> Pimentel’s client asked him for list of candidates trained in “Agile” project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain.
> But such people are thin on the ground in Spain. It takes at least eight months for an experienced software developer to earn an Agile qualification and they also need the ability to deal with senior executives, limiting the pool of people who could potentially fill the roles.
That part of the article is hilarious, not only because 200K euros is completely made up and untrue (by far surpasses best salaries in other more decent countries), but because of the Agile qualification mention. Do we have Agile certifications now? What a load of bullshit.
The only truth in the article is this:
> Spanish executives are less-skilled than their competitors in Germany, France or Italy, according to a study of 11 European countries. Only Greece came out worse.
And that's the reason why the executives don't find workforce. Being less-skilled means they don't value the engineering profession up to the required level to compromise and give good salaries.
Agile is barely different to how teams I worked on in the 90s operated, naturally, without trying to implement and enforce a new holy grail, chase the rainbow routine of machinic efficiency. I find it really is much ado about nothing, the emperors new clothes. An anal retentive formalising and trumpeting of common sense. I recall only one project which was waterfall, and the rest were used as soon as they were useful. I have an agile coach at my current job. As far as I can tell his job is to be the expert at drag and drop in Jira, and peeling post it notes. The only good thing I can say about agile is that it fills a space that will otherwise be filled with the next holy grail gimmick which management won't be able to resist as they sell themselves and their new magic power up the corporate ladder. I'm neck deep in this farce at the moment.
Sure. A lot of "Agile" is actually cargo-cult agile, used as a vehicle for self-promotion: The daily scrum, the sticky-notes or the Jira.board, and all that other ceremony.
Typically retrofitted on top of a defunct process, with separate requirement analysts, "software architects" whatever that means, and a lot of control functions and processes inherited from the manufacturing industry.
What makes that work is probably the few people that actually understands software development - typically a low percentage of the massive overhead in a typical business software development center.
But you've got to start somewhere.
The Agile ceremonies are not bad, but relatively useless if there is no "real Agile" beneath. Unfortunately, they are easy to implement whereas "real" agile is not.
And what is "real" agile: The core agile ideas (the manifesto), the focus on flow-control, the incremental analysis-build-analysis cycle, continuous improvement, multi-disciplined teams, knowledge sharing, analysis methods that involves multiple people (like story mapping), empowerment (self governing teams, but also product owners).
Perhaps above all, the idea that software development processes should not be defined by business administrators, but instead by people that are actually qualified.
I guess it could be labeled as "common sense", but a few things are typically hard to reason about for a lot of people, for instance the flow-control part (such as kanban), as dynamic efficiency is harder to "see" than static efficiency.
But getting good at that is actually hard. Adding 1000 fields and workflows to Jira is easy.
Process is not going to fix a toxic work environment. But, it can make a positive difference over time.
Many teams start out productive, but they also tend to degrade over time. How many 10 year old projects have you been happy to start working on? How about 20?
Those are the places most in need of someone to cut the bullshit.
The reason development methodologies exist even in the face of common sense is the same reason management metrics have been around for ages: they aren't for the people doing the work, they're for the managers to quantify the work their team does for the sake of their managers.
Not every manager can understand every facet of the operation two levels down. Methodologies not only give them an understandable metric of what is going on, they also have something to point to when upper-upper management is considering a lower manager for a promotion or trying to figure out why things are taking too long or not working as expected.
Development methodologies have a place, that's for sure, but structure for structure's sake - in my experience - tends to exist primarily for the benefit of the managers, rather than the engineers.
If your agile coach is dragging and dropping in Jira, they're doing it wrong. That's more likely the PO's job.
And agile coach, at least as I know them, guides several teams in their use of agile, without being part of the team. They have to be experts at recognizing whether a team functions well, which aspects need improving, and handing the team the tools to improve. It's a bit more distant from a team than a scrum master is.
That's because even my Software Engineering textbook first published in the early 80's warned about it, and presented iterative, agile-like, models and referenced the article by Royce that first described waterfall (without naming it) as an example of a broken model in the early 70's... Iterative processes have been widely taught since the late 70's at least.
Yeah, I'd stay far away from anyone who thinks you need 8 months to grasp the concepts of Agile. Sounds like @horse_recruiter is running the talent search.
That ridiculous expectation is probably a symptom of some pretty dysfunctional management in general.
For someone involved in non-technical delivery, I would expect they had experience delivering agile projects.
(Of course, agile projects typically call them product owners instead, a subtle distinction.)
I've been involved with agile projects since 2006 and I am still learning new ways of delivering software that solves the right problem, developing team cohesion, surfacing risk early, and other things you don't learn in the 3 day class.
I can teach Scrum in 30 minutes, but there should be an actual expert around until enough of the group has internalized the reasons for the concepts and feel like they can adjust it to suit their situation without fear of dogma. (This expert, however, won't usually cost $200,000 unless they signed the manifesto themselves or are otherwise agile-famous.)
(Here's the 30 seconds if you don't have anyone around. Start with trying to group the next most important thing to do in a 2 week chunk. Every day, talk with each other and make sure to surface any problems and risks as fast as possible. Have at least one person who will use the software sitting with the team to answer questions as they pop up. And every week, take an hour to figure out what's working well, what isn't, and what you need to adjust to make things work more smoothly. There are dozens of technical and organizational practices to go through and try, but the best is to keep the ones that work for you, ditch the ones that don't.
Standups and Demos are just 2 of those organizational processes. Use them if they work, ditch them if they don't. For example, I'm currently working with expert practitioners and we're not doing a standup because we're small enough, work close enough together, and have worked with each other long enough to just talk.
>> Here's the 30 seconds if you don't have anyone around. Start with trying to group the next most important thing to do in a 2 week chunk. Every day, talk with each other and make sure to surface any problems and risks as fast as possible. Have at least one person who will use the software sitting with the team to answer questions as they pop up. And every week, take an hour to figure out what's working well, what isn't, and what you need to adjust to make things work more smoothly
Product Owner is not the same as Project Manager. Product Owner is similar to Product or Program Manager in software, though the Product Owner role is usually a subset focused on software development and does not include go to market and P&L.
SCRUM Master role is the closest to a Project Manager.
The SCRUM Master isn't on all agile projects, but the SCRUM Master can be any combination of rotating team member responsible for following up on team tasks and facilitating SCRUM rituals to a full agile coach responsible for team coaching, organizational-wide systems/process analyst and change agent. Sometimes they get saddled with traditional project management deliverables as well.
The product owner, however, controls the backlog, and the yes/no in what defines the product is most often the most important (and difficult) position of the PM.
Right, Product Owners (like Product Managers) define the "what" of the product, effectively guiding the team on what market problems to solve and for which customers.
That's different from the Project Manager who works on resourcing and timing of a project.
> And that's the reason why the executives don't find workforce. Being less-skilled means they don't value the engineering profession up to the required level to compromise and give good salaries.
Came to post this
> (Spanish dev here --working abroad obviously--.)
Same here. Spanish dev working from the US. Sad to see many people like us here. Most of my fellow graduate students are in the same boat, really few stayed in Spain.
It is not competitive at all compared to the US of other european countries. That along with the "special" office politics and extreme inefficiency that plague Spanish companies, makes it extremely uninviting to come back to Spain.
200,000 euros is possible for what's essentially a contract digital transformation consultant, and there are agile qualifications on offer - and when you're dealing with the enterprise, they're often more valued than experience.
It is possible, but that's a very niche market. When you need people who can deal with multiple layers, including senior execs, and run tech teams, you are usually not looking for developers anyway. I don't find it very strange there is a shortage of those; I think you'll find that in most countries. It depends on the exact job description as this is all a bit vague though.
You know, there is a bit of politics, but I've come to the conclusion that it's better to just hose down the managers with "techy-stuff" rather than try to sell them power points with bullshit. After all, if they are making the decision, they should actually either get it, or trust you to get it for them.
The one thing that does not fly is developers that does not know the business case, or worse, those that don't care and acts like the company's purpose is to give them new toys (frameworks) to play with. But grokking a business case is marginally harder than resolving a merge-conflict so most people are actually presentable in a steering committee meeting.
Anyway; 200.000 € is probably not a developer, but possibly someone with a development background.
Unfortunately only a few people can sell things to the (non-tech) management - that is typically harder for us square-headed developers, as you have to be able to skimp some details in order to convey the big idea. But selling ideas is a unique skill anyway.
Agreed. I think it's entirely possible that they cannot easily find the skill set they need at 200000€/yr and it's simply that the tech writer did a poor job of communicating the job requirements.
What the hell even is an Agile qualification? Isn't it something you pick up on the fly? Some boss tells you that you're going to build an mvp prototype and you get to build more iterations after the first one is done, so don't break your heart over getting it right. And you say "ok bro I'm on it" and then you go code. What else is there?
Glad to be able to put some happiness in your world. Now seriously; do you think that one single unnamed study can be token as proof of what they are claiming? This is not much different to that 'The scientists say that...' mantra. How many executives were evaluated? 3?, 5?, 50?. We don't know.
Spanish dev here, 3 years in the business, been twice a freelancer and twice an employee. My main complaints:
- The maximum salary a developer can earn at any given company is almost written in stone - around 36000 euros. Every public job posting will have that figure as the max. When it's higher, they'll water it down in the interview.
Why? Probably because they don't have the notion of a 10x programmer at all. We all are perceived as 'equal' or even replaceable.
- Also, companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving. The sole hint of that you may leave will turn their red alarms on, and they'll start searching a replacement.
There rarely exists here the mentality that a work relationship is a commercial exchange, not an intimate family-like relationship. Being open to the market is not 'treason'.
- Tech stacks tend to be years behind San Francisco, whether is languages, frameworks, ops practices...
- Functional programming opportunities extremely scarce. Elixir is gaining traction here though.
It used to be better - I was looking for work in Spain just before the crisis. A senior dev could easily do 50K, banking positions were 70K and up.
Nowadays however, you can't find anything over 35K that is related to development -and- in Spain ( i.e. not a position in Germany)
Anyway - Spain does not have a problem of running out of worker, it has a problem of not paying those workers. I have been looking for years to go back to Spain but the job market is just completely unrealistic. I'm highly skeptical of the 200K figure in the article. Of course, job offers in Spain often do not specify the salary at all, but I have regularly seen director level position for about 70-90K.
Another spaniard here, and I can confirm that it absolutely is a problem of not wanting to pay appropriate wages.
First, most software companies only offer crappy jobs that don't require specific skills. Most of the job postings are for standard developing positions in very common languages such as Java or Python. Considering how many people finish their degree or their FP (Formación Profesional, courses of about two years oriented towards the job market, and often including internships) each year, and how high the unemplyment rate is, I just don't believe that there aren't enough applicants.
Second, a lot of the big companies are what we call cárnicas (roughly, "butcheries"), i.e. companies specialized in outsourcing that pay ridiculous wages (10K a year for an entry level, full-time position where you will get fired if you don't do three hours of overtime a day is not difficult to find). Most developers know better and stay away from these, but because of the unemployment rate, a lot of people end in these places.
In other words, those hard-sought qualifications are more or less "will do a specialized job while getting peanuts in return". The article misleads by giving an example of a position with a 200k salary (which I'm also very skeptical of, like gutnor), and fails to mention that it's a very specific position and does not represent the whole set.
The only way I could believe that there is an actual shortage of workers, and I still doubt that it's true, is if we took into account that many of the good developers fled to greener pastures a lot of time ago.
EDIT: I should also mention that the problem is not that there isn't money and therefore the job market can only offer crappy jobs. On the contrary, most of the big enterprises and especially the cárnicas are very lucrative for their owners. The problem is that there is a very big barrier entry, because these companies strive on public contracts, and because of corruption, new and smaller companies can't stand a chance against the already existing ones.
I have read a number of other articles which say essentially this as well, that essentially you aren't paid a market wage in Spain so the only people who work in Spain in technology have some alternate reason why they can't (or don't want to) leave.
I find these sorts of problems intriguing from a microeconomics perspective. There was a store in a small midwest town which closed because it couldn't afford to pay its workers, and felt if it raised its prices no one would shop there. The next closest store was 20 miles away. So people with the choice of buying something locally for 10 to 15% more than buying it remotely, it would seem would rather drive the 40 miles to get what ever it was they were looking for.
So how do economies get into these inversions? Is it globalization? is it an expectation of price or value? Is it the difference between economic action versus values?
So if Spain did pay a market wage what would impact be on other costs? Who do those companies sell to? In market? Out of market?
I'd say it is multidimensional problem. It's true there is a very high number of unskilled workers that are the ones that were left behind after the construction bubble. Their skills are in construction mainly and it's difficult for them to find a job.
But the low wages in skilled job are a prebubble problem. In fact I think they are due to a "titulitis". People (by traditional family request) needs to have a university tittle, and no real expert technician studies (really skilled electrician, plumbers, woodworkers, etc..) like in other countries like Germany were they are well respected and with high wages.
In fact the entry wage to construction worker was maybe double to the one any university graduate had. It was not uncommon for a construction unskilled worker to make in excess of 3000€/month while a fresh law or economy graduate with English and a Master couldn't find anything better than 1000€/month. Quite a shame and an inverted market.
Of course now with the bubble over, the 3000€ wages in construction are over, but the 1000€ wage for people with a title remains.
It's true that Spanish company owners don't expect that someone with a title will be able to add value behind the 1000€. I've been thinking why for quite sometime, one of the reasons is that most Spanish entrepreneurs used to be self-made, rising their business from the bottom with little formal education. So they didn't find that that education was truly valuable. Also the oversupply of graduates already before the bubble, made finding someone for the job easy. Another reason is that most Spanish people can rely on the family network so it was very rare to see someone moving to another city to find a Job, they rather stick to a low pay and stay close to family and friends. This has changed with the crisis, with people people with studies or experience emigrating to the EU and south America mainly.
I do think that Spanish people that goes abroad to work is mostly as good as the other European or American counterparts, hard-working and well prepared. But it's also true in Spain that a lot of people that is not interested in moving, are also not interested in making an effort in their jobs. I can say this of myself, I work as an airline pilot, and certainly wages are much higher in the middle east or asia. But I'm not interested in earning more just to be stranded in the middle of the dessert or in a megalopolis. I'd rather stay here where quality of life is very high even with a lower wage (family, friends, nature, culture, etc... are just 10 min away with awesome food and nightlife). For example one of my best friends is what you'll call a 10x programmer, is the star programmer and architect in a tour operator, he has built mostly alone and from scratch the core of a hotel reservation company with sales figures close to one billion €. He is the one who is called to put down fires or to handle difficult projects. He is very happy making around 100k€, when I'm quite sure he could be making 5x that in SV, and he is the best paid programmer in his company.
