucrats, accountants, etc that you need to run a subsidiary) don't have working English fluency and in some countries are Indian bureaucracy level headaches (looking at you Bulgaria) with the added lack of an English speaking ecosystem headaches.
In all honesty, if the Russia-Ukraine War didn't start in 2014, much of the Eastern EU's tech scene would have been much weaker as it's largely powered by the UKR/RUS/BEL diaspora who emigrated the moment all 3 countries entered an economic and social tailspin.
At a previous employer 5-7 years ago, we had an office in Czechia, but most of the Engineers were Russians or Ukrainians.
But employment laws are not an issue. Last 8 years I didn't have even one employment arrangement, it was all contracts. I get it, you still have to pay some overhead for each country but you can outsource to various services that cover those quite well.
At that point your best option is to open an office in India/Israel/Eastern Europe because at least people don't complain as much, you get similar productivity (depending on what you pay), and you don't need to deal with a lot of these headaches.
The same thing happened to the CPA/Accounting industry in the 1990s.