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Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed

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Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed

#21

Pay. More. This. Is. The. Market. Speaking.

I was interested in a product job in Barcelona, then I saw that it pays almost 70% less than I'm making now...

Why do you say "70% less"?

Sorry to pick on you, but I see this usage everywhere and I'm curious. Doesn't "Pays 30% of what I make" convey what you mean much more effectively?

Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed

#22
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?

Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed

#23

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 f…

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.

Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed

#24
Check out this little gem from the article:

“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."

Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was interested in a product job in Barcelona, then I saw that it pays almost 70% less than I'm making now...

Why do you say "70% less"? Sorry to pick on you, but I see this usage everywhere and I'm curious. Doesn't "Pays 30% of what I make" convey what you mean much more effectively?

Apparently not or the poster would have used that convention.

Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed

#26

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?

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.

Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed

#27
post #13

Pay. More. This. Is. The. Market. Speaking.

The wages were too low. The skilled spaniard fled the country. Combined that cuting spendings in education. And now act surprised at the result.

> Combined that cuting spendings in education.

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.

Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed

#28
post #6

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 an…

> "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.

Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed

#29
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.

Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed

#30
The gap isn't the pay or the training per se.

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.

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