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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

#431
post #320
post #66

So I live in Barcelona at the moment. I have 10 years of system administration experience and 3 years of devops / sysadmin experience as well. The average salary I am offered when I look around is between 25K and 45K Euros a year. However, I would say the ratio is about 60% For friends and family that are looking it really depends. If you are lucky and have / had a position in certain companies who are well known, yo…

This promotion stagnation happens in the US as well, but if the market is fluid enough you can get the promotion by changing employers now that you have your 5+ years experience in skills and methodology.

Its crazy as it takes 3 - 6 months to get up to speed on any non complex software system. They will save on wages but loose on productivity.

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

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but big part of the people that voted Leave are not the people that do business or that like money above other things. Many Leavers I've talked to justify their decision on "border control" and "sovereignty". They have been given the power to decide and apparently they were "better off with a grand or two less" (sic) "than being slaved to the Eurocrats" (sic). The problem with visas is that if I have to go throu…

EU citizens probably won't event need a visa, just a passport. Especially from rich western EU countries, like it was already the case before Schengen.

The UK is not in Schengen, that's a common misconception :)

One of the points of the Leave campaign, reinforced after the vote by some of its leaders like Michael Gove, is to setup a points system for immigration. If there was no "limit EU migration" argument, Leave would have easily lost the vote.

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

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

Rubbish. I have been working in Barcelona for 8 years. I speak English as my first language and crappy Spanish considering the amount of time I have been here. No Catalan required.

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

#434

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…

Now I am curious about the jobs you offer :)

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

#435
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…

> Also, companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving.

Have they ever considered that programmers might be less likely to leave if they got a decent salary?

I've got to say, much of this sounds familiar. In Netherland, I used to hear companies complain that it was so hard to find technical people (programming and otherwise). At the same time, the jobs I saw didn't really pay all that much. The solution is simple: pay better, and people will come.

The problem is that in Netherland, management is/was seen as better, more important, higher status and deserving of better pay than programming. So for a programmer to move on beyond a certain point, he'd have to go into management. If programming jobs were seen as equal to management (in status and pay), programmers would have no reason to switch. Netherland is very much a management-oriented culture, for some reason.

Another is education. Politicians always kept talking about the knowledge economy, while at the same time cutting costs for education, and there was not a particular stimulus for technical education. And students are more likely to choose something management-related when they think there's more money there.

I'm talking somewhat in the past tense, because it feels to me like things have changed. I made enormous jumps in income over the past couple of years (could be because of the switch to freelancing and mostly working for banks since then), and the management-over-tech attitude seems to have diminished a bit (though that could be because of Scrum, which emphasizes empowered development teams and makes management somewhat redundant at times). I don't have any recent data on this, though. Maybe it's just my personal situation that has gotten better.

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

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually found it pretty hard to find regular work focused on doing FP. My last job was Erlang when I started, but pivoted to Go because of a lack of Erlang developers. My last two jobs before that were mixes of C and Haskell, but only because I was given the lattitude to select haskell. This time around when I was interviewing I was trying to find something that would let me focus on FP, but the best I could fi…

I'm curious to know what you think of Go in general as well as Go vs Erlang.

Go vs. Erlang feels like a pretty difficult comparison to make because they feel entirely different. Erlang isn't a bad language, but it never felt like more than a very flexible DSL to me. If you look at OTP with a critical eye, it's actually not much more than a lot of tooling on top of a state monad; and my limited experience with using the language professional makes me feel like you're buying a lot of code complexity and you need a very strong group of people with a lot of erlang experience to make that complexity pay off. Some of the process management and hot code updates and such that used to be really beneficial are less beneficial now that we have so many other solutions to managing containers and microservices, and the language itself, while functional, never really felt to me like it was achieving the power and expressiveness of other functional languages I've used. A lot of that seems cultural; I wrote a little toy monadic library in Erlang when I was trying to help teach some coworkers about ideas from other functional languages and how we could use them in our codebase (https://github.com/rebeccaskinner/erl_m) but I don't see a lot of libraries like that coming out of the wider Erlang community- there seems to be a much stronger focus on solving a single concrete problem than on making development in the language better overall.

As for Go, I do like the language- well enough that I took another job where I'll be mostly using it. I can't quite shake the feeling that some of the syntactical and stylistic choices were made more to be different than because they are better, but I can move past them. I think goroutines and channels have a lot of potential as atoms of concurrency for building models going forward, and I think it's nice to see a language gaining popularity that is focused on being small (in the sense of the size of the spec) and simple (in terms of feature interactions). I don't think a lot of it's potential has been realized yet, and I hope that we can take some of the lessons learned from other languages, e.g. Conduits and FRP from Haskell. For right now I've seen enough cases of people introducing threading errors and problems introduced by the user of pointers that I think it pays to be wary of third party libraries.

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

#437
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually found it pretty hard to find regular work focused on doing FP. My last job was Erlang when I started, but pivoted to Go because of a lack of Erlang developers. My last two jobs before that were mixes of C and Haskell, but only because I was given the lattitude to select haskell. This time around when I was interviewing I was trying to find something that would let me focus on FP, but the best I could fi…

Become a sysadmin that writes tools (which is more like old-school system programmer, the one who wrote grep and syslog and init and bash and awk). Since you're nominally a sysadmin, nobody will look at your workbench to check if you're using "kosher" languages, so you're free to use whatever makes sense to solve a problem (hint: not always a functional language). Been there, done that, been happy with the approach.

I know a couple of people who do something like that. I don't think it would work well for me though, since I had to resign from my current job because although it was a developer role there was a good bit of sysadmin required and I just find that work extremely unrewarding.

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

#438
post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

Rubbish. I have been working in Barcelona for 8 years. I speak English as my first language and crappy Spanish considering the amount of time I have been here. No Catalan required.

Thus, you are not in this group of unemployed spaniards that was the reason of this post in the first time. Congratulations, you are neither in the first group, nor in the second. (And if your spanish is "crappy" after 8 years living in Spain you should wonder if there is a hidden reason for this that you didn't noticed before. What if your company moves or if the job of your dreams opens in Mexico DF, Buenos Aires or Sevilla in the next year?)

Again, It depends on the context and the job; and for some context, provinces and jobs, to speak three languages or more is required for a spaniard trying to find a job, because you can't have a degree otherwise.

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

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The do so because local people don't want to do these jobs.

If people don't want to do a job, it is because it is not suitably remunerated. Using illegal labour instead should not be defended. It undercuts the position of the legal workers.

Paying people more for these jobs would make the end product way more expensive and make it hard to compete on the global market and make your country not competitive (what's happening here in France). Another side effect is that because the price of the end product gets more expensive, people will have to work more in order to buy said products or just avoid buying them.

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

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU citizens probably won't event need a visa, just a passport. Especially from rich western EU countries, like it was already the case before Schengen.

The UK is not in Schengen, that's a common misconception :) One of the points of the Leave campaign, reinforced after the vote by some of its leaders like Michael Gove, is to setup a points system for immigration. If there was no "limit EU migration" argument, Leave would have easily lost the vote.

I know it's not, it's why my wife can't get there :) That's why I said that's how it was even _before_ Schengen, ie French and German didn't need a visa to go to the UK even before the EU.
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