I know a number of business owners that complain of being unable to find people willing to do the work, it's true that the initial wage will not be very high, but usually are very specific jobs that need learning. And this business are interested in paying better once they have the skills. This includes electricians, beauty parlour worker, car mechanic, boat mechanic (I´m talking just positions I´ve learned are needed this last year). They find that workers are not interested in learning or working hard, just ask for what is the payment the first day, and they don't even know how to do the job!. Even people desperate are not willing to make the effort to learn a new skill or hard work, because most of them have the family that supports them. Even my friend complains that a high percent of his programmers are not interested in improving or learning new things.
In Spain most people want to be civil servants, entrepreneurship is something that just recently has started receiving some recognition. Before entrepreneurs were seen as just bosses that want to take profit of people, some kind of villain. That's why I'm not very bullish of the universal wage as an "universal" thing. You see that a high percentage of people is not interested in working any more once they are able to have enough money to live. We have this institutional envy in Spain were successful people (business or professionals) are seen as cheaters no matter what. You can not make money working hard, just cheating or stealing, so people don't even try. Don't take me wrong, there is very hard working people here, but they do it as their responsibility, because they like their job well done, even when they are poorly paid. Usually no as a way to improve their conditions or earn more.
In Spain living from the public money is for some like an art. Working in "b" jobs that are not registered so they can maintain the government help, or working just enough to have the next 6 months of unemployment, or trying to obtain a health disability (when they are fine). With the crisis all this went down, but still...
You also have to think that that as we had the Euro and we couldn't devalue the currency to keep up with the crisis, they had to devalue the whole country, taking most wages and prices a 15 to 20% down over 6 years. This has been very very painful to the economy, but I don't see they had other way to save the Spanish economy.
I must say that my experience is in Mallorca island and Madrid where the crisis has been melower than in the rest of Spain due to the tourism for example. There are towns in the middle of the peninsula, where unemployment is dramatic an nothing has come to replace construction even after all this time.
It's a complex problem both at the supply and the demand side. Companies don't value properly good workers, and also workers don't see their job as something to nurture, but as an inconvenience and the management as oppressors.
It depends very much on the products you offer. Necessities are much less sensitive to price raises than luxury goods when it comes to distance simply because not everybody is equally mobile.
What is wrong with Java/Python? I don't know about Java, but Python is certainly a nice language to write in in my opinion. (However don't expect raw performance from Python.)
It's not that they are bad languages, it's that they are the ones that everyone knows, so I don't believe that there are open positions on those languages that nobody wants, unless the money is obscenely low (which it often is).
Man, how things change. I remember times when most developers would derisively laugh off Python's indentation.
Back in 2006, Python jobs were so few and far between, you'd struggle to get paid to work with it. 10 years later, "everybody" works with it, so apparently you struggle to get paid a decent amount.
Why can't I ever find a niche I like and paying well? :(
I've actually found it pretty hard to find regular work focused on doing FP. My last job was Erlang when I started, but pivoted to Go because of a lack of Erlang developers. My last two jobs before that were mixes of C and Haskell, but only because I was given the lattitude to select haskell. This time around when I was interviewing I was trying to find something that would let me focus on FP, but the best I could find were jobs that ostensibly wanted to hire Clojure and Scala devs, but really 90% of the job would be maintaining a bunch of legacy enterprise architecturey Java with just enough FP to try to attract people into the positions.
Become a sysadmin that writes tools (which is more like old-school system
programmer, the one who wrote grep and syslog and init and bash and awk).
Since you're nominally a sysadmin, nobody will look at your workbench to check
if you're using "kosher" languages, so you're free to use whatever makes sense
to solve a problem (hint: not always a functional language).
Been there, done that, been happy with the approach.
I know a couple of people who do something like that. I don't think it would work well for me though, since I had to resign from my current job because although it was a developer role there was a good bit of sysadmin required and I just find that work extremely unrewarding.
Go vs. Erlang feels like a pretty difficult comparison to make because they feel entirely different. Erlang isn't a bad language, but it never felt like more than a very flexible DSL to me. If you look at OTP with a critical eye, it's actually not much more than a lot of tooling on top of a state monad; and my limited experience with using the language professional makes me feel like you're buying a lot of code complexity and you need a very strong group of people with a lot of erlang experience to make that complexity pay off. Some of the process management and hot code updates and such that used to be really beneficial are less beneficial now that we have so many other solutions to managing containers and microservices, and the language itself, while functional, never really felt to me like it was achieving the power and expressiveness of other functional languages I've used. A lot of that seems cultural; I wrote a little toy monadic library in Erlang when I was trying to help teach some coworkers about ideas from other functional languages and how we could use them in our codebase (https://github.com/rebeccaskinner/erl_m) but I don't see a lot of libraries like that coming out of the wider Erlang community- there seems to be a much stronger focus on solving a single concrete problem than on making development in the language better overall.
As for Go, I do like the language- well enough that I took another job where I'll be mostly using it. I can't quite shake the feeling that some of the syntactical and stylistic choices were made more to be different than because they are better, but I can move past them. I think goroutines and channels have a lot of potential as atoms of concurrency for building models going forward, and I think it's nice to see a language gaining popularity that is focused on being small (in the sense of the size of the spec) and simple (in terms of feature interactions). I don't think a lot of it's potential has been realized yet, and I hope that we can take some of the lessons learned from other languages, e.g. Conduits and FRP from Haskell. For right now I've seen enough cases of people introducing threading errors and problems introduced by the user of pointers that I think it pays to be wary of third party libraries.
I didn't read it as necessarily knocking those languages, but saying most programmers had experience in those languages. And most jobs did not ask for any unusual skills, so companies should be able to find decent local developers.
I find it hard to find it hard to find remote jobs in the EU for Python anyway. There are a lot of shops depending on it (Django for instance) in the northern countries but they basically want you to sit in an office there. For Java (PHP, ... ) jobs are far easier to get remotely.
If there's lots of local workers that can't or won't leave, is there opportunities to run outsourcing firms? It sounds like a $50k euro salary would allow you to cherry pick devs, or am I wrong?
1. cárnicas is an awesome term for what native English markets would call a "body shop".
2. You're probably looking more for the term "meat market" than for "butcher". Unless, is part of the implication that a cárnicas somehow chops up the time of a bunch of FTE's?
ps -- in english, meat market colloquially means a bar where young people go to get drunk and meet one night stands. Stereotypically frat boys w/ popped collars and sorority sisters in miniskirts. Before gordaco uses that in conversation, I thought I'd share...
Also true! I just wondered if that was closer to the spirit of the Spanish term. It would be funny if it wasn't, and they really were trying to evoke people being cut up by butchers.
It's super funny to me but unfortunately american english has picked a different meaning already. I just had an image of him dropping that into conversation with some Americans and things being badly misunderstood...
For a while my former employer used a Spanish software consultancy for second level support on an open source solution; they were happy to work with us because we paid well [0] and didn't argue on every bill like their other (mostly south American I think) clients did.
[0]: my boss told me literally to tell them: contract is fine, except for the hourly rate, I should tell them he would not accept to be associated with such a cheap rate so they would have to add 20% to their prices.
I use this now that I hire through upwork as well. Espescially when you hire across the globe you get chances to build good relationships for peanuts compared to around here. (Oh, works with kids as well: you can buy many lifetime friends before they become teenagers.)
As a 18-old Polander I was absolutely thrilled to work part-time for a US company. In hindsight, it was also much more valuable for me than academic education I pursued later.
I would be offended if someone called this child labour and attempted to limit this opportunity.
>> Oh, works with kids as well: you can buy many lifetime friends before they become teenagers.)
> Are you seriously saying you are using child labour?
No, I say I buy myself friends and happy consultants that come back. The link is when you are in an advantage position (parent with small children, western SW company that use remote consultants) it takes next to no effort to make a difference in someones life.
Was your "before they become teenagers" statement perhaps in error? I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, and ethical concerns aside, I have trouble imagining even a brilliant 12-year-old producing code you'd want to use in a commercial product. (Speaking as someone who started coding at 7.)
Perhaps you're mistaken about the meaning of "teenager"?
I'm not mistaken about the meaning of teenager but eiter my writing is unclear or some people are obsessed with reading it as me recommending child labour.
The "work" part is about consultants.
The "friends" part is about mine and relatives kids.
No, I do not try to extract value from kids.
And the youngest person I have seen coding anything useful was a 16 year that managed to complete 70+ days of effective 9-5 work in 14 afternoons.
He got a nice job (at well above market rate IIRC) at the compiler division at one of the big IT companies after finishing his bachelors degree a few years later.
Leaving aside the validity of the 10x programmer concept, the company still needs to be able to extract that extra performance in actual value. Most software jobs in Spain don't have productivity of that kind. Almost no companies here develop software products or services whose effectiveness translates directly into revenue. Very few of those who have tried have had any sort of long-term success.
Several years ago I took over the lead UI position at a company. Jira has a feature to display lines of code contributed by developer. After 10 months of adding features, and getting the product to shipping, I had contributed -1500 lines. There were less lines than when I started, and the code was simpler for it. I'd _almost_ say that LOC is a good measure of bad coding.
It's a general thing about data. Just because it is easy to measure doesn't mean its a useful metric.
My hunch is that as expertise increases for developers, LOC/day initially goes up, as they have to think less about language constructs and how to do certain things. Once a certain level of expertise is reached, LOC/day goes down, as the developer figures out how to do more with less code and spends more time in decision making and planning.
I think you're missing Jare's point. You don't need an amazingly powerful engine in your car to go at 20 miles/hour, just as companies don't need 10x programmers to work on the types of software problems that Jare asserts Spanish companies are working on.
In my experience, the real '10x' productivity bump comes from engineers who can internalize huge swaths of the codebase and make all of the necessary connections. Given a large enough product, that will be out of reach for the majority, due to either dedication or capacity. Hearing about a new feature and instantly knowing the implementation points and consequences instead of having to fumble around parts of the system you're not familiar with is easily '10x,' LOC be damned.
I've worked with developers that commit far far more code than i do. I still find it intimidating. I take solice in replacing those 50kloc subsystems with a few interfaces and a handful of implementations. Those -40kloc days are awesome.
To be fair, those guys that throw out tons of code really explore the problem space. it's tough to start with a clean design when the spec is vague.
You don't have to claim "10x more LOC", if your abstractions are powerful enough to capture a vast breadth of situations in an elegant and not-an-over-inefficient manner.
If you could achieve this feat, I'd say you are already a 10x type programmer. It's good you are better at abstraction, you may not be 10x but you may be 5x/4x and that's significant.
LOC is the worst measure of productivity, but sadly, most managers (mainly, the excel sheet type managers) find it easy because they can use LOC in their shitty formulas.
Have you considered working remotely for a US company? I know a guy making €7 or 8,000 per month, after tax, living in Paris. Best of both worlds: amazing quality of living, cheap cost of living + healthcare, lots of spending (or investing) money! Seems to be working well for him.
Amazing remote jobs exist: I have one. The problem is to find a company that has those remote jobs AND will hire people they don't have a huge background on.
I know a recruiter at a company like that that worked on a point system: Barring a recommendation, to pass his bar you had to have 5 years of experience in the industry for what he considered a major tech company, a degree from a top university, and a history of promotions during those years.
So he is fine with hiring all over the world, as long as you had already worked at trendy Silicon Valley companies for a while (In practice, using them as a recruiting filter). So, for all intents and purposes, the only people passing that bar would be people that already had a great job. Someone with talent but without pedigree would not even get an interview.
Paris is much less expensive than the bay area, but more expensive than the average US city. In fact, it's barely less expensive than NYC, one of the most expensive US cities.
Also, if you are working remotely you cannot command a bay area salary.
You can command a bay area salary. There are a lot of companies out there who cannot find skills because everyone is in the bay area, and want to work at the coolest company possible.
There are a lot of uncool companies who need those same skills, and will pay to get them.
Hell, they pay consultants far more to fly in and do the work if they can't find someone remotely.
would you be willing to name some of those companies who need and will pay for said skills? I think it's time programmers get away from the propaganda of the big 5 being cool, which artificially supresses the market imho.
Yes. Specifically, rents are much higher in SF/SV than in NYC. SF has even higher rent than Manhattan. Most of NYC (not Manhattan or Williamsburg) can be quite reasonable.
Does SF gave rent brokers you have to go through? Manhattan you have to pay first/last rent to a broker plus deposit you need around 8-$12k to sign any lease up front
Broker's fees of 15% or even 20% seemed to be fairly common last time I was looking in Manhattan several years ago. It's definitely not pegged at one month anymore nowadays even in Brooklyn.
I moved from SF to Manhattan and found the prices and the process of finding an apartment easier. Most of my San Francisco friends dare not move or move to Oakland. People move here in NYC all the time, paying roughly the same in rent accounting for yearly inflation related increases.
Thanks for the reminder! Of course from time to time I consider the possibility. There's no particular reason why I don't give it a shot, other than the global competition for US remote gigs.
Probably it's easier when you specialise in a niche language - which I'm doing lately!
Same here. I know at least 4 people who are making six figure (US) salaries working for a US company from Europe. All for the same company and it's kind of hard to get in, but still...
I know a lot of US companies hiring remotely. Two reasons: 1) costs (you're not competing with Google and Facebook on salary, at least not directly) and somewhat related 2) bigger applicant pool. This is especially true if you're looking for specific skills - much easier to find somebody if you're looking at 10x market. For many developer positions, having a person in the office is not much better than having remote employee, and may be both more expensive. You don't really have to be "very special", just plain good, and there are a lot of good developers all over the globe.
Unfortunately I can't give good advice as I know most of these people after they were hired, and didn't ask them how they were hired. I know there are companies doing that, and social networks are also very useful in it, otherwise there are companies like http://www.safeguardworld.com/ (just one I know, not a recommendation since I never worked with it, but I know some people who did and found good remote jobs) which usually help connecting employers and employees.
Or have to move because of H1B which ends after 3 years, and it's pure luck to get an extension in time. That's how I ended back in Germany doing remote for US.
I find that salary excessive tbh. I understand working remotely for a US company and get a US based salary, truth is that the companies that will do that are mostly startups and I don't think they have the funds for high end salaries. Except if you are a genius dev and they do need you and you go off and tell them that you want to work from home and live in another Country.
I do think though you can get jobs that pay around 2000-3000 euros a month when working remotely, although you have to be very patient as it is some kind of contracting, I mean you won't exactly get all the employment rights you would get if you lived and worked at the country that the company is set.
