There are more than those two categories - for example, Europe exists. So does Canada.

I would be surprised if there were any meaningful differences between American, European and Canadian labour.

Europe includes Germany, Spain, and Romania. I know Romania is far cheaper than Germany, at least.

Mindset is a big one.

Yes but there are barriers there that other countries dont have.

Its lower cost than serbia, where you need to either register a business locally or help the staff out with taxes.

But its higher cost than canada, where people just sort of dont fuck around and get on with things.

And in some circumstances the lack of regulation can make things more expensive. Or at least, lack of regulation + lack of respect for norms.

I had a customer insist on using a particular tower climber for cabling, but the guy had no idea about cabling or network engineering. He was "cheap" in that he didn't draw a large wage, but he was actually expensive because he needed so much hand holding. Later I found out he had several 500M + runs of Cat5 that could have been 3 meters and a switch.

In fact it seems a fairly uniquely american thing that some bloke will go off and do a lot of """work""" and then hand over an absolute pile of dogshit that proper engineers need to come in and resolve. The shit I have seen american network engineers "produce" that needed to be cleaned up by expensive consultants would curl your hair.

Its because americans try and do everything with slave labor that they are so damned expensive to deal with.

If I engage a cabler in an Australian or Canadian data centre, they tend to find a fault and fix it in the first instance.

Literally never happened for me with yanks. Its always 5 visits, back and forth, arguments about responsibility, providers closing tickets before they have resolved anything, and engineers that dont understand the difference between light stats and BGP neighborship.