I worked in a recruitment company in SEA for software devs and management/exec layers.
Just sharing my perspective, Taiwan's Software Devs were paid 1/3 of what devs in SG or HK are paid, the biggest reason being there aren't any software companies headquartered in Taiwan that are big/growing fast enough to offer competitive salaries to SG / HK. In SG/HK you have banks, hedgefunds and tech companies all competing for talent—Grab, Amazon, Google, Shopee, DBS, HSBC, etc, pushing up prices to be competitive globally. Taiwan's local companies have to make enough money to pay global salaries for strong talent, or they just get their best talent poached by SG/HK or China (which has plenty of strong tech giants of their own).
But... a tiny 23 million population island where the average wage is low and people are generally happy and content... is not a great business environment for startups. I think some local startups saturated the Taiwan market with like 70% of the island's population in their database... and like $2-5m US revenue/yr? Great achievement but not a large base for continued rev growth.
As a Taiwanese company, you are not winning against bigger tech companies in China. Neither are you building for english speaking audiences of SEA because Taiwan's english is not native... in short, the local market conditions is just unable to pay for global level talent, who leave.
This is a software dev focused view of Taiwan, but it applies to all or most other industries not named TSMC.
Just sharing my perspective, Taiwan's Software Devs were paid 1/3 of what devs in SG or HK are paid, the biggest reason being there aren't any software companies headquartered in Taiwan that are big/growing fast enough to offer competitive salaries to SG / HK. In SG/HK you have banks, hedgefunds and tech companies all competing for talent—Grab, Amazon, Google, Shopee, DBS, HSBC, etc, pushing up prices to be competitive globally. Taiwan's local companies have to make enough money to pay global salaries for strong talent, or they just get their best talent poached by SG/HK or China (which has plenty of strong tech giants of their own).
But... a tiny 23 million population island where the average wage is low and people are generally happy and content... is not a great business environment for startups. I think some local startups saturated the Taiwan market with like 70% of the island's population in their database... and like $2-5m US revenue/yr? Great achievement but not a large base for continued rev growth.
As a Taiwanese company, you are not winning against bigger tech companies in China. Neither are you building for english speaking audiences of SEA because Taiwan's english is not native... in short, the local market conditions is just unable to pay for global level talent, who leave.
This is a software dev focused view of Taiwan, but it applies to all or most other industries not named TSMC.