2000-3000 Euro/month is incredibly low. Fresh devs around here go for $50k+ annually, and experience costs 6 figures easily (and I'm in Philadelphia, I'm not talking SF/NY numbers).
Edit (pressed submit early): some companies use remote workers to reduce costs, but I wouldn't expect to pay such a low $36k max in Europe. Remote, if managed well, is just as good as in-house. You're not worth significantly less.
You have to consider that here in a lot of sud-west EU states 3000e/month allow you to live VERY GOOD even in the main cities. Cost of life here is extremly low compared to that of SV.
Forget Silicon Valley: It's gotten stupid expensive. The rest of the US, however, has not.
I lived in Spain, and moved to the middle of the US, to a city that is about the same size as Valencia: Here, A 4 bedroom house can be had for $200K. Groceries are often cheaper here. Cars are WAY cheaper here, barring a few EU luxury brands. My mother's electricity bill, in an apartment less than half the size of my house, is double mine, so the cost of living is in no way higher than in Spain.
The difference is that someone right out of school will make 60K. A completely average senior dev makes 100K. The last time I had local work I had a long term hourly contract, 40/week average, that paid $125 an hour, so 20K a month. Today I make more.
So in Spain you have a cost of living that is not really any better, far higher taxes, and pay that would be seen as pretty low for a recent college graduate. Every time I visit, and people ask me why I don't come back, I just go through the economics, and Spaniards quickly agree that I'd have to be insane to come back.
Why make €3,000 when you can easily make €6,000 or €8,000 doing the same work? Unlike a lawyer or a doctor, software engineering can easily be "exported" and done from anywhere in the world. You just need to be _good_.
I agree. I was just saying that, anyway, with 3000e/m you are not living a bad life, you are instead pretty """rich""" for the standars here. Indeed, if you can, better improve it.
It depends also on how many hours do you work. Here is pretty common you never go over 38hours week, and if you have to you are compensated very well (1.5~2.5 x normal hour rate).
For what I read (but probably there is a little bias in it) in SV there is a partially workcentered style of life when you have to work often >60h with a salaried contract (that, btw, here in EU they do not exist... you are paid with an explicit amount of hours per week in your contract). For example reading the book of Elon Musk it seems he asks constantly for 80/90h/w working also on the weekend. Consider also that.
Oh and also you have not to pay anything for healtcare.
Basically, as other have already said, if you manage to live in Italy-France-Spain-Portugal-Germany and you are capable to get a remote work for a company in US you will have a incredibly high level of life here.
It is not quite bad as it may seen in SV. Most people work 8am to 5pm as gauged by the traffic peak periods. Some start earlier or later but most work around 40 hours. Rarely do you see much traffic or people at work on the weekends. There are certainly places where people work like long hours but one doesn't have to work in those places. There are plenty of other options.
I don't know how it works in Spain, but in Italy the cost of an employee is probably much more than his/her salary.
The employer gives you a salary, then they have to pay on top of it ~30% of INAIL, INPS etc. (pension, health "insurance" including sick days and so on) and ~10% of TFR (fund you get back at the end of your career.)
In the U.S. those are costs you have to remove from your salary.
So, 3000 euros a month would be 6000 euros before taxes and if you add the other employer costs, it's about 10000. Now convert it to dollars and you have a 130000 dollars a year.
When hiring contractors the company doesn't have to pay any of these things (it's on the contractor). I'm currently contracting for a company in Italy and getting much more than 3k/mo.
You are speaking about gross salary I guess. I don't really believe that in Italy you can get much more of 3k€ net as a developer. And contracting market in Italy is really fucked up, when I was there on average contractors were paid less than permies.
Don't know about Italy, but at least in some EU countries, freelancers do build pension.
In my country, pension payments is mandatory. As well as insurance for maternity/paternity leave. I've full medical insurance. Well, as full as regular workers. The only difference is I don't have paid sick days and can't claim unemployment benefits. Which kinda makes sense when freelancing.
I think I'm eligible for disabled pension though. So if I got hit by car, I'd get free treatment. But no salary compensation. If I was rendered disabled, I may be eligible for disabled benefits based on my previous incomes. Or at least basic disabled benefits.
Cost of employee is always higher than salary. Bear in mind that employee have to pay (feed) himself, government, management, company revenue etc. It's simply not possible to create business value 10 000 € and get all of them into own pocket. At least not as standard employee.
It depedns on definition of gross or super-gross salary. It may vary per country.
But...employee is always the only one who have to create value for customer who will give company his money. It doesnt matter who pay taxes (even health or social "insurance" are kind of taxes) value needs to be created and customer needs to be charged. Employer will not pay (long terrrm view) your bills and taxes from own pocket (dont consider early startup phases)
your feeding corrupt governments in a mandatory way with out a way to get out of the system (i don't want a government pension or the so called "free" social/medical care)
in spain your pretty much putting your money in fund they may not be there by the time you retire.
so making 3k a month is peanuts there is no way you can save for retirement.
most specialist will tell you that you will need to save anything from 500k to 1M for retirement. if you have kids, 3k its probably a stretch specially if you want to give them a good education.
€1500 a month is €18K a year, I believe Portugal has about 28% income tax for €7-20K income bracket (which seems very high), so it is roughly about €25K before taxes.
And you are saying this is a good as it gets for Software Engineers. I was looking up real estate prices in Lisbon and they seemed pretty high. Per my understanding a lot of people from EU (and some outside of EU) are buying real estate in Portugal and that drives prices up. How do local people buy real estate then?
What websites do local people in Portugal use for real estate sales and rentals?
I would advise anyone to stay away from Lisbon regarding housing as there's some kind of bubble over here because of all the tourism. The rest of the country has saner prices, so if you don't really need to live in Lisbon, stay away from it..
Regarding locals, we have a problem which is that when daily workers leave Lisbon, you can only find the tourists looking at each other..
We do lease for everything, TV, computer, car, house, vacation, you name it.
Before the crisis you could get full credits, with 0% entry on your side.
It is also quite common to live with the parents and only leave when you eventually marry, with one salary being used to pay the bank and other running costs.
Or you get to buy a little piece of land with an house that gets built with lot of shortcuts along the years.
Not sure what the best websites are, as I am living abroad, however many local agencies lack Internet presence. The best sources are ads on local newspapers or word of mouth.
Let me correct your numbers. For 1500€ monthly net your employer will pay about 3000€ (~20% income tax + ~30% social security). Multiply by 14 (Yes there are 14 salaries in a year. Don't ask.) and the yearly gross is 42000€.
Edit: https://casa.sapo.pt/ for a look at the real estate market. "para venda" is for sale, "para alugar/aluguer" is for rent.
You're apparently unaware that not all tax appears on your salary receipt. Employers have to pay 20% to SS, on top of the 11% that the employee pays. (This amount doesn't count toward your gross income for IRS purposes though, which is relevant to your point)
The distinction is largely a technicality, all the more because both parts of the SS contribution are paid by the employer directly to the state, but it does have one effect: because the 20% don't show up in the salary receipt, most portuguese people are, like you, blissfully unaware of what the real tax rate on their salaries is.
You're responding to a statement I didn't make. I just corrected the common misconception that the SS tax is 11%, it's not, it's 34.75% [0]
What would happen if those taxes were lowered is for economists to speculate, I'm not one (even then, as the joke goes, put a question to two economists, get three different opinions)
Local people will hardly ever buy a property within Lisbon center. Advantageous tax and citizenship acquiring policies for foreigners drived prices extremely high. Suburbs are the only solution as soon as you get a family and renting a room is not an option anymore.
Even renting is way harder right now. Landlords prefer to rent central properties via AirBnb than to make cheaper long term contracts.
I suggest taking a look at HN's "Who is Hiring" monthly threads. Try to focus on remote work for Bay Area companies - minimum should be $100k/annually for a good dev.
When I have been on the interviewing side, and I see what you are talking about, but there seems to plenty of decent devs when I go to the python meetup group.
>Probably because they don't have the notion of a 10x programmer at all.
I don't think the 10x programmer is a valid concept. If a company believes they can easily replace you for that price, then chances are you aren't working on anything that that makes you irreplaceable. Why should an employer pay you more for the same amount of work? I also have reservations about looking at work as "an intimate family-like relationship". It's all families and sunshines until an investor pulls out and its time for layoffs.
I don't think there is such a thing as a 10x programmer if we're just talking about implementation. Where there is easily a 10x factor or more is making the right architectural decisions up front. An experienced dev can avoid making mistakes that can doom a project right out of the gate.
Another way to make an order of magnitude difference is to approach the problem from the 'why' perspective and come up with a different solution that is a lot less work.
> Or, they cannot really appreciate the quality or even the speed of my work. Clueless people abound.
Many "10x programmers" aren't anywhere near 10x faster/better/etc in an environment full of 1x programmers. I think "exponential" would be a better description than 10x. If you watch them in the short term they look similar to the 1x programmers. If you distribute their exponential gains over the whole team then this will always be true. These types are like successful hedge fund managers in the domain of technical investment and debt. If you let them work alone long enough you'll start to see their foresight paying dividends.
I think you can easily be a 10x developer, since 10x is relative. Especially in a world awash in bad developers. Just being familiar with the right algorithms and software approaches vis-a-vis your co-workers will do that. I've seen "enterprise" code that was doing tons of string key-value pair lookups using arrays. Just converting those to hashtables could very well speed up the app by 10+ times if the key-value lookups were the bottleneck. I can imagine a poorly performing database program being sped up by 10 times just by having the right person refactor the code to use caching to avoid database reconnections. This is what I think of when I think of a 10x developer; they may not be literally 10x better but their code can be 10x faster or use 1/10th the memory or be 1/10 the size of competing developers.
Your comment is totally reasonable. You're being down-voted because the sentiment of that statement is so negative but in some ways it's true. There is widespread encouragement from society for individuals to learn how to program. In the last 5 decades the group that operates primarily from this motivation has exploded. The much older fanatical nerd group (originating with Charles Babbage himself) has seen more modest growth. This latter group operates primarily from intrinsic motivation. They would have an earnest desire to achieve the improvements you've stated. Simply to see if they can. Their love for their craft and overall playful orientation eventually accumulates. They quickly familiarize themselves with the whole bag of tricks. They have wet dreams about things like binary search. You just can't compete with someone who loves what they do. The more monetary incentive there is to do something the more those people are few and far between. So yes, I agree that the phenomenon is relative and that it is so extreme (10x) mostly because so many developers are merely "good enough" (1x). I still think there's a lot to be said about how much an environment enables the expression of a 10x programmer. It is most common that "good enough" really is good enough and going extreme doesn't make anything better.
I have no problem speaking of bad developers because I myself was one. Now, I am probably above average and in some organizations maybe even a "10x" developer. But I shudder thinking of some of the code samples that I've sent to prospective employers in my earlier days (~12 years ago) -- code that I thought was good and clever. Probably most junior developers are bad and I suspect a lot more code gets written by junior developers than we'd like to think. The senior developers get to work on the interesting problems and they leave the necessary but boring coding work to the junior developers.
I was also a bad developer. Then I was a "clever" developer. Then I was rewriting everything from nothing because I needed to know how it worked. Doing so is a great way to get a sense of how much "secret sauce" there is in a domain. The C++ standard library has a lot for instance. My naive implementations never came close.
> I suspect a lot more code gets written by junior developers than we'd like to think.
This may be true if you just measure lines of code. But if you couple that measure with the number of times each line was actually executed I suspect you'd see a different story. My library, for example, was comparable in size to parts of the standard library it replaced. So by direct measure a junior developer wrote half the code. But when you measure it by usage you can see the magnificent results of the 10x programmers at Boost and otherwise working on the C++ standard library. Notably their 10x-ness is in the performance of their code and not their performance on the job. Like you described.
People with experience in the field have been telling me I am a very good programmer. I always compare myself to the car mechanic who holds a screwdriver to the engine, puts his ear on it, and immediately hears that the third valve needs replacement.
That's a really nice hierarchy. I'd argue a 10x business value developer is a 10x technical developer AND a 10x product designer. Also that a 10x manager is a 10x business value developer AND a 10x leader/coordinator. The rarity compounds with the number of passions that must converge on a single individual. I'd bet you get a bit of a bump with a partial set. So a 10x technical developer may be able to operate as a 2x business value developer without significant product design skill. A 6x manager may get by with average technical ability.
I'm not sure how much the 10x thing generalizes. I still think it's a terrible name. I sort of gave an argument for why programming ability may have a bimodal distribution. With one half growing and eventually eating the other. I don't necessarily see that same phenomenon in leadership or product design. That is assuming you're looking at people who are actually trying and not just random technical developers.
The 10x thing happens all the time. What should happen is that a way for he 10x person to teach or otherwise influence the other members of the team should be in play, but constructing a robust set of incentives for that is difficult.
We are on Ruby, Sinatra, Rails, Nginx, Lua & not afraid of new technologies.
Our open positions are on https://www.3scale.net/about/jobs/
We're based in Barcelona, but had remote workers in the past and still might be opened to that after some warmup time. On some hiring sites we were publically posting 50k EUR for Senior Backend Developer.
Being here for 5 years I can say there is plenty of growth space for good developers. Cheers.
But the problem I see is that the top people you might want would have no problem finding a similar position in a US company for 2x-3x that salary. So what how do you compete in the global economy with a 50+% salary cut? Do most of your developers only speak Spanish? Or do they have their roots firmly set in Spain (family/friends/relationships)?
I had the chance to interview (and get offered) by a company in the area. For context, I'm from the area but have been living abroad for some time now.
The internal recruiter was honest with their problems finding talent abroad: People have families and, even though there are cheap flights inside Europe, if you have a partner and maybe kids things change. Life there is great with a good salary, but chances are your partner also has a professional career. If it's outside IT, your partner is pretty much screwed: Little jobs, terrible salaries, no English-speaking outside IT and a disdain for foreigners in more traditional industries. "Why hire a foreigner when I can hire someone local?" seems to be an acceptable attitude for a majority of the population, even though we're talking about people with the right to work, so there's no extra effort, paperwork or burden to the employer.
On the other hand, you have beach, culture, food, night life, mountains (even the Pyrenees), a cosmopolitan city in such a tiny radius that you can enjoy each of those every so often. Plus an international airport that can get you in a few hours anywhere in Europe and North Africa. And it's cheap to live there.
If someone is wondering now why I didn't go back, these were my concerns: Career development (none was offered) and stability. I'm up for well paid risks, but if that position disappears (it was newly created) I have to move country again. Such a pain in the ass.
> finding a similar position in a US company for 2x-3x that salary
Remote or ? Because I don't think it's that easy to find them remote with (often) hampered English language skills and very different interviews than we have here in Europe. And moving to the US is also not that easy even if you have a job, partially because it's a life altering decision which moves you far away from family. For a lot of people that's not worth the increase.
