Comment by alephnerd

> 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.