421–430 of 449 posts
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?
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.
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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 198…
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?
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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.
Naming companies just puts undue focus on them, when there are so many.
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> No, I say I buy myself friends Who are under 13? 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…
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> 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,…
> 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 th…
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.
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 fo…
Did you know IBM HQ for Europe is in Madrid? They moved here from Paris a year ago.
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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…
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?
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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.
That's the thing, you're not getting a "good dev" in Spain. And that's why they cost just 36k or are unemployed.
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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 1…
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…