Edit: also, it is really cheap, depending on where you (want to) live to buy houses. So your 'compared low' salary actually brings you quite far. I am a weirdo in that regard though (at least compared to most on HN); I don't like living in cities. But even there it's not expensive if you look in the right places. Exceptions are there ofcourse yadayada.
I am sorry I was talking about the best people, and I haven't yet met anyone who is really great technically but has hampered English skills.
> "Remote or ?" / "And moving to the US is also not that easy even if you have a job, partially because it's a life altering decision which moves you far away from family. For a lot of people that's not worth the increase."
Totally agree, that is why some people choose to stay even if it's not the best for their career. The salary is definitely not the only reason to move out of Spain in Tech.
Maybe because working remote is not for everyone. I actually really enjoy working with people in our office. They are awesome. I relocated there few years ago and we are not only colleagues but also friends. Some people don't speak Spanish at all. Everyone has to speak English. That is official language of the company.
I'm from Barcelona, living in Denmark and moving to SF soon. I have a couple of friends working in 3scale, and they seem happy. It looks like a good company to work for.
My plan is going back to BCN at some point, so if you are still searching for backends then, I will give you a call. ;)
I know a lot of employees or freelancers making a lot more working for companies in Malaga or companies elsewhere; more said it but get projects abroad; worked well for us. A problem here is that you need USPs because in Portugal people are working for a lot less than in Spain, all speak English and very willing to take whatever work. Also less rules; easy to fire people in the first few years.
> companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving
where does that come from?
> Tech stacks tend to be years behind San Francisco,
That is a problem? I would say that's kind of an advantage? Most programmers would find it more of a problem to learn new stuff all the time.
> I know a lot of employees or freelancers making a lot more working for companies in Malaga or companies elsewhere;
I talked about the rule - undoubtedly there are exceptions. I once interviewed for a senior position for a prominent Malaga company, and they offered me less than my first job ever here in Barcelona.
> Most programmers would find it more of a problem to learn new stuff all the time.
One could argue that London/SF programmers do exactly that - and are compensated accordingly!
We are in the technology business - by definition those who don't keep up are left behind. Maybe not drastically, but gradually and without you noticing.
> We are in the technology business - by definition those who don't keep up are left behind. Maybe not drastically, but gradually and without you noticing.
I agree, i'm saying many programmers would not think that a problem as long as the market demands those 'older' technologies. If you read HN or /r/programming you might think you are missing out all the time; if you make E200k+ at BBVA as senior dev you really wouldn't notice any of that. You would be using stuff that hasn't changed massively for over a decade. I would wager that a lot (most) programmers would prefer the latter to the former. Not me, not you, but many would.
Developers are not fungible. But in my opinion: this "10x" term really has to go away. We need a better way to describe the reality that there's a range in quality and capability for developers that doesn't suggest an order of magnitude. That just means corner cutting.
I've seen order of magnitude differences in performance among developers. The baseline was competent still, mind you; it's just some people are really, really good at their job. And it's not just "oh they put 10x as much LOC while really smart people would focus on proper design": they excel both in theory and practice.
A problem however that you can't really see it in the hiring process. Unlike "0.1x developers" whom you can filter with fizzbuzz, they are indistinguishable from a normal, competent engineer in the interviews, and there aren't many of them around.
Either way, building your company to depend on being staffed by top performers is a dangerous strategy IMO.
I'm sure technical ability falls on a curve like all other human abilities/activities. Like take weight lifting. Most people will be around the middle. Some will be able to lift heavier, some will be able to lift less. But if two people are training I would not expect one person to lift "10x" the next person. No way, no how.
It is a bit silly, but try thinking of it as "one developer who helps makes ten others be twice as productive". It could even be a non-technical manager who is really good at taking care of all of the non-development work for the team, allowing them to focus on what they do best.
Why don't you think the range covers an order of magnitude? Salaries certainly do. There would have to be an explanation for why companies are behaving wildly irrationally for that to not indicate a similar range of employee output.
For a senior developer, let's say 10 year working experience, there are some jobs above 50k but they are an small percentage. If I were a fresh graduate, or senior willing to relocate, my advice for any spanish engineer would be to move out of Spain: better salaries, better working conditions and better working culture overall. The EU it's a huge opportunity, don't limit yourself.
36,000 euro in, say, Valencia, that's close to 100,000 dollars in San Francisco when adjusting for purchasing power. Not great but certainly not that bad either. For someone with three years experience. I know a team of developers south of Valencia who make way more than that. They work out of a mansion with an infinity pool. Doing simple websites.
Whereas 36,000 euro in Southern Spain (where the unemployment is high) is not fantastic, it doesn't seem all that bad. In few industries employees would complain about that. And how many years of university education do you need to get to there: often none.
The wages for a programmer in Indiana aren't bad in context, either. I still chose to move to New York for a better paying job there.
Why? Well, firstly, it's a real kick in the pants to get paid half what you could elsewhere, even if you're paying rent and eating out for half the price. Secondly, computers, student loans, automobiles, and AWS services cost the same whether I'm in New York or Indiana, so I'd rather get paid twice as much, thank you very much.
It's amazing how often "structural unemployment" is just "we don't want to pay what people want to be paid".
> I know a team of developers south of Valencia who make way more than that. They work out of a mansion with an infinity pool. Doing simple websites.
Sounds like a great setup to raise a family... not.
Just saying, what sounds amazing for young and single white guys might not be great for the rest of the population. Wouldn't it be better if each of them could have their own flat and privacy for the same price?
I guess Upwork is the leading place to find freelancers. It's a race to the bottom (i.e. competing with third-world devs) though so that can discourage one.
Then there's Linkedin. Personally if I receive a job offer from outside Spain I assume it's clueless recruiter spam. Your message should be extremely clear that you are actively seeking remote developers from abroad.
Basically yea, LinkedIn, hacker news, local recruiters. When searching or posting an offer, do it in Spanish, if not most Spanish people searching wont find it.
> Also, companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving.
Have they ever considered that programmers might be less likely to leave if they got a decent salary?
I've got to say, much of this sounds familiar. In Netherland, I used to hear companies complain that it was so hard to find technical people (programming and otherwise). At the same time, the jobs I saw didn't really pay all that much. The solution is simple: pay better, and people will come.
The problem is that in Netherland, management is/was seen as better, more important, higher status and deserving of better pay than programming. So for a programmer to move on beyond a certain point, he'd have to go into management. If programming jobs were seen as equal to management (in status and pay), programmers would have no reason to switch. Netherland is very much a management-oriented culture, for some reason.
Another is education. Politicians always kept talking about the knowledge economy, while at the same time cutting costs for education, and there was not a particular stimulus for technical education. And students are more likely to choose something management-related when they think there's more money there.
I'm talking somewhat in the past tense, because it feels to me like things have changed. I made enormous jumps in income over the past couple of years (could be because of the switch to freelancing and mostly working for banks since then), and the management-over-tech attitude seems to have diminished a bit (though that could be because of Scrum, which emphasizes empowered development teams and makes management somewhat redundant at times). I don't have any recent data on this, though. Maybe it's just my personal situation that has gotten better.
Sadly if employers are able to pay so low it's because there's a serious oversupply of devs... On another note how possible is for a non European to get a job in Spain?
There are few, although not many counter-examples. We run Mobile Jazz [1], which is an international boutique agency with headquarters in Barcelona. We're trying to treat our employees extremely fairly and have managed to gain some of the best talent not only in Spain, but also internationally.
Here some of the things we do:
- Pay fair salaries: 54k€ / year (before tax) for those that work full-time
- We distribute the companies profits every quarter with our employees as bonuses. Although we're planning to retain more of that in the future to reinvest in internal projects.
- Everyone can choose to work from wherever they like (one guy is currently traveling around the world with his wife) and you can work as much as you like (as long as it is planned properly in advance). Some people prefer to work less and spend more time with their kids or go kitesurfing. Others decided to reduce to 1/2 time and study again (just for fun) the other 50%.
- 3-4 times per year we organize 1-2 month long company retreats [2], where we rent a villa in a nice location with good Internet and work remotely. This year we went to Cape Town and Bali. Last year we went to Thailand and skiing in the Alps. In October we're going to Martinique (Caribbean)
- We support our employees with internal project ideas, even the most crazy ones, like the automated Nespresso Ordering Machine [3] or those that have turned into actual products, like Bugfender [4].
Summarized we treat our employees very well and give them a lot of responsibility and autonomy. And it all pays off. Our clients and customer are extremely happy and since inception (2009) we didn't have to make on single outbound sale. All clients came to us through word of mouth and recommendations from existing clients.
On top of that it gives me personally a lot of freedom and peace of mind, because I know I can fully trust and rely on our employees. For example just two months ago I completely disconnected and decided to work on a small sailing boat for a month (just for fun, as a life and learning experience) crossing the Pacific from Micronesia to New Caledonia [blog post coming soon].
We're also about to launch a niche entrepreneurial community for similar-minded people called: O4H - Optimizing for Happiness (instead of profit) [5].
Feel free to email me (email address in my HN profile). I'm always happy to connect with like minded people.
For those that are looking for a job, check out our Jobs API on our website [1]. Although, to be fair I'd like to mention that we currently don't want to grow a lot more in team size (currently 20 engineers and designers), but rather focus on getting traction with our products. But that will probably change in the future again.
Not all of us want to go on retreats overseas with coworkers, especially if we have a spouse and kids, but definitely some people prefer that kind of environment at work.
Interestingly enough, this may be the kind of scenario that you may face in London if the UK really leaves the EU and shut down the free movement of workers, ie, being unable to find skilled workers inside your own borders..
Not only that, another factor to take into account is that very few Spanish companies are willing to sponsor a work visa, and, don't even get me started on the perma-intern scam for professionals with 10years of experience.
1. 5 million unemployed people
2. very highly sought after workers
The employers complaining about people in group 2 being scarce are merely not paying enough. The workers complaining in group 1 need more skills that the market wants. They're at different ends of the spectrum.
Other than that they live in the same country, they really don't have much to do with each other. Whether you can convert people from group 1 to group 2 is an interesting question, but generally if it were easy to be in group 2, a lot more people would be in it.
I am not sure the real problem is as described in the article. While there is a percentage of the population with no real skills, there are highly skilled people with either no work or working on positions for which they are overqualified (frequently non-permanent employees [1]).
I know people that are doing "fine" by Spanish standards, which is around 30K/year, but the majority of my friends and university classmates are making way below that bar. Most of them with the equivalent undergrad + master.
If the problem was "just" the lack of preparation among the youth, I am pretty sure that migrants would have trouble finding jobs on other countries (UK, Germany are the most frequent "destinations"), which is not the case. In my opinion, there is a big cultural problem; long hours, low salaries (employer) and a lack of culture for optimizing work hours (employee). If we add this cultural problem to the incompetence of the Spanish government, that basically prioritizes building pharaonic public structures (like the high speed train) or taxes technology (solar panels [2]) instead of investing on technology and/or innovation we have the current situation.
Very true. Just compare salaries of software engineers in most EU countries with salaries in the US.
If you're a good developer, 99% of the time it's better to work remotely from Europe for a US company. It really is a simple problem to solve -- pay talented people in Europe more. And yet, for some reason, this is often dismissed by CEOs as a ridiculous statement. They're probably the same people who think you need 100 software engineers to complete a complex technology project.
I don't think it's that developers are underpaid in Europe. They are just objectively less productive there. After all it's a very specialized job that requires modern, developed economy open to disruptions to be really productive. On the extreme opposite end of a spectrum - a pre-industrial economy - a developer's productivity would be zero.
American nominal GDP per capita is 2.13 times that of Spain's and 1.38x that of Germany's, and the distance keeps increasing. There are many possible causes, but I think lower salaries are a symptom.
GDP per capita seems to be a curious way to estimate if a local dev is likely to be productive. Would a Luxembourgish, Swiss or Norwegian dev be expected to be more productive than one from the US or UK?
It seems to me that the prime determinant of pay is how close the worker's "category" is to the money. So in a start-up intensive environment like the Bay Area, the devs are also sometimes the executives, and executives are often former devs, so devs get paid correspondingly.
Switzerland does have higher average pay CHF 91,374 = $93,703.5 [0] compared to USA $68,082 [1]. Their nominal GDP per capita is 36.62% higher and the pay is 37.6% higher.
Norway interestingly has almost the same pay as USA - $68,737 [2], probably because of high share of oil extraction in GDP (22% [3]) which skews the result. If you subtract oil share from the GDP, you get $56,195.88 nominal GDP per capita, which is almost the same as the American one ($57,220)!
Now Luxembourg is a tax haven/financial center with a population of half a million so I don't think it's a relevant comparison. Just due to population to get something close to true pay average you would have to ask a relatively (to other countries) very big percentage of their developers.
Dude. You're not getting the objection. We're not objecting to the numeric ratios, we're objecting to using those numbers in the first place.
> GDP per capita seems to be a curious way to estimate if a local dev is likely to be productive.
Curious is putting it mildly. :) What is being objected to is your _measure_. Stop using the GDP per capita of an entire country as a proxy for software developer productivity. It's frankly stupid. Anyway GDP per capita using PPP (purchasing power parity) is seen as a fairer comparison. But even GDP per capita by PPP is a stupid metric to compare software developer productivity. I'm sorry for using the word stupid. But it's stupid.
>Stop using the GDP per capita of an entire country as a proxy for software developer productivity. It's frankly stupid.
Outside of entertainment where software is a direct consumer product, the developer's productivity comes from increased efficiency of use of other productive resources. You can't eat code, but you can eat food that comes from higher production due to better software. So software has a multiplicative effect on existing production. That is, GDP.
Now even added value of entertainment software (games etc) depends on total GDP, because people have to pay with something for that entertainment.
So average developer's productivity IS a function of GDP, with different coefficient depending on the structure of a economy.
A primitive non-mechanized agricultural economy would have a coefficient of near zero because there's almost nothing to automate.
>Anyway GDP per capita using PPP (purchasing power parity) is seen as a fairer comparison.
A fundamentally wrong metric because pay is nominal.
This way of estimating a dev's likely productivity would operate independent of their individual ability, as well as be applicable across all worker categories. For example a dairy farmer in Switzerland earns more than one in Poland because people pay more for milk products in Switzerland compared to Poland.
So why would the GDP per capita of their country be a useful tool in deciding who to hire?
>For example a dairy farmer in Switzerland earns more than one in Poland because people pay more for milk products in Switzerland compared to Poland.
