There is a reason why Poles, Bulgarians, and Ukrainians are ubiquitous on remote teams in tech: they are cheap, they are hungry for a challenge, and they get gold medals on the IOI (at least the Poles and Bulgarians do).
Dramatically increasing the pay of these people would be doing them a disservice by making them less employable.
From my experience eastern developers seem to need a lot of hand holding their don't seem to be many technical leads / CTO who can take broad instructions and produce a good piece of work
> From my experience eastern developers seem to need a lot of hand holding their don't seem to be many technical leads / CTO who can take broad instructions and produce a good piece of work
Hmm that's interesting and there may be something to it (I'm Polish). I've seen some very competent Polish tech leads, but no one higher than that really. It may be because the local value of a developer or tech lead salary is so high in Poland (esp. if you contract for rich Western/US companies) that people don't really have the motivation to move up the ladder - they're living like kings already and build wealth that will stay in their families for generations.
Dramatically increasing the pay of these people would be doing them a disservice by making them less employable.