Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by erfgh » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 9:12 AM UTC

cloakandswagger wrote: post #86

macspoofing wrote: post #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?

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.

People can and do learn foreign languages you know. Also, for many positions just knowing English will do initially.

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

#232

Post by galfarragem » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 9:13 AM UTC

hospes wrote: post #156

pjmlp wrote: 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…

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.

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

#233

Post by pvaldes » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 9:18 AM UTC

wallflower wrote: post #145

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?

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.

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

#234

Post by anjc » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 9:20 AM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #166

anjc wrote: post #33

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. Ind…

It's entertaining to see a comment simultaneously criticizing people for NOT hiring Euros, yet being willing to hire Indians. Draw your arbitrary tribal boundaries at the exact same place I do!

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.

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

#235

Post by thinkloop » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 9:31 AM UTC

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.

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.

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

#236

Post by olakease » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 9:38 AM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #136

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 a…

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?

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

#237

Post by Bombthecat » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 9:40 AM UTC

vemv wrote: 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…

In Germany wages went down. More than people want to admit.

I don't know where they pull the numbers from that wages increased.

A former company I worked with went to shit. So the best ones are leaving first.

All, of, them, earn less now. I'm the only one getting more now.

And they are seniors mostly with a ton of experience and dozens of projects under there belt...

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

#238

Post by yxhuvud » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 9:42 AM UTC

triplesec wrote: post #224

reitanqild wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

Are you seriously saying you are using child labour?

No, he is saying he buy their friendship with ice cream.

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

#239

Post by charlesdm » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 10:07 AM UTC

ido wrote: post #161

charlesdm wrote: post #105

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.

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 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.

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

#240

Post by franciscop » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 10:11 AM UTC

_mikz wrote: post #218

vemv wrote: 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 dev…

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)?