A Swiss farmer is much more productive when measured in currency units, but probably not that much in milk volume.
However as we are talking about salary differences it's money that matters.
>So why would the GDP per capita of their country be a useful tool in deciding who to hire?
Why would it be? In this conceptual model the ability of a developer is how much he multiplies the output of whatever he's working on, but his productivity is the absolute value of added output. How could it be counted otherwise, in what? Lines of code?
If productivity didn't depend on location immigration wouldn't exist.
I guess it depends on the sense in which "productivity" is being used.
A remote dev working for a Bay Area company from Spain can be just as productive for his employer as one located in Los Gatos, CA. However the above method would categorize this dev as "objectively less productive", which seems counter-intuitive...
>However the above method would categorize this dev as "objectively less productive", which seems counter-intuitive...
It wouldn't, it purports to explain the differences in local salaries, or more precisely salaries paid by local entities to on-site developers.
It's true I didn't specify that explicitly in the first comment, along with definition of productivity, so your reading of it was a reasonable understanding. It's a good thing you helped me clarify the intended meaning.
One assumption is that foreign demand (for non-local use) for local on-site developers is small enough to not change the workforce demand significantly. So it won't work for India or other common offshore destination, but it seems to explain pay differences between USA and Spain, Norway and Switzerland reasonably.
I would contest the hidden assumption/assertion in your comment that GDP per capita can be used to compare productivity. Especially averaged out across the entire economy disregarding wealth distribution.
It is a given that GDP per capita is a measure of a country's economic output per person. I know that is the technical definition of GDP per capita. And presumably then you would link economic output to productivity.
You've fudged together too many uncorrelated entities :)
The application I have inherited was written by an agency in Sweden, (where I assume devs are paid a fair bit more than Barcelona). By your reasoning it should be better written than if someone from here had written it. It's not.
> It really is a simple problem to solve -- pay talented people in Europe more. And yet, for some reason, this is often dismissed by CEOs as a ridiculous statement.
I don't think it's European vs American CEOs, it's treating software engineering as cost center vs value creator. Even in the US one would likely have a hard time procuring a large compensation package employed as a software engineer in a utility company, aerospace company or insurance industry, but the attitudes take a drastic 180 turn with tech-centric and tech-oriented companies where software creates new value.
> have a hard time procuring a large compensation package employed as a software engineer in a utility company
in which case, there ought to be market pressure for software engineers to move away from such companies. When the company finds out they actually need a good programmer, they end up having to pay more again for quality (perhaps, indirectly, via consulting companies). But the current anecdotal evidence is that those companies _can_ pay very little, and yet, no catastrophe has happened. The only valid business conclusion is that the highly paid engineers aren't needed there!
> But the current anecdotal evidence is that those companies _can_ pay very little, and yet, no catastrophe has happened. The only valid business conclusion is that the highly paid engineers aren't needed there!
They pay in other ways: increased layers of management, decreased development speed, decreased software quality. One argument is that they manage to stay in business anyway — but I think we're actually seeing places like that start to go out of business, or at least be surpassed, by nimbler firms. The world is all about information, and those that can do more, faster with it are at a tremendous advantage.
> If you're a good developer, 99% of the time it's better to work remotely from Europe for a US company
Again, how do people get those jobs? I have a lot of friends in the underpaid situation and they applied for stuff on HN; most of them don't hear anything back or have problems with the interviews. They are very good devs though. Loyal too; don't think they would ever leave once on board.
> It really is a simple problem to solve -- pay talented people in Europe more.
Playing devil's advocate: If we limit the discussion to pure tech companies that target a global market, then yes, it is that simple. But there is a vast majority of companies that do not belong to that category, yet require software developers.
I'm thinking primarily of Spanish software agencies that have other Spanish companies as clients.
You only "require" the things you can afford. If a company does not have the revenue to afford paying real market rates for developers, they might want a dev, or even need one, but that doesn't mean they can have one any less than a homeless man can have shelter when he needs it but doesn't have the means to afford it.
I always hate the mindset that because developers are in demand for some reason lower wages are acceptable. The opposite is true, exclusively, than when developers are in demand you should demand more money, and accept no less. It is extraordinarily rare for a worker to have any leverage over their employer, to such a degree that there is this systemic culture of employers being unable to stomach the concept of a developer being a skilled professional that demands a professional wage above and beyond what someone driving a truck or working in Excel makes.
I think you're missing the point. No one is saying that developers should be ok with getting less money when they can get more. The point is that as an employee, you bring certain value to the company. And that value is often capped not by your skills and productivity but by the type of company you work for. And there are less companies in Europe of the type that can afford to pay very well.
There's often still significant leeway. I'm based in Belgium - most senior developers probably make between €3-4000/mo (before tax) here. That's for guys in their mid 30s, early 40s. So a bit better than Spain.
My cousin's husband owns a small agency (15-20 people) and sells one developer at €2.000 a day on €500k-1m projects. I think on average they're billed out around 150 days a year, so grossing around €300k per developer, per annum. Paying developers more would mean less profits ending up in his pocket.
I'm surprised Belgium isn't better paid, even in Berlin you'd earn better than that (aside from maybe game-dev) and in western Germany you'll earn better than in Berlin.
Part of that is because employer contributions (tax + social security) are quite high on wages. Total cost to the company is probably double, i.e. €6.5-8k. In addition, income tax is also very high, so employees are left with <2-2.5k after tax on average.
There are ways to reduce the tax rate a bit to an acceptable level, but this depends on the goodwill of your employer. Most just don't care, even though it could mean an extra €1,000 - €1,500 in after tax salary for their employees, without increasing cost to the company. You can even ask the tax authority for a free tax ruling, meaning they approve this and can't challenge it later on.
I know what I'd do if I wanted to hire great local developers.. starting by offering a salary that is 1/3rd higher of most other local companies probably isn't a bad starting point.
1. 5 million unemployed people 2. very highly sought after workers
"If there was excess of people in group 2, then there'd be no upward pressure on wages, in the fashion that there is none in group 1. If we import or train enough of group 2, perhaps we can make this happen..."
Basically, the message for each group - "we want to pay less".
That's the way I read it. Employers don't want to pay enough to motivate people to develop skills for which they have openings. They'd rather hire foreigners than hire locals and train them.
So they put pressure on the government to swamp the market with newly trained/educated people as well as loosen restrictions on the hiring of foreign nationals.
Don't forget among the 5M unemployed, the employed who don't want to pay taxes, so are not declared. I don't know the number, but Spain seems to have high tax rates.
The article says the average salary in Spain is around $22k. Even at twice that, it's not hard to see why developers are not working for (or maybe even in) Spain. I suspect the problem has more to do with Spanish businesses not being willing or able to compete for developers with market salary rates.
It's frustrating that they don't provide data like that in articles like this. Instead of they a single data point anecdote about how a company can't find an Agile project manager for "up to" $220k.
How about comparing the percentage of software developers in Spain to the US? Or discussing how the education for technology is different? Or what percentage of the unemployed are developers? Or software developer salaries compared to rest of EU. Or the number of Spanish developers working abroad or for companies abroad. Instead have a graph of Spain's GDP and a graph showing the size of their workforce.
This is why I rarely ever click on articles and only read the comments. Most of the time it's the only place with any substance.
A lot of skilled Spanish dev have fled to Paris and London despite the high cost of living of those cities and being paid less because they're foreigners because it is still more rewarding.
In Spain, politician and corruption are pushing skilled people away. I have seen (and heard of) too many people moving out to be just mere coincidence.
The subtlety is that most of the time the greedy consulting firm will keep 198K out of the 220K and the be surprised not to find anyone.
After Brexit, I'm very tempted to move in the opposite direction. If the Spanish consulting firms can be undercut to that extent, there's a potentially lucrative market.
Unfortunately I only know French and German, but I could learn Spanish relatively quickly I guess. The corruption and politics is troubling however.
Its not to bad. I live in Barcelona, the corruption is a problem, and will not be solved soon. But thats such a deep problem thats going to take a long time to solve. There is currently a a lot of talented local people and international people who want to work here. A lot of the agencies pay between 15K and 25K on average for junior developers / administrators. However, you can be stuck in the bracket for a long time unless you are able to find a way to switch to a different position. The issue is once you get a job in the 30K+ group where its a lot harder finding anything. Let me know if you have any other questions :)
Doesn't this give a competitive advantage to early-stage startups in Spain?
Pay a little more than the average, but still way less than in Paris or London, and you'll have your pick of the good devs who don't want to emigrate, right?
Conditions are improving in Madrid and Barcelona for startups, but in general I'd say the laws, the banks, the bureaucrats and the system in general are all very startup unfriendly.
That I think it's the root of the problem. Dev salaries don't rise because there is no real competition for top talent. Many established software companies in Spain can get away with mediocre programmers with low salaries because they operate in captive markets and the quality of their products don't really matter.
If politicians really wanted to fix this problem they'd make it easier for new companies to compete with the old ones, but they are doing just the opposite.
The lower wages are a double-edged sword, because it means that your potential customers also have less money to pay you (or if you try to sell elsewhere, they are farther away which makes them harder to sell to).
I still remember when Tuenti opened and they started paying developers a normal developer salary (instead of the insanely low standard stuff here) and eeeeevery dev business here was mad as fuck about that. They understood it as if Tuenti were stealing developers from them, paying the unpayable for men
You mean they were mad because someone was making it difficult to take advantage of people? Because it sounds like they're pissed it became more difficult to take advantage of people.
Which sounds very mafioso, not to mention the collusion that must be taking place.
Spanish dev here. I created with some friends the most active Maker group in Spain [1]. We won contests like Hyperloop's, NASA's SpaceApps (once winners, twice finalists), making robot competitions [2], teaching to everyone, etc. A couple of days ago we were talking about who would continue it, since ALL of us are leaving the country for different reasons.
So I can say that I know what it means that skilled workers are leaving first hand. Now I reverse the question, why would we stay? Spain has some great things, such as weather, food and party, but it's horrible in any tech-related industry.
For instance, I did a couple of internships to help with my University credits and earn some money. I got paid per month almost the same that I'm getting paid now every couple of days working as an US contractor. Not only that, now I'm doing things that I really love, challenging but rewarding, collaborating with the best people I know and living wherever I want. We made https://www.angularattack.com/ , now we're launching a new one way better (not yet public though) and I'm helping doing two websites for two of the biggest Venture Capital firms in USA.
Now tell me, why should I go back to working 9-5 for some company that doesn't care at all about developers and treat us as code monkeys, for peanuts and in horrible conditions? I had a horrible chair for example but there was "no budget" for a better one.
It's a pity because the country gets worse, but it's also good since the hard working Spaniards get the best -- even if it has to be outside. I am lucky I can visit my sister in UK and my friends in Japan, Sweden, Germany and USA :)
Not in tech, but in finance, and your words resonate with my experience too. After working in a project for a bank, I got headhunted by one of the Big 4, I turned down what I considered a laughable job offer (22K) and moved to Mexico. I couldn't be happier with my choice. If you are young, Mexico offers many more opportunities to develop a fulfilling professional career than Spain does.
Moved to Germany 3 years ago, going to to Spain this year.
Tech scene here in Germany is way better than in Spain, but social life... I gave up a long time ago.
My plan is to go back and make my own thing. If I'm not successful I'll try to work in remote.
I know things are moving forward in Madrid and Barcelona. What about Valencia?
I'm from the UK and living in Madrid (working remotely for a company in London) - in my experience there is a LOT more quality work in tech in Barcelona that in Madrid. I think outside of Madrid and Barcelona you'll struggle to find much interesting work.
Actually I think that my experience in Spain has set me back as I asked for way lower compensation than I realize now that I could be earning as it just seemed crazy. I remember when they asked me about "what is your hourly rate?" the first time, I said a number while shaking as it was beyond my dreams and now I realize it's totally pennies compared to the money they are probably making out of my work. Now I know for the future though (:
I'm wondering what is the cognitive dissonance with employers who are unwilling to train workers. I mean, I understand the reasons if you're a an SMB, but large corporations used to train their employees or hold something close to apprenticeship programs.
I'm guessing this is more along the lines of "we want qualified work but we're not really willing to pay for it"?
> I'm wondering what is the cognitive dissonance with employers who are unwilling to train workers. I mean, I understand the reasons if you're a an SMB, but large corporations used to train their employees or hold something close to apprenticeship programs.
It was far less common for people to change jobs back then, too. Neither employers nor employees feel any real loyalty towards one another, so investing in one another feels foolish. There's nothing to incentivise someone to stay once he's learnt the skills he needs to get a position elsewhere.
The benefits were far better too. I've worked at the same place my father did; the benefits he had when he started 35 years ago are literally unobtainable for our generation.
I started roughly 31 years ago and I was making $10 an hour, with rent @ $400 a month. That's $22 2016 an hour with inflation against $880 a month rent for a crappy apartment with air conditioning in 90-100 degree heat about 80% of the time, for half a year ( Dallas ). But at least we had a pool. Helicopters chased people down the "creek" at night.
"The benefits" are because health insurance has been a slow-moving disaster starting in 1949. And from about 1989 until 1993, I did without health insurance.
IT was a low-paying job. I paid my dues and the money's gotten better.
> "It was far less common for people to change jobs back then, too. Neither employers nor employees feel any real loyalty towards one another, so investing in one another feels foolish. There's nothing to incentivise someone to stay once he's learnt the skills he needs to get a position elsewhere."
Sorry, I still don't understand this attitude. I live in the UK, it's common here to have at least some level of on-the-job training, especially for jobs where there's a skills shortage. In my experience, training opportunities are a great way of building up company loyalty, you want to stay with the company because you know you can progress in the company.
Job culture in the UK is soooo much better than in Spain. I've worked on both places, so this is first hand experience.
In Spain I would get sent to a training, because we needed to have someone certified on that product to get discounts, then the company would ask me to sign a contract to either stay with them at least two more years or pay a 2k fine. The idiots only tried to do this after the training, thinking otherwise I might just refuse to get trained. Of course I refused to sign, but I was only one of the few who would refuse.
In the UK I even get to choose my training. Not just technical, but also on soft skills. Even training that I might not apply in my current role, but I might need to move to a new role.
The biggest shocker for me was the manager-employee relationship. In Spain the manager owns you. In the UK the manager is a team member with a very specific goal: make you and your team successful.
And don't get me started on leaving the office before your manager does... Of course he would be the biggest sucker (otherwise you don't get to be a manager) and won't leave until 8pm. Leaving shortly after your shift ended was frowned upon by colleagues and verbally challenged by managers:
- Where are you going?
- Home.
- Don't you have work to do?
- Yep, that's why I'm coming back tomorrow again.
