Former Soviet Republic of Georgia To Become IT Tax Haven 153
A few days ago we noted how Ukraine is driving out its software freelancers with the threat of onerous taxation. Now comes news that another former Soviet republic, Georgia, will become a tax-free zone for IT companies. It might be the Google translation, but it seems that officials there are somewhat worried about how to categorize the IT segment: "[T]he main difficulty ... is to determine which organization is the IT company, and what is not: 'While from a formal point of view it is impossible to distinguish between software developers from the oil.'"
Re:Is my source code safe in a third-world nation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Take warning from this: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Russian-Plan.aspx [thedailywtf.com]
Re:Is my source code safe in a third-world nation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ask Airbus how that worked out in the USA when they hit some government assisted industrial espionage on behalf of Boeing. The answer as always is don't let your crown jewels stray into a place where you can't contact your local police and get them tried in your local court. It's still a huge undertaking to get justice if it's not in your own country even if there is a decent justice system.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Except it's not the same service. (Score:3, Interesting)
You're a moron.
The reason outsourcing development has little to do with whether or not people in third world countries 'can' write good code, and everything to do with the fact that paying someone for each line of code, without any relationship to if the code actually works or solves the problem, is just incredibly stupid.
It results in companies hiring people to code straight out of a book, and producing nonsense. It's cookie cutter shit, the sort of stuff you'd get if you kidnapped a bunch of freshmen CS students and forced them to write programs.
You cannot have unskilled software development, and that's what the offshoring coding houses are doing, with a few skilled guys to actually communicate with everyone else.
There's probably, statistically speaking, as many skilled coders in Indian...but they're working for actual Indian software development places that develop their own software. But Indian has managed to invent the equivalent of fast-food jobs in software, and Americans are dumb enough to buy the results. That doesn't mean that Indians can't actually cook....it means stop ordering from McDonalds if, you know, you want actual normal quality food.
Re:So now our jobs go to Georgia? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd say that, if you're looking for a libertarian paradise, it's one of the places closest to that.
I think that comment wins the 'inadvertently funny' prize for today.
Re:So now our jobs go to Georgia? (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually, I think it's pretty safe (depending who you outsource to). Granted, generic apps being outsourced won't have the same benefit of being outsourced there than to anywhere else, but speed intensive, algorithmic optimised kind of stuff (like rendering various file formats to screen - PDF, CAD, SVG, or high performance desktop stuff etc) will be very very good.
In my experience, the high level of maths these people do at high school (probably 1-2 year university stuff for math-idiot westerners) coupled with crazy-ass fundamental computing teaching at universities (lectures along the lines of Knuths art of computer programming rather than HTML101 and "Whatever the market wants" classes that most Western universities teach).
I'm not saying that all of them a good, I'm saying that the former-USSR programmers I've dealt with (50+) are the types who can deal with heap dumps, optimizations, crash logs, memory management etc rather than morons who can't grasp the concept of a switch statement. I am sick and fucking tired of outsourcing to India and getting back a pile of steaming crap consisting of the copy-pasting together of various internet tutorials.
Re:Labor is a bigger cost than tax (Score:3, Interesting)
As an IT employee making in the top 10% (apparently I was just inside so I'll just claim 10%), I paid less than 1/10 of my salary in federal income taxes. When you count all directly paid taxes (federal income tax, state/local income, sales and property tax, including a house and a separate piece of investment property) I still paid less than 1/5 of my income in taxes. So I don't see what the problem is. Are all those people renting, so they don't get deductions for mortgages? Are they not putting anything into a 401(k)? Sure, a single male living in their mother's basement with no deductible expenses (or living in a very expensive house that's paid off, so paying taxes on the land but no deduction on interest) may have higher rates, but 1/2 would be hard to get to without seriously contrived circumstances. And if you are going to do that, you should contrive them the other way, so that a married blind person over 65 with 100 dependent children (all under 18, he got busy late, but made up for it) making $20k in IT would probably end up receiving more in direct federal payment than they'd pay in tax, so we could call that 2/1 tax rate.
But every time I hear people say "we pay 50% in taxes" it seems to just be wrong. I've run the numbers they claim, and I always come out much lower. It's like they purposefully write larger checks to the government than they need to, just so they can whine about it.