Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed
bloomberg.com
Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed
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Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed
#2Pay. More. This. Is. The. Market. Speaking.
Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed
#3I'm wondering what is the cognitive dissonance with employers who are unwilling to train workers. I mean, I understand the reasons if you're a an SMB, but large corporations used to train their employees or hold something close to apprenticeship programs.
I'm guessing this is more along the lines of "we want qualified work but we're not really willing to pay for it"?
Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed
#4Pay. More. This. Is. The. Market. Speaking.
€200,000 in Spain seems a pretty good wage
Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed
#5The article says the average salary in Spain is around $22k. Even at twice that, it's not hard to see why developers are not working for (or maybe even in) Spain. I suspect the problem has more to do with Spanish businesses not being willing or able to compete for developers with market salary rates.
It's frustrating that they don't provide data like that in articles like this. Instead of they a single data point anecdote about how a company can't find an Agile project manager for "up to" $220k.
How about comparing the percentage of software developers in Spain to the US? Or discussing how the education for technology is different? Or what percentage of the unemployed are developers? Or software developer salaries compared to rest of EU. Or the number of Spanish developers working abroad or for companies abroad. Instead have a graph of Spain's GDP and a graph showing the size of their workforce.
This is why I rarely ever click on articles and only read the comments. Most of the time it's the only place with any substance.
Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed
#6I'm wondering what is the cognitive dissonance with employers who are unwilling to train workers. I mean, I understand the reasons if you're a an SMB, but large corporations used to train their employees or hold something close to apprenticeship programs. I'm guessing this is more along the lines of "we want qualified work but we're not really willing to pay for it"?
> I'm wondering what is the cognitive dissonance with employers who are unwilling to train workers. I mean, I understand the reasons if you're a an SMB, but large corporations used to train their employees or hold something close to apprenticeship programs.
It was far less common for people to change jobs back then, too. Neither employers nor employees feel any real loyalty towards one another, so investing in one another feels foolish. There's nothing to incentivise someone to stay once he's learnt the skills he needs to get a position elsewhere.
Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed
#7Pay. More. This. Is. The. Market. Speaking.
Markets aren't for working stiffs.
Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed
#8You have two groups:
1. 5 million unemployed people 2. very highly sought after workers
The employers complaining about people in group 2 being scarce are merely not paying enough. The workers complaining in group 1 need more skills that the market wants. They're at different ends of the spectrum.
Other than that they live in the same country, they really don't have much to do with each other. Whether you can convert people from group 1 to group 2 is an interesting question, but generally if it were easy to be in group 2, a lot more people would be in it.
Re: Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed
#9Starting 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 field, the cause of the unemployment was insufficient demand. They basically likened it to the Great Depression, where highly employable people were thrown out of work despite their skill levels.
This news story makes me think that we have some combination of the two stories going on in Spain. And maybe also the US?
Of course, how the country responds to that situation is a separate discussion.
Maybe the government can just borrow some cash (at historically low rates) and, instead of building another airport somewhere, educate twenty thousand IT engineers, even paying them to go to school. Maybe government could demand that employers train people.
Also, what's going on in the EU with the free movement of labor? Don't some IT people want to move from Estonia and Poland down to sunny Spain?