The agreement also includes "mobility". The EU has plenty of STEM talent. And since many industries are downsizing due to energy and other issues, there's no point to bring more from India, of all places.
Von der Leyen today: "We are signing an agreement on mobility. We will facilitate the movement of students, researchers, seasonal, and highly skilled workers. And this is also why we are launching the first EU legal gateway office in India. It will be a one stop hub to port Indian talent moving to Europe."
That may be an intention, but the deal, as it is, does not cover mobility.
From the BBC article:
> Delhi and Brussels have also agreed on a mobility framework that eases restrictions for professionals to travel between India and the EU in the short term.
The Mobility Work is separate from the deal.
And you know what? Good that it includes it.
One of the major strengths of the US, one that I see as amazing that they are throwing away, is that they were always very capable to attract talent from abroad.
Having more skilled people around is never a bad thing. Only if you believe in a zero-sum economy.
More trade and more talented people generally result in economic growth and technological progress.
Recruitment of talent from India is complicated. To be precise, sifting for actual talent in the sea of mediocre nephews of VIPs is complicated. You can't even rely on actual identity of the person who is sitting in front of the camera, it can well be someone who was hired to impersonate them. Low trust societies tend to operate like that.
That's rich coming from someone in Czechia. Indian tech salaries [0] are comparable to Italian [1] and Romanian salaries [2].
We deal with the same problems in Czechia, Poland, Romania, and India when paying at the lower end of the spectrum.
A Czech, Pole, Romanian, and Indian are all equally commodifiable to me as an American.
Either way you guys are taking American jobs, which represent the majority of tech jobs. And it's ironic that you sound the same as the Brits who railed about Polish, Romanian, and Czech immigrants before Brexit.
Anyhow, it doesn't matter. India's working with Czechia to lobby against CBAM, Agrofert has JVs with Indian SoEs, and India is one of the only non-CEE markets where Skoda has PMF so everyone who matters in Czechia will fall behind the deal.
I am sure you do. Czechs aren't particularly honest people on average (why should I pretend otherwise? Mine is a medium-trust society at best, no Denmark or Iceland), and without the necessary cultural knowledge you will struggle to spot the red flags that the locals can spot easily.
Maybe the whole idea of just easily cherrypicking talent from very distant nations with very different cultures is less workable than naive people think?
Edit: you edited your response, I will add something to mine.
In capitalism, jobs are commodity. Business really only cares about efficiency, not nationalist sensitivities. For every "American" job taken, there is an "American" boss who gives it away, but that is the point: the boss does not feel any patriotic duty to keep jobs onshore. He is beholden to the bottom line of his business.
Edit 2: (this will be a long war of edits). Where did I "rail" against anything? Are you having some stereotype in your head and simply decided that I am a good fit?
I literally wrote that fishing for actual talent in India from the outside is hard. Not desirable or undesirable, but hard. That is the result of actual experiences of people around me. I didn't say even a single word about whether it should be done or not.
That's my fault. I abused my HN account instead of using the HN API years ago during a drunken hackathon in the early days of LLMs. As such my replies are rate limited.
> without the necessary cultural knowledge you will struggle to spot the red flags that the locals can spot easily
I agree. This is why most VC/PE funds have a deep bench of Asian American operators.
> In capitalism, jobs are commodity. Business really only cares about efficiency, not nationalist sensitivities. For every "American" job taken, there is an "American" boss who gives it away, but that is the point: the boss does not feel any patriotic duty to keep jobs onshore. He is beholden to the bottom line of his business
Absolutely. Hence why I made choices to move offices from SV to Karlin, or moving Brno offices to Delhi. And that's my point. I don't give a shit if I'm hiring in Karlin, Koramangala, Krakow, Capitol Hill (Seattle not DC), ir Cebu (imo the next Bangalore).
> Maybe the whole idea of just easily cherrypicking talent from very distant nations with very different cultures is less workable than naive people think
It's not that difficult. Most VC/PE funds have a roster of a couple dozen (VC) to couple hundred (Megacap PE) operators we can poach to manage investments. This is why the recent boom in Indian American C-Suites and VPs happened.
