How did you manage to go from "IOI gold" to "not as good"?

Kind of obvious given this comment

"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

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.