DominicB (his usual mantra is 'maximising income')
His usual mantra is to maximize savings potential in absolute dollars, not income, as I explained above. As for non-science degrees, I always recommend highly in-demand, highly paying fields like financial engineering, financial mathematics, econometrics and actuarial science.
The only difference between a local office and a shared service center is that the employee works in a central office where instead of just one entity, most European entities of that company are being handled from.
No. They retain their departments in their home countries, at least the higher level positions, especially specialists, management and admisitration, and transfer the low-level grunt work to cheaper countries like Poland where they can pay much less.
This is lousy for several reasons:
Most importantly, workers in SSCs are cut off from the core of the corporate structure, which makes advancement in the corporate ladder very difficult. Upper level management and administrative positions are filled by people who work in the home country, not in the SSCs. It's worse than being stuck in some windowless basement in the home country, where there is at least some chance that someone upstairs might notice them when they go outside for a smoke.
Interesting, rewarding projects generally stay in the home country, and SSC workers are generally stuck with the mundane grunt workers that workers in the home country don't want to do. This also limits advancement, as doing grunt-work does little to enhance ones CV.
Practically all hiring, firing and retention decisions in an SSC are made on the basis of keeping wages as low as possible. Job security sucks, and workers get stuck in low paid positions without the means to escape to greener pastures.
There are practically zero chances for continuing education or other forms of self-improvement, both because of the language barrier and cost. SSCs are extremely reluctant to spend money to improve and retain staff because replacements are so easy to find, especially from countries like India and Pakistan that see any job in Poland as a back door to the richer countries of the EU.
Work conditions generally suck, wages are much lower, quality of life is lower, relative cost of living is higher, job security is poorer, and savings potential is drastically lower.
Sorry, but given the choice between relocating to Poland to work in a lousy SSC for peanuts, it would be much better to stay at home and beef up one's salable qualifications, or to do so at a school elsewhere that offers programs that are much more salable than anything you can get in Poland.
Bottom line, as I've said many times before, if you come to the conclusion that working or studying in Poland is your best or only option, you have failed miserably at exploring all the better opportunities available to you, either for employment or further education. There are precious few exceptions, and this is not one of them. There's a reason why so many Poles seek employment in the West.