标签：#salary

I place developers with US tech companies for a living. Before that sentence makes you close the tab: what follows is the thing I tell developers for free, one conversation at a time, until I got tired of saying it one person at a time. Last month a developer in Prague asked me if 55 dollars an hour was a reasonable rate. Nine years in. Kotlin, AWS. He had built and run a payment system for one of the largest Czech fintechs. Three million transactions a month. Zero P0 incidents in two years. A profile most US startups would fight over. I told him what the US market actually pays for that exact stack at that exact level. He went quiet for about thirty seconds. Then he said: "I have been contracting for three years. I just did the math." He had left roughly 180,000 dollars on the table. Not because he was not good enough. Because no one had ever told him the number. This is the most expensive blind spot in our industry, and almost nobody outside the US escapes it. So let me walk through why it happens, because once you see it you cannot unsee it. You are pricing against the only benchmark you have ever seen When you set your rate, you do not pull it from nowhere. You anchor it to something. And the only thing you have ever had to anchor to is your local market. So a senior engineer in Warsaw prices against Warsaw. One in Bucharest against Bucharest. You take the local senior salary, maybe add a premium because the client is foreign, and you land on a number that feels brave. Forty-five an hour feels brave when the engineer at the next desk makes the local equivalent of twenty. Here is the disruptive part. The US client is not paying for your location. They are not even thinking about your location, except as a logistics detail. They are paying for the work, and what that work is worth to their business. A payment system that does not go down is worth the same to a US fintech whether the person who built it sits in San Francisco or Brno. The value did not get cheaper w