> Czechs aren't particularly honest people on average
Ehn, y'all are honest enough. Czech pragmatism is refreshing after dealing with Germans.
---
I think what happened was a mutually heated moment of emotion, but largely we sound aligned (and from personal experience, I have tended to agree with your thoughts somewhat). When I'm back in Praha let's grab some Pivo - I'm a Mliko guy to be honest.
Good morning from Ostrava! Yeah, misunderstanding travels fast and efficient over TCP/IP... especially around midnight.
I am not Prague based anymore, but I travel there quite often, so sure, let's grab something to drink when we are both there. My Prague office is actually in Karlín and Karlín was "my" neighbourhood since 1996, when I started studying there. (Back then, it was a veritable dump. Gentrification in action.)
" Czech pragmatism is refreshing after dealing with Germans."
LOL, that is a common observation I heard often enough, but then again, even the local embassy of Hell would likely feel refreshing after dealing with the Germans :)
I will be in Prague from Feb 1 to Feb 5, then again later in February. Looking forward to meet you. Have a mliko if you fancy it, I can't, my body stopped liking it when I was twentysomething. I still like the taste, but the consequences are nasty.
"It's not that difficult. Most VC/PE funds have a roster of a couple dozen (VC) to couple hundred (Megacap PE) operators we can poach to manage investments. This is why the recent boom in Indian American C-Suites and VPs happened."
Sure, if you can rely on this sort of infrastructure, it won't be hard for ya.
But in the context of the EU-India deal that is being discussed here, plenty of us continentals will find that without such infrastructure, it is hard. Just a few weeks ago I sat with a friend from Charles' University who described various funny incidents when dealing with postdoc applications from distant countries, India prominently included.
From our local point of view, Western Ukraine is the edge of "intuitive" cultural understanding and anything east of the Dnipro river and south of Bulgaria really needs dedicated people with cultural competence to work.
In case of India, the Anglo-Saxons can rely on three centuries of mutual interactions. That helps a lot.
> let's grab something to drink when we are both there.
Let's do it! I won't be back in the near future but I expect to be back soonish.
> But in the context of the EU-India deal that is being discussed here, plenty of us continentals will find that without such infrastructure, it is hard. Just a few weeks ago I sat with a friend from Charles' University who described various funny incidents when dealing with postdoc applications from distant countries, India prominently included.
To be honest, you aren't getting the best talent India has to offer in Central Europe (and especially Czechia) - salaries in the 75th and 90th percentiles in Indian STEM end up similar to Prague but with better purchasing parity, so the pull factor isn't there when Indians in that demographic can easily be poached by Citadel, Anthropic, or Google Deepmind.
Most top Indian researchers going abroad target American universities for postdocs (even with Trump) and maybe a Max Planck (Germany), UKRI, NSERC (Canada), CSIRO (Australia), INRIA, MEXT (Japan), NRF (SK), or ISF (Israel) instead so I'm not surprised that Charles University isn't getting good candidates - there's no pull factor when the countries listed can provide significantly more funding while also offering better commercialization opportunities.
On the other hand, a major reason a lot of my peers opened Prague offices was because it made it easier to recruit talent from the CIS following 2014 which made operating a Moscow office difficult. Around that time the Czech government also revamped their services investment attraction program which made Prague a better option than competitors like Tallinn or Budapest.
That said, I think Czechia has started resting on it's laurels and I'm starting to see much more competitive FDI attraction programs in Tier 2/3 tech hubs in Romania and Poland let alone perpetual competition from India - imo FDI is starting to cause a form of commercial real estate/IT Park induced Dutch disease within Czechia.
OK, looking forward to meet you! I tend to visit HN everyday and usually cannot stop myself from commenting, so once you have an itinerary, just write me a message somewhere in a forum.
[0] "India, EU seal landmark mobility pact; Indian professionals, students set to benefit" 27 Jan 2026 https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/study/india-eu-seal...