That company was terribly toxic and I have seen it destroy several families and people's health.
What you describe is sadly very common (and I've seen it happen first hand in a few places, including Tuenti by the way[1]). However, if you look you can find places where it doesn't work that way. I've found that the closest to a sweet spot is working for any European (i.e., not American and not Spanish) company that does in-house software development (i.e., not an outsourcing company).
[1] I mention this because someone else has mentioned that Tuenti infuriated some companies by paying more than the average one. On the other hand, I could name a few people that were literally fired from there because of not doing enough unpaid overtime.
> - Don't you have work to do?
> - Yep, that's why I'm coming back tomorrow again.
Hah, good one.
I'm curious in this toxic situation doesn't it just take a few good companies that treat their employees well to change things around? The good engineers will flock there leaving the bad ones at the old companies.
Granted that probably means the managers will now try and get 2x the work out of the remainders. Maybe some will get a clue though and change their ways.
I thought about it a few times. What would it take to turn this around? Surely I can take some capital and start a development company where the people are treated better hence more productive, so I can deliver better products?
The problem is the customer. The customer ends up always being the government (national, regional or local) and they have a higher degree of employees that don't care about quality, so the big software factories (called butchers over there because they sell you almost by weight) can put under payed, under qualified and burned out developers on the project.
I have hopes on all the new tech companies flourishing around the country that are looking outside Spain for their customers. I am hoping they will end up shaping the market for good.
We invest a lot in training and mentoring, especially for a small company. Someone once asked "what if we train them and they leave?" Our CEO replied "what if we don't train them and they stay?"
Developer skills take a very long time to train. For example, you can train someone to use a forklift in a day, but there are people who have developed for 10 years and still have trouble with version control software.
Developers are a professional role, and you don't get unskilled, unemployed people and train them on the job to be professionals.
Depends. There are paths into development that don't rely on formal training. 10 years ago I was a customer service advisor, now I'm a test analyst (with coding experience). You can work your way into technical roles. One of the best things I did (other than immerse myself in learning about computing in my spare time) was to start learning SQL. Anyone that uses Excel to do their job can benefit from learning SQL, and it's been very useful to me even when I wasn't directly in a software development team. In addition, you can get plenty of use out of the basics and build up your knowledge over time.
The point is, even if you can't train a new developer in a weekend, on-the-job training can help people build up to it eventually, with the added benefit of the employee being more effective at what they do along the way (basic coding skills are useful for cutting down on a lot of time-consuming tasks).
Oh and if an experienced coder has trouble with version control software, perhaps that's a sign that the approach to version control may be overly complex. From what I've seen of version control systems, the hardest task is merging branches, and the need to constantly create branches can be mitigated against through better management of centralised repositories (which still works with DVCS like Git).
I live in India, and on-the-job training is very common. And to be honest, I still feel a certain loyalty towards the company I interned at. Just because they invested about a month just training me and paying me.
There is "some" training, but I think the general understanding is: "There are 50,000 others who want the job, and if we dont like this one, we will get someone else" so why train them? The normal training I see here is "know the company" kind of stuff and the yearly health and safety course mandated by the government.
I still find the attitude bizarre. If you train your current employees they generally become better at their job. If they become better at their job then the company can work more effectively without requiring additional staffing overhead. Those "50,000 others" are not equal in productivity and effectiveness to the employees you train in-house. In addition to all of this, sometimes you don't even need any additional budget to train employees, you just need to give them the space to work based on their own ingenuity.
Here in New Zealand you hear employers complain that New Zealanders don't want to work and that they have to get staff in from the islands etc etc. What this actually means is that they can't find any local willing to work 12 hours a day for minimum wage. The amazing unwillingness to see what they are doing is very impressive to witness - asking if they have considered paying more generates the filthiest of looks.
I spent years doing maintenance (and for not much money ) before I really started doing new development. I know for a fact that starting in the late '90s, the freshouts I met were unwilling to do that.
Look, companies are barely able to say what they want, much less evaluate anyone's work, much even less able to hire. Throw in adherence to Paradigm <X> religion and creeping Dunning-Kruger and this is what you get.
A growing issue I see frequently is that companies need more highly experienced (read: senior) people, and are willing to pay for it, but there is no fast pipeline from "no experience" to "highly skilled" even if companies did invest in training. Meanwhile, the existing pool is much too small to meet demand; redistributing the talent won't address the underlying issue. Companies are hiring to fill a need now, not 2-3 years in the future. The company or product generating the demand might not even be around in that time.
An unfortunate reality that people tend to ignore is that the length of time required to train for the average high skill/high pay job has been increasing. There are many high demand specialties in software that require a minimum of 2 years of hardcore experience to really be "experienced", but you can't manufacture that overnight and the hiring companies have little use for someone without that experience. Many companies with existing teams do recognize this and hire a mix of junior and senior talent to generate an internal pipeline but you still need the senior talent when building teams in the first place.
Reallocation of people sounds simple but it doesn't account for the increasing latency of acquiring a different skill set at the level of quality required to perform the jobs that actually exist. It is a sticky problem because it is a bit of a vicious cycle.
NOTE: this is a more general observation, Spain has its own peculiarities.
King hired in Barcelona a lot of highly senior developers, people that were leading protects, being architects, etc in other companies.
How? Better pay, better conditions and it gives more autonomy to the developers.
A fraction of them are talent brough from abroad because they wanted to live in Barcelona. So it is less hard to find talent when you are willing to be competitive.
On the other hand, it's not like businesses have a big bag of gold that they can simply choose to dip into to increase salaries, especially for the smaller shops.
Spain is doing a bit better than Greece but its on the same boat.
When I speak with friends back home, I do get a feeling that they don't want to work. Is it because they are lazy? part of me wants to say yes. I can't ignore the fact that the working conditions are awful. Salaries are quite low compared to the rest of Europe, an employer has full control over you, and can fire you any time. An employer won't ever promote you. They will just hold you as long as they can and then they will just hire someone else for less money.
Also when you have internet and so much information avaialble to you, and you can see what are the working conditions in other Countries it kinda makes you sad.
I live in London, and tbh there have been many times that I've been thinking what am I doing here. London is quite expensive and the salaries are not as high compared to rent, food etc (at least for developers).
Now I just made this comment in order to give an overview of whats going on to a country that is on the same boat as Spain.
Being undervalued in a "global" economy can be way unmotivating (especially the Euro economy where Germany expects Greece to operate in the same currency and economy, but then workers in Greece make far less than their German counterparts).
> I can't ignore the fact that the working conditions are awful
one of the great things about the EU is that people can freely move inside it and work wherever they want. Nothing is stopping your friends from doing what you did - seek employment elsewhere.
At the same time, if Greek and Spanish companies want to survive they'll have to learn to adapt to the new order and treat their people better, or perish.
> one of the great things about the EU is that people can freely move inside it and work wherever they want.
That's true in principle but languages are an issue. In Nordic countries everyone will speak English but central Europe is different. You might get by with English but not everyone (or even most, depending on the country) will speak it.
Do you want to go through the trouble of learning another language from scratch? The culture will be completely different too.
Coming from Finland I've thought about moving somewhere else just for the experience as it would probably be interesting, but I don't really feel like learning another language when I already speak English.
I've also always wondered how difficult it would be to actually get a job, especially if you don't speak the local language. Maybe with a rockstar education and resumé it would be easy but what if you're "average" (at least on paper)? Having worked for well-known international companies would probably be beneficial.
Spanish here. I moved to Sweden, I prefer the business culture here. Less non paid extra hours. More respect from managers. Better pay. Etc.
They rant about not being able to use more people as part time slaves. It's a problem of using industrial business mentality in the high tech industry. They care only for reducing salaries and getting long hours with no respect for the developers that are expected to be code monkeys.
So yes, they don't find as a big supply as they want.
So I live in Barcelona at the moment. I have 10 years of system administration experience and 3 years of devops / sysadmin experience as well. The average salary I am offered when I look around is between 25K and 45K Euros a year. However, I would say the ratio is about 60% < 30K & 30% < 35K.
For friends and family that are looking it really depends. If you are lucky and have / had a position in certain companies who are well known, you might get into the higher bracket. If you dont, and for example only have a University degree, then expect to start between 15K and 25K (unless from one of the known private schools, in which case you can normally jump to the next bracket).
From what I know, the two places to look are Madrid and Barcelona, but Madrid normally list almost double the amount of jobs that Barcelona does (mainly because a lot of headquarters are located there).
Another important thing that I have notices is that its a lot harder to climb internally in companies here. It depends if the company has American business culture or Spanish (but sometimes it tries to be American but its run in a Spanish way). This is in general over all businesses. My wife is currently working at a call-center and have co-workers who have been in that position for over 10 years. There are basically no way to get promoted, unless you get lucky and someone retires or leaves. I have seen this everywhere, basically no way to really grow, no incentives to grow, an over educated workforce, where the cashier in the supermarket has a masters degree in childcare or similar.
There is a saying here, where they call people "mil eurista" meaning thousand euroist more less. The amount of the working population that earn around 1000e a month is quite high but its something thats accepted here basically. People are not happy about it, but "At least I got a job" attitudes are everywhere.
A last thing, take care regarding any unemployment numbers that appear during the month of May, as thats basically when the tourist season starts. That alone probably employs over 1,000,000 workers during the summer months.
This promotion stagnation happens in the US as well, but if the market is fluid enough you can get the promotion by changing employers now that you have your 5+ years experience in skills and methodology.
Barcelona is a bit better in term of salaries than Madrid, where I live.
For developers and sysadmins salaries are down 25% or more for the last two years.
The reason is there is very little product development here and the main IT employers, Banks and telcos, have renegotiated the amounts they pay for subcontracting.
That the reason you can not get more tan 36k working for Telefónica or Santander subcontracting (who will pay your compary about 90k for you).
I live in Spain (am Dutch); even more; I live in Andalusia. For me that's better, besides getting people to work. We cannot find people at all for programming or our brewery. Everyone around us is unemployed, however they either a) do not speak English; we speak Spanish, but a lot of our clients do not b) do not want to work c) are foreign and have no papers to work. It's quite horrible. And it's not for lack of trying; we have been trying for at least 5 years. In my experience it has nothing to do with payment. This is just limited to Andalusia ofcourse; my colleague says it's better up north, however some people I met from other parts and who have companies complain about the same thing.
Then another issue with the country is the extremely hard time you have in hiring someone ; paperwork, you cannot fire them even if they are crap etc. And the paperwork to get grants for hiring people (which are there) is incredible. We have a company in PT as well and it's quite different there. The gov needs to take their finger out. Luckily we have a very helpful (Spanish) mayor who loves entrepreneurs and helps us with whatever, but he also shakes his head when talking about hiring people locally.
When were those because I was discussing this 'recently' with my lawyer on the coast? Yes the 6 months is true and I compare it with NL where firing is also hard but it's very straighforward how it works. Here I haven't been able to get it explained in that fashion. So far people look at us with pity when we talk about hiring people legally. Note; we are a tiny company.
What I am missing in the article and in all discussions here is: Why not pro-actively train people? Looking 2 months for someone with some kind of certification for "agile" is already a fourth of the time required to train someone who is already working for the client (numbers taken from the article).
If one is willing to pay 220k and cannot find anyone while most job offers (according to comments here) max out at 36k, make a deal with a current employee: "We pay for training, after 2 years you get a bonus of 72k and we double your salary." Company does not make a loss even if the dev leaves after 2 years, it has built the experience in-house and it had 16 months to disseminate the newly acquired knowledge to other employees.
The mindset that people must already have knowledge about some specific technology and universities accommodating employers there is exactly why we have so many code monkeys who don't know anything about CS finishing with a degree in CS who, after a few years, realize that their knowledge is basically worthless because the IT world has moved on and other languages or stacks are now en vogue.
The "you need more skills" issue is a false problem. Is just that the bad guys have kidnapped, blocked for years, or freeze, most of the good jobs.
This is a mediocrazy and they need to raise a lot of walls for keeping off the brigther people who give them a bad image by comparison. And all is carefully planned to keep this people unemployed also for the next four years.
Requisites to be a minister in Spain?. Speaking english? not necessary. Holding any sort of degree of PhD? Not necessary. Years of experience working for private companies?. Not necessary, but it helps. If you helped a big company to contaminate a bay for example, you could be even be promoted as the next environment minister.
Requisites for the rest of guys for a normal job?. A hamster wheel. Well, first of all you need to be fluent in three or four languages, just because maybe one time a year, or once in ten years, you could need to speak with a foreigner; and for some reason you can't just raise a phone and hire a professional translator for this special day. You will burn in hell if you dare to suggest your boss this logic and simple solution. Then you need to have a degree, a PhD, and also a few masters, and being able to hypnotize a goat in less than five minutes, and work for free for some years, and ...
Job market in Spain is a question of kinship and means being promoted directly in lots of cases... or never.
Yes, it happens. In any case 500 millions of people have spanish as native language in the world so "mandatory" is a relative term. You will need chinese to work in China, and spanish or portuguese to work in South-America.
If you don't speak Catalan and live in Cataluña you just will never finish the middle school. Or if you want to work for the administration you will be ostracised or directly banned for working for the public, just because you are "an subhuman stubborn charnego". If you born in Euskadi and then go to Barcelona for work, you need to be able to speak fluently four languages (spanish, english, vasque and catalan) just to start talking about having a job. If this guy move to Galicia later, will need to learn the Galizian language also.
Oh, If your foreign language in the middle school was french, and a lot of spanish people still studied french in this generation, you will not graduate unless you speak French. If you want as adult to work for a german company you will need a little deutsch of course to be competitive in the job interview.
But the worst stupid thing is that most of the time to be fluent or not is not necessary at all for the job because some kind of problems can be solved in any language and because human brain can fill the communication gaps easily. Is just that is trendy to ask for this.
For some jobs you will need to be "fluent" also in more languages: C, Ruby, Java, Python... Don't worry. They still will say that you are "unskilled" and will want to pay you in peanuts.
Oh please, spare the HN crowd of your anti-Catalan obsessions. Or, on second thought, please continue to educate the community on the anti-Catalan sentiment that is unfortunately so common throughout Spain.
> If you don't speak Catalan and live in Cataluña you just will never finish the middle school.
Or you will learn Catalan which is kinda the fucking point of education? Boo-hoo, Catalonians want kids to learn Catalan if they are going to live in Catalonia! By the way Spanish is mandatory too, why won't you find a problem with that?
> Or if you want to work for the administration you will be ostracised
> Is just that is trendy to ask for this.
