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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

#211

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 tryi…

> you cannot fire them even if they are crap etc.

I highly doubt that, it has not been easier to fire someone in Spain since the latests reforms.

Not taking into account that there is always a period were the employer and the employee can cancel the contracts without any duty. Normally 6 months

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I have worked for a global company for 10 years, and that is false in my view. Europeans do get paid very, very well, and they are equally as productive as Americans. It's about the individual, and not much else.

Not all Europeans get well paid for the same job. Changes on function of the European country.

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

#213

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 tryi…

> you cannot fire them even if they are crap etc. I highly doubt that, it has not been easier to fire someone in Spain since the latests reforms. Not taking into account that there is always a period were the employer and the employee can cancel the contracts without any duty. Normally 6 months

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.

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

#214
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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.

As junior, I get 1800€/mo (before taxes). I'm Spanish and I live on Madrid.

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

#215
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 t…

Java and Visual BASIC 6

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

#216
post #156
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Portugal you hardly get more than 1500€ after taxes, unless you are very very lucky.

€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…

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..

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

#217
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.

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

#218
post #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 a…

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.

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

#219
post #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 a…

I'm in London. I've occasionally wondered why we keep hiring Spanish devs ...

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..

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been considering applying to your company, any advice / comments about working for them?
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