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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

#141

Post by throwawaymaroon »

pvaldes wrote: post #59

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?. Speakin…

>This is a mediocrazy

That's an absolutely lovely, totally brilliant and apt term, that is unfortunately perhaps over-the-top in a way that will turn people off. I'm vaguely asking permission to steal it.

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

#142

Post by jaggederest »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #77
nemothekid wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rela…

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.

Interesting article here: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/flowers/

He talks about how you can allocate engineering effort to making other engineers more productive, among other subjects.

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

#143

Post by smsm42 »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #9

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…

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.

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

#144

Post by tmptmp »

vemv wrote: post #56
Jare wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that measuring productivity is a hard, universal problem. While I don't claim to commit 10x more LOCs, I do write exceptional abstractions that allow me to get things done in a quick, robust way. I've met far too many 'senior' developers blatantly breaking DRY because they don't really know/use all features $language or $framework has to offer.

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.

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

#145

Post by wallflower »

pvaldes wrote: post #59

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?. Speakin…

> Well, first of all you need to be fluent in three or four languages

My understanding is that English to CEFRL level B1 was mandatory to work at a multi-national company. Are there other languages required?

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

#146

Post by inoop »

muse900 wrote: post #57

Greek here, living and working abroad. 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 y…

> 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.

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

#147

Post by api »

gorkemyurt wrote: post #113
fchollet wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you are saying NYC is much less expensive than Bay Area?

Yes, especially since car ownership is optional in NYC.

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

#148

Post by Viper007Bond »

agumonkey wrote: post #51
charlesdm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is he a very special kind of dev ? Why would an US company go to that length to hire someone.

My company is 100% remote. 400+ folks around the world. Stuff like that is becoming more popular.

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

#149

Post by hexagonc »

MawNicker wrote: post #134
vemv wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> chances are you aren't working on anything that that makes you irreplaceable. Or, they cannot really appreciate the quality or even the speed of my work. Clueless people abound. > I also have reservations about looking at work as "an intimate family-like relationship" You misread my original sentence - I'm with you on this one!

> 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…

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.

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

#150

Post by nostrebored »

winestock wrote: post #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."

Greener but not false. There is a reason why a US education is highly valued by exceptional international students and by multinational companies.
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