I'm one of those offshore people that live in a cheaper place and works remotely for a US co.
The majority of people in the company are still in the US, and even for the East coast, the timezones are just annoying to work around sometimes. Either I need to do late days, or they have to do uber early mornings/SUPER late days, don't even get me started on West coast where the hours basically never match. And I'm in the closest timezone I can be for the US.
And there's also a cultural aspect to it. I simply work differently to how the US bosses expect, because my employer has to respect worker's rights if they want to hire people in the EU unless they hire them as contractors (they still have many protections in that case though). I clock off at exactly 17:00, I never answer messages outside working hours, I don't do overtime or anything resembling it etc. And yes, they don't pay me the same as I would in the US, but it's really not that much lower, plus life is just cheaper, even here in the Netherlands. I get paid less relatively, but from what I can tell other that the people getting paid obscene amounts, my quality of life is higher than most of my US counterparts
I've noticed my US colleagues are much more willing to waste away their lives for their employer as well, even if there's no real expectation for them to do so, and the business obviously prefers those kind of employees over the ones like me.
So there's still plenty of reasons to keep hiring US-based devs, from cultural to logistical. Maybe you guys should work on getting some actual worker protections first, though...
> but it's really not that much lower, plus life is just cheaper, even here in the Netherlands.
Lived in the NL for 4 years, it was many things - cheap wasn't one of them. With the enormous taxes , high rents and mediocre salaries I don't think you can make the case it's somehow cheaper than the U.S unless you specifically mean Manhattan and Silicon Valley.
There's a reason I included that "even", because indeed NL is not cheap. However if you're not in SV or NYC, you're also not making the ludicrous half-a-million figures that people often talk about as well. Myself having lived in NYC, I can tell you right now QoL is dramatically higher in NL even if I'm earning a lot less cash. Also, it definitely is cheaper than those cities, even if you're in Amsterdam (and cities like Utrecht or Den Haag are a lot cheaper than Amsterdam too).
Around the 50-60k Euro mark is a VERY decent and comfortable living in the Netherlands and you'll be hard pressed to find companies not paying that much for medior roles, yet alone senior ones. Plus you have the bigger companies like Adyen, Booking, ASML etc. plus remote US companies that pay ~100-125k for Medior+ talent (I know this as I literally today, a mere 4 hours ago got an offer letter from one of the mentioned companies as a SWE II). The taxes only really start hurting in the 70k-90k region, but since it's progressively taxed it's still not the end of the world. Also if you work for one of the aforementioned big boys then you're probably going to be in the party bracket (literally what it's called :p) where the sting is lessened, stupidly enough.
Remember, average salary in NL is around 40k-45k EUR. If anyone above a medior level manages to work at a tech-adjacent company as is getting paid less than that, it's time to move jobs because the market has shifted up massively as of late in terms of wages, at least anecdotally from what I can see.
And most importantly, money isn't everything which is so often missed in these discussions talking about EU vs US comp. Most importantly of all is that I never have to worry about healthcare costs should anything happen to me or my loved ones that don't have the privilege of being sponsored by a megacorp, and very importantly I have job security and a permanent contract that makes it damned hard to get rid of me.
Now things aren't perfect here obviously, train costs are astronomical, the tax brackets are absurd (the aforementioned party bracket being an absolute farce), the healthcare system while great can be very annoying to navigate alone, and indeed rent in the private sector and housing costs in general is completely detached from reality... But compared to anywhere in the US I've ever lived, especially if we zoom out a bit and look at it from a lens of someone not in tech and not making FAANG-level money? I'll take Utrecht 100 times out of 10, thank you very much.