Try getting a job in the public administration in Spain without speaking Spanish, in France without speaking French, in Italy without speaking Italian, in the UK without speaking English... see the pattern? Should we give up our right to address our public administration in our own language just to please non-Catalan Spaniards?
> because you are "an subhuman stubborn charnego"
Your comment depicts the Catalonian society as overtly xenophobic. This is an extremely offensive and unfair characterization of Catalonian society as millions of native Spanish speakers living here can certify. You are either completely misinformed about Catalonia, or spreading lies deliberately (both being extremely common within Spain).
Fortunately support for independence is growing fast. Hopefully once we are independent we won't have to endure this sort of bs anymore.
> Try getting a job in the public administration in Spain without speaking Spanish, in France without speaking French, in Italy without speaking Italian, in the UK without speaking English... see the pattern?
Yes, I see it, and is not the same as you think.
Would be, "Try getting a job in the public administration in Spain without speaking Spanish AND catalan, in France without speaking French AND Patóis, in Italy without speaking Italian AND Lombard, in the UK without speaking English AND Gaelic"... see the pattern? Duplicated effort, same result.
But in Argentina the same guy could use the extra time to learn other things, that maybe could be even useful for their employers.
Again, you mirror the Spanish public opinion very well.
The pattern is clear: you only respect state backed cultures, my culture and language are mere nuisances that waste people's time.
That's one of the main reasons we need to break away from Spain ASAP. Before it can complete the cultural genocide it has repeatedly attempted during the last 3 centuries.
> If you don't speak Catalan and live in Cataluña you just will never finish the middle school.
My Catalan friends exclusively spoke Spanish at home to their kids. Their son who just started Kindergarten is struggling right now but his older sister picked Catalan up to fluency after 1-2 years, so they are not worried.
Rubbish. I have been working in Barcelona for 8 years. I speak English as my first language and crappy Spanish considering the amount of time I have been here. No Catalan required.
Thus, you are not in this group of unemployed spaniards that was the reason of this post in the first time. Congratulations, you are neither in the first group, nor in the second. (And if your spanish is "crappy" after 8 years living in Spain you should wonder if there is a hidden reason for this that you didn't noticed before. What if your company moves or if the job of your dreams opens in Mexico DF, Buenos Aires or Sevilla in the next year?)
Again, It depends on the context and the job; and for some context, provinces and jobs, to speak three languages or more is required for a spaniard trying to find a job, because you can't have a degree otherwise.
>>“It’s a paradox,” said Valentin Bote, head of research in Spain at Randstad, a recruitment agency. “The unemployment rate is too high. Yet we’re seeing some tension in the labor market because unemployed people don’t have the skills employers demand.
There's no real paradox there. Employment of young people, and therefore normal career progression for that cohort, essentially shut down for 6-8 years. Now the pipeline is a little empty.
Same thing is happening in every country, it seems. Spanish companies have the entire EU from which they can draw workers without any paperwork or issues, and yet they can't find any? From central/eastern Europe even, whose workers may have lower wage expectations?
No. They're flagging this "shortage" and will simultaneously petition their government to allow faster issuing of/more visas to non-EU countries, i.e. India etc, with lower wage requirements for incoming workers.
My "arbitrary boundary" is my country and consists of citizens of my country, whether they're indigenous or not. If you like seeing an underclass being manufactured in your country due to the profit maximisation of businesses then that's your problem.
Spain has 50% unemployment for under 30's. This is a national disaster and will have effects that last generations, and companies that operate within the country should be mandated to address it.
"Willing to hire Indians". How gracious of them...maybe they could be given the tax status of a charity organisation.
> The underclass is already created due to the nationalism of citizens in your country
Poverty due to endemic unemployment in Spain is caused by nationalism? And it can be solved via free movement of labour between third world countries and European ones?
Unemployed spaniards almost certainly live a far better life than the majority of India. The underclass is the global poor, kept poor by nationalists who won't let them cross arbitrary lines.
Is an interesting question. I have some friends from East Europe living in Spain. They typically learn how to navigate the language surprisingly fast. They even laugh at us about this.
The reason is that their native Eastern Europe languages are very complicated to read and speak by nature; vowels are scarcely used, you need a finely trained ear to discern some special whispered sounds, is not always easy to recognize a word by its shape...
For this people customed to use every day words with "two vowels hidden in twelve characters", speaking spanish is practically a childsplay.
Yet Romanians are the second biggest minority in Spain. There are no more problems than the disgusting and systemic racism that Spain has towards any other country and hurt feelings on the other side.
Looking at the salaries mentioned in this discussion, I wouldn't expect any Czech or Slovak developers in Spain - I already make more in Prague than I the "maximum" in Spain is (and I'm not that well paid for a senior developer), and the cost of living is much lower here.
Most of our highly skilled emigrants moved to Germany or Ireland.
I am Spanish. If I say racism in Spain is disgusting and systemic it is because I have seen it.
You are probably familiar with things like "Cómo en España en ningún sitio" and how we dismiss other people’s food preferences, cultural habits and religions as those from someone inferior.
The problem is that some of you are incapable of acknowledging that because you think you are right and Spain is some sort of chosen by God country.
Just as an example, you use the word gypsy as something bad.
>You are probably familiar with things like "Cómo en España en ningún sitio" and how we dismiss other people’s food preferences, cultural habits and religions as those from someone inferior.
You know what, every country does that. And I doubt anybody think this is a "chosen by God country". Before the "como en España en ningún sitio" we have the "Spain is different", the "picaresca", etc. Those are negative values. Spain is a country that is ashamed of itself.
>Just as an example, you use the word gypsy as something bad.
Gypsies are bad. I know a few good gypsies, and you know what? You look at them and you wouldn't even think they are gypsies. By gypsies, we all know what we mean, and most of them are Spanish themselves. As an example: Spain is a big country, with tons of accents (and languages), and gypsies live so secluded from society they have their own accent country-wide.
Oh c'mon, stop making the same lame excuses over and over again. I've been living in Spain for the better part of a decade and love this country, but the reputation for being racist is well deserved. Your comment itself is filled with racist/xenophobic references. I've lived in 5 countries already and the only place where I consistently get crap for being 'not from here' is in Spain
“Education and work exist in two alternative worlds that don’t really connect,” Gomez said. “While in other nations, like the U.S., college education is designed to get you a job, that’s not the case in Spain.”
This may be a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side of the hill."
corporate you mean, most startups and valued tech companies don't give any credit to formal education, and the real balance is moved by experience, seconded only by cultural fit.
1 - Spanish Universities not in tune with the market reality, pouring out thousands of unemployed people into the market...
2 - Graduates living in a bubble... 99% not wanting to move their asses and thinking that the academic degree is all they need. Get a crappy job or move to another country. Let others create the jobs...
3 - Zero entrepreneurial spirit and risk aversion, making starting up a remote to non-existing option. Blame it on the executives of your crappy company, and obviously, the government...
4 - Gov not having a clue about scientific research, innovation and entrepreneurship, with policies that fail to build a proper ecosystem for startups, and also fail to connect academic and industry worlds (I.e: Silicon Valley <-> Stanford).
You're getting the downvote brigade but you're right. It's a many faceted problem with plenty of blame to be shared around.
There are almost zero people at the best colleges and universities in Europe who want to start a new company. I remember trying to convince about a dozen people to start a bitcoin exchange several years ago when it was in the single digits. No go. We could have fucked up almost everything and still been millionaires. I did okay but we would have done much better working together instead of looking for 'a good job'.
> Graduates living in a bubble... 99% not wanting to move their asses and thinking that the academic degree is all they need. Get a crappy job or move to another country.
Whole lot of that going around. They don't realize they will be living in their city living hand to mouth for the rest of their lives. There is no big break coming for them. The smarter ones move, but the core problem is entrepreneurial spirit.
And this honestly seems to be common across much of Europe, as an American, why is this? I get it that America is not perfect (we're messed up in plenty of ways), but we do have a very entrepreneurial mindset as a society. Why is so much of Europe risk adverse?
It isn't that Europe doesn't have tech workers as good or better than the US, I work with a ton of brilliant Europeans . I just can't get why the Facebooks, the Googles, the Microsofts, the Apples, etc are so US centric. I'm clearly missing something obvious and am curious if you happen to understand why that is. Granted I've only been to maybe 6-7 countries in the EU and Berlin seemed to be the most startup friendly of the cities I've visited, but it still blows my mind why there aren't more successful startups from Europe.
> It takes at least eight months for an experienced software developer to earn an Agile qualification and they also need the ability to deal with senior executives,
I am a bit confused by this sentence. How does one "ear an Agile qualification"? Why does it take eight months? What is "the ability to deal with senior executives"?
Actually, I think it's the ability to translate the state of a project into risks, rewards and trade-offs. It's not necessarily an innately understood skill for technical individual contributors.
Agreed. I read Jeff Sutherland's Scrum book in about a week, but don't care for a paper certification. Most certificate companies (I'm looking at you CompTia and LPI) just care about selling their worthless paper certificates.
Starting about 2009, there have been a lot of discussions about whether the unemployment in the US was "structural" or not.
Some argued that a huge number of laborers and potential employees did not have necessary skills and therefore would be unable to find work. Period. This was a big component of unemployment.
Others including Paul Krugman and Dean Baker argued that, because employment was down across most every field, the cause of the unemployment was insufficient demand. They basically likened it to the Great Depression, where highly employable people were thrown out of work despite their skill levels.
This news story makes me think that we have some combination of the two stories going on in Spain. And maybe also the US?
Of course, how the country responds to that situation is a separate discussion.
Maybe the government can just borrow some cash (at historically low rates) and, instead of building another airport somewhere, educate twenty thousand IT engineers, even paying them to go to school. Maybe government could demand that employers train people.
Also, what's going on in the EU with the free movement of labor? Don't some IT people want to move from Estonia and Poland down to sunny Spain?
Speaking as an Estonian, based on the comments in this thread, the working conditions and even salaries are better in Estonia. Estonia is way more tech focused in general.
In Spain, we just had elections on the 26th of June, and the conservatives won. There is money, as taxes in Spain are high on wages but low on big companies and the government's budget is 10 points lower % than the EU average... but we have a conservative government.
PP won the most votes but not enough to secure a majority. Rajoy is currently in talks with other parties to form a majority, hopefully "within a month." Technically you still have a conservative government but who knows what will happen.
If you had elections on 26th of June, it's not likely that this has had any effect on anything happening in Spanish economy. And probably won't be for a while - economy has inertia.
Borrowing cash internally won't change much - unless you assume that government is spectacularly better at investing than commercial professional investors (whose resources the government would be decreasing by competing with them for the pool of money available for borrowing). So far I haven't seen the proof of it.
Borrowing externally may work, but for that you need confidence of foreign investors - which is exactly what you don't have when you have economic problems, so rates would not be historically low.
A company once flew me to Madrid for an interview. Unfortunately, I cannot understand Spanish, but the receptionist at the hotel seemed to mumble to a friend: look they are flying people here, but our people are unemployed. It seemed a bit crazy for me as well, since I was unsure, if my person and skills justified that kind of effort.
The interview went fine and I think I was offered something around 30k, which was below my current wage in another (non-capital) European city, so I had to decline, although I loved Madrid and the team seemed really nice.
I don't think so.. Most of my friends left Spain looking for better long term opportunities rather than money. Even if our economy (and politicians) sucks, quality of life is pretty high with those salaries.
I think the problem is the polarisation in the population. Very well trained people is leaving the country while non-skilled people remain.
Skilled people do not trust the system therefore they leave as soon as they can.
Quality of life is high, but what if you have a long term goal of moving? Making a lower wage even if proportionally you're taking home more money has a break even point, and 35k in Spain doesn't hit it.
It definitely has to do with low salaries: by Spanish standards, I'd say that's a good job offer. Sure, the range advertised is too broad to be useful, but at least there is one; a good one, too, considering that most tech jobs here are on the 18-30k range.
I've seen software projects where this was a big issue. Many ambitious Spaniards wind up working in London or elsewhere. Then Spanish companies have to hire overpriced consultancies to fill local tech positions with underqualified resources.
I wonder how much the Brexit will send folks home.
My impression is that many companies are looking at Spain as alternatives to London HQs, but those are also the kind of jobs for elites, rather than the 5M unemployed. Very hard to convert housing builders into programmers.
Brexit will happen in 2 years at best. Even so, the UK would still offer work visa to skilled EU workers, there's nothing stopping them from doing that, in fact this is what they said they were going to do. Does everyone really think Brexit is some kind of apocalypse or something for the UK? They love money as much as anyone else and want to remain the finance capital of Europe because money.
Yes, but big part of the people that voted Leave are not the people that do business or that like money above other things.
Many Leavers I've talked to justify their decision on "border control" and "sovereignty". They have been given the power to decide and apparently they were "better off with a grand or two less" (sic) "than being slaved to the Eurocrats" (sic).
The problem with visas is that if I have to go through the burden and uncertainty of visas for me and my family, I might as well just move to Paris, Hamburg or Munich for no visas or Australia or California for good economy and fucking decent weather. You'll still get talent, but the shortage will still be much worse and you'll end up lowering your requirements.
EU citizens probably won't event need a visa, just a passport. Especially from rich western EU countries, like it was already the case before Schengen.
The UK is not in Schengen, that's a common misconception :)
One of the points of the Leave campaign, reinforced after the vote by some of its leaders like Michael Gove, is to setup a points system for immigration. If there was no "limit EU migration" argument, Leave would have easily lost the vote.
I know it's not, it's why my wife can't get there :) That's why I said that's how it was even _before_ Schengen, ie French and German didn't need a visa to go to the UK even before the EU.
This was a frustrating article to read. I got the sense the author missed something. Spain is part of the EU common market which numbers 500 million people - how is it that this is only a problem for Spain, and why can't they recruit fellow EU citizens to make-up the shortfall?
a) Language barrier — Spanish is only the fifth most spoken language in the EU, with only 15% speaking it as a first or second language (around half of whom are Spanish citizens);
b) Lower salaries on offer (as others have noted) as opposed to working in the UK, Germany, or France;
b) Given the economic situation in the country, and high levels of unemployment, Spain isn't anywhere near as attractive to skilled migrants as the other leading EU economies.
Just because UK leaves the EU, that doesn't mean it won't still welcome foreign workers (especially from the EU).
When I was last on Iceland, I met a handful of professionals working in software engineering and engineering - all but one of them was from the EU (a few from Spain). Anecdote, sure, but I got the impression a lot of businesses on Iceland hired various foreign workers (not to the exclusion of Icelanders, just to fill in a shortage of skilled workers - perceived or real). And then there's Norway, which participates via the EEC, but isn't an EU member. And the UK has made some noise about getting a similar deal.
This assumption is the same mistake made by almost all supranational federalists.
Europe is composed of different countries with vastly different languages, cultures and economic conditions. Just because they're technically "joined" together via treaties doesn't mean labor is going to naturally distribute throughout the union.
Economists from around the world were adamant that the Euro was a terrible idea when it was founded. Binding dozens of wildly differing economies to one currency controlled by one central bank has always been a pipe dream, but it takes decades for it to start to unravel.
The politicians knew a shared currency without sharing other aspects was a bad idea, but they gambled that as the problems became manifest, they would be solved by greater unity.
Maybe that was stupid, but it's a different kind of stupid than not listening to the economists.
No, this could totally have worked. Once the Euro was implemented, they had a choice: Either do what's necessary for real large-scale labor-market mobility (where migration becomes a typical part of life and a substantial part of every paycheck gets remitted back to one's family), and-or create a fiscal union where Spanish spending gets subsidized by German taxes for the sake of unity.
They opened the door a bit to the former legally but didn't force the issue sufficiently to make the numbers work, nor did they let economies collapse in ways that cause large-scale migration (preferring to buoy them up with unsustainable debt). They did little towards the latter.
This was inadequate, and caused a massive, entirely foreseeable debt crisis because the ability to print money for the use of a single national economy that desperately needs inflation, was lost. The thing that the Eurodollar politicians were trying to force the 2000's politicians to do, did not come to pass.
There are EU wide shortages of some professions (eg nurses, especially mental health nurses; doctors, especially mental health doctors (and especially paediatric MH doctors)) and these professions take some time to train people.
They bring in 1000s of nurses from the EU and 1000s from outside the EU. I'm not sure that it's true to say that they're all unemployed when they're poached though.
Interesting, you're the first one to ever point this out to me. "Pays X of what I make" doesn't seem to flow off my tongue as well in either English or Russian (my native tongue). Also, in the context of my comment, seeing that a salary is 70% less rather than 30% of a salary, seems to better emphasize the vast difference.
I think it might have to do with the poster's mother tongue. As a Spanish-speaker I'd tend to say "pagarían 20% menos" (which roughly translates to "they'd pay 20% less".
Some idioms are very difficult to get rid off. I sometimes can distinguish Brazilians from Argentines just by the way they write in English.
I grew up in the US and am a native English speaker raised by native English speakers and I sometimes use the same idiom. I suspect the GP is complaining because English is not a strong language for him/her.
I agree with you on this. "30% of my current salary" is much clearer for me than "70% less". I always see a floating "0.3x" when reading this stuff, and it happens way faster if it is just given in that form.
I highly doubt they were cutting spending to CS courses and medical programs.
More education doesn't solve the '5 million people unemployed' problem. Having the right education is what matters. That often doesn't require throwing more money at the problem. Especially when the vast majority of education financing goes down administrative black holes.
Just saying 'cutting spending = bad' is about as baseless as this article claims that the problem is lack of employable people when the problem likely involves issues with training/salary and other nuanced issues.
Jumping to quick correlations like 'all education = good' this is how massive mismatches in education/market demand happens in the first place.
> Just saying 'cutting spending = bad' is about as baseless as this article
I'll grant you that. But Spain is the country who was in the top 5 countries in solar RD in the 200x, a lot of education program in that sector for instance.
The cutback were mishandled/misplaced. The Spanish government purposefully pushed to have low skilled labor as they intended to compete with Turkey on manufacturing. The thing is, that not what the market wants so it unbalanced it further.
Yeah, but that's the intoxication you can hear in the Spanish media all day long. How the next politician is going to solve everything by throwing money everywhere... you can see how a society that readily swallows that crap can't be very skilled at doing any kind of work.
Very few Spaniards are skilled enough to "flee" the country, let alone speak enough English (or any other language) to be able to work abroad. Wages are low because both companies and workers are not very valuable. Companies are not adding enough value to pay good workers and good workers are extremely hard to come by anyway.
Are businesses making their ends meet? This is more important than devs getting not enough. You can only hire so many for so much when your business is getting taxed at 50%.
When you are willing to hire women, older people and provide adequate salaries (dare I say work conditions), suddenly there isn't so much tech shortage.
Couldn't 100% of your claim be solved with just the salary variable? What evidence do you have that old+female+cheap people are not being considered as part of the option matrix?
"Pimentel’s client asked him for list of candidates trained in “Agile” project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."
So they're willing to pay ten times the going rate, but they're not willing to take the time to train anyone?
But wait; there's more!
"But such people are thin on the ground in Spain. It takes at least eight months for an experienced software developer to earn an Agile qualification and they also need the ability to deal with senior executives, limiting the pool of people who could potentially fill the roles."
Again, note that they're willing to pay ten times the going rate, so training them for eight months and then paying them the regular wage would pay for itself after a few months on the job; but they still won't train. More importantly, look at the part which I italicized. Dealing with senior executives takes special skill? I am but a lowly suburban nerd, and the ways of my betters intimidate me, so could someone enlighten me as to what that journalist is talking about? I have a sneaking suspicion that Clay Shirky knows.
"Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d learned. This always struck me as a waste of my time and their money; I was like an overpaid bike messenger, moving information from one part of the firm to another. I didn’t understand the job I was doing until one meeting at a magazine company.
"The thing that made this meeting unusual was that one of their programmers had been invited to attend, so management could outline their web strategy to him. After the executives thanked me for explaining what I’d learned from log files given me by their own employees just days before, the programmer leaned forward and said “You know, we have all that information downstairs, but nobody’s ever asked us for it.”
"I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came clear: I was getting paid to save management from the distasteful act of listening to their own employees."
It is easy to be dismissive of executives and the fact that dealing with them takes a certain skill set.
If it is one thing I've learned as someone in a data-heavy field it is that executives don't care about the details and nuances, and that distilling the details of things like log files, etc. and conveying it in a way that aligns with their pain points, strategy, etc. does in fact take great interpersonal skills that many more technically-inclined folks unfortunately lack.
> "conveying it in a way that aligns with their pain points, strategy".
In my experience, some executives don't even care too much for facts if it interferes with their agenda. This is usually expressed in subtle ways, but in one instance I've heard an executive directly ask for a report that was easy to manipulate the figures on in order to push our employees into generating more sales.
This is part of the problem when you have directors who see themselves as insulated from day to day challenges. I accept that there's a need for a long term vision, but if someone isn't prepared to understand the details of what's blocking it, they'll not be in a place to advise on how to fix it, and if they're relying on other people to fix those organisational issues, what's the point of having directors at all?
> This is part of the problem when you have directors who see themselves as insulated from day to day challenges. I accept that there's a need for a long term vision, but if someone isn't prepared to understand the details of what's blocking it, they'll not be in a place to advise on how to fix it, and if they're relying on other people to fix those organisational issues, what's the point of having directors at all?
There isn't any. Why do you think small groups of computer programmers and a handful of venture capitalists are like a wrecking ball to so many different industries.
In the 20th century we got used to the idea of managerial capitalism. Now in the 21st we're seeing that unless you're an Elon Musk level manager, capable of both understanding fine detail plus having comprehension of the big picture, you're surplus to requirements. You'll be competing against managers who are also geeks as well aka the real Silicon Valley advantage.
If your manager thinks 'the market should decide' they ought to step down unless they mass produce widgets in a B2B context. Their entire job is central coordination. In the 18th/19th centuries the manager of a factory would have understood the functions of every bit of machinery they acquired.
That essay by Clay Shirky is golden. I can't believe I hadn't seen it by now. Reminds me of the promise of what agile should have been instead of what Agile often is. I shudder to think of what the Spainish execs are looking for in candidates "trained in Agile".
20k isn't the going rate of an agile software developer, it is the average salary in the country. So the average of all the janitors, and chefs and construction workers and agile software developers combined.
There was a Polish composer, writer and politician Stefan Kisielewski who used to say: "Socialism is a system which bravely fights problems that are not known in any other system". That describes situation of Spain perfectly.
Nice cliche. That describes the situation perfectly, except by the small fact that Socialism parties do not rule in Spain since a lot of years. We have the equivalent to the Conservative Party, that... ehem, aren't exactly "socialists".
Language is a large part of this problem, not willing to pay market prices is another.
Why else would recruiters have to look for candidates in Argentina when there's a huge amount of suitable candidates in the EU with an automatic work permit?
Therein lies the rub. In most other countries business people who have to deal with subtle business requirements speak English decently well where in Spanish business it's absolutely normal for a CEO of an international company to only speak broken English at best.
Mr. Pimentel is a Managing Partner and regional director over several countries and as such the main job is to talk the playbook and drum up business. Finding good people is hard and we are the right guys to talk to. Finder fees are proportional to salary so aiming high is important. He claims on his web page to hire country sales directors and country managers so talking salaries of 200k+ is probably quite natural for him. Maybe he is more thinking of a person who can turn a dead end organization into an agile one - such a feat is hard and requires a multitude of skills. In any case it is likely that some things were mixed up in the interview.
One thing is clear - after the property bust in Spain and Portugal a lot of the higher skilled and mobile people were heading elsewhere. There has been a brain drain in the region. Disproportionally high (vs. average Spanish) salaries may be required if mobile top talent is needed. Agile project management or product ownership for run of the mill projects aren't those. But when talking about roles that shape organizations then things may be different.
One of my first jobs (in the US) had a great strategy for getting low cost talent:
1. Hire cheap
2. Train on the job
3. Lock in your investment with a multi-year employment contract, broken down into options to "not renew" the contract at 6-month, then 12-month, intervals.
Worked great, they got cheap talent and a means to weed people out, and I got valuable training I used for the next 15 years.
> From software developers and mathematical modelers to geriatric nurses and care workers, a mismatch in qualifications means companies are struggling to fill posts, even though the unemployment rate at 20.4 percent is the second-highest in Europe.
This is the result of years of malinvestiment in human capital. The Austrian Theory of Business Cycles explain.
So, if they don't have enough qualified workers, why don't they start creating on-the-job training programs? I understand there's risk in such investment (i.e., you train a person and then they leave for a higher salary) but there are many ways to counter it. Is there something like that happening in Spain? If not, why?
I've been pinged by recruiters for positions in Spain pretty much every week, either multinationals who need to grow their presence or local corps looking for experts. Cost of living is about the same as here in Portugal, but my previous experience with local execs makes me leery of those opportunities.
Paying people more for these jobs would make the end product way more expensive and make it hard to compete on the global market and make your country not competitive (what's happening here in France). Another side effect is that because the price of the end product gets more expensive, people will have to work more in order to buy said products or just avoid buying them.
The EU restricts agricultural imports, fixes prices and pays out massive subsidy for non-production via the CAP.
Perhaps market manipulation by the EU should be reassessed if the consequence is widespread and necessary use of illegal labour by some of the richest farmers in Europe.
Article 39 TFEU sets out the specific objectives of the CAP:
1 to increase agricultural productivity by promoting technical progress and ensuring the optimum use of the factors of production, in particular labour;
2 to ensure a fair standard of living for farmers;
The skills gap is very real in America, too. It can be hard to find the people you need. And many of the folks who are out of work don't fit the bill. There are specific training programs, sponsored by large companies, that are trying to give post-high-school trainees the right vocational skills... (Can't remember the names atm!)
I guess a good rule of thumb is: If you can pack what you think is the motivation for such a big and time intensive project as the EU into one tweet, it's probably far from the truth.
It means the expectation of the demand (companies) are not matching what the market provides.
Having to look for a job in Europa, I dare say most job offers are laughable.
C#, PHP and java are MODERN technologies that no one should be scared of.
Windev is a very good tool.
Mysql and mssql are the only two worthy databases.
Free software is a free as a bier.
AGILE is SOOO complex...it has to be officiated religiously like ITIL or ISO norms.
They want software devs on the market already proefficient in proprietary/tricky technologies, and no one understand why jobless persons with so much time cannot buy these 10K€ tools and use their worthless time in self formation.
And salary expectation are low : a coder MUST not be paid more than any manager. Even the manager responsible for the cleaning team of 500m² office with a headcount of 2.
They just have irrealistic expectations. That's all folks.
Europe in general, with some rare exceptions, does not value the kinds of skills that are selected for in SV.
The culture is bad. The incentives are all wrong. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
The typical business person in Europe considers him or herself top of the pecking order. This only looks to be true relatively because they hire less capable workers. These are the exact kind of people who imagine hiring twice as many developers gets the job accomplished faster i.e. simpletons.
The typical software engineer is at least one standard deviation above them. Just not in one specific area. In everything. I have friends who did part-time degrees in literature or language studies while they were also studying for computer science at some of the most elite european universities. Most geeks are systems thinkers and have no trouble in grokking areas outside of their main thing. Many of us refuse to be put into a box.
Having interests in exclusively one thing is a pretty fair indicator of not being very adaptive, I'd say it's almost defintional. That is the kind of person they want to hire. You can hire them, but they won't be very good.
Then you get these idiots who think they can run circles around us because they have the phone number of a venture capitalist or bank manager. Get a grip boys, your money doesn't count for much when a software engineer can be ramen profitable so easily. I have all manner of skills I don't bother to put on the market because the rates of pay are so pitiful and I can obtain better results by doing my own thing. Lots of other people just physically move. This is then misread by the business community as 'not enough skills'.
The other thing is that most projects they offer are really boring grunt work where you learn nothing by doing them. If there was an actual project we found cool or innovative we'd probably work for lower base salary plus some equity, but that's not the kind of work we get here in Europe, those kinds of benefits are reserved for Clod-Class. A good many programmers would prefer to work 20 hrs a week as janitors and then work on interesting projects rather than put up with this bullshit plus work 60-70 hour weeks. How many European programmers are told they'll be paid 20-30 euro per hour but actually are required to work three or four hours a day for free? Apparently they like to think we can't do arithmetic but can order a machine to do floating point operations just fine.
Diagnosis: Failure to Coordinate. Failure of Imagination.
> But such people are thin on the ground in Spain. It takes at least eight months for an experienced software developer to earn an Agile qualification and they also need the ability to deal with senior executives, limiting the pool of people who could potentially fill the roles.
That part of the article is hilarious, not only because 200K euros is completely made up and untrue (by far surpasses best salaries in other more decent countries), but because of the Agile qualification mention. Do we have Agile certifications now? What a load of bullshit.
The only truth in the article is this:
> Spanish executives are less-skilled than their competitors in Germany, France or Italy, according to a study of 11 European countries. Only Greece came out worse.
And that's the reason why the executives don't find workforce. Being less-skilled means they don't value the engineering profession up to the required level to compromise and give good salaries.
(Spanish dev here --working abroad obviously--.)