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

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

#191

Post by gordaco » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 6:43 AM UTC

gutnor wrote: post #80

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…

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 two years oriented towards the job market, and often including internships) each year, and how high the unemplyment rate is, I just don't believe that there aren't enough applicants.

Second, a lot of the big companies are what we call cárnicas (roughly, "butcheries"), i.e. companies specialized in outsourcing that pay ridiculous wages (10K a year for an entry level, full-time position where you will get fired if you don't do three hours of overtime a day is not difficult to find). Most developers know better and stay away from these, but because of the unemployment rate, a lot of people end in these places.

In other words, those hard-sought qualifications are more or less "will do a specialized job while getting peanuts in return". The article misleads by giving an example of a position with a 200k salary (which I'm also very skeptical of, like gutnor), and fails to mention that it's a very specific position and does not represent the whole set.

The only way I could believe that there is an actual shortage of workers, and I still doubt that it's true, is if we took into account that many of the good developers fled to greener pastures a lot of time ago.

EDIT: I should also mention that the problem is not that there isn't money and therefore the job market can only offer crappy jobs. On the contrary, most of the big enterprises and especially the cárnicas are very lucrative for their owners. The problem is that there is a very big barrier entry, because these companies strive on public contracts, and because of corruption, new and smaller companies can't stand a chance against the already existing ones.

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

#192

Post by BjoernKW » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 6:43 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #108

BjoernKW wrote: post #60

Language is a large part of this problem, not willing to pay market prices is another. Why else would recruiters have to look for candidates in Argentina when there's a huge amount of suitable candidates in the EU with an automatic work permit?

Argentines speak fluent Spanish, and will be able to understand complex and subtle business requirements presented in Spanish.

Therein lies the rub. In most other countries business people who have to deal with subtle business requirements speak English decently well where in Spanish business it's absolutely normal for a CEO of an international company to only speak broken English at best.

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

#193

Post by pcrh » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 6:43 AM UTC

duckingtest wrote: post #183

igravious wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude. You're not getting the objection. We're not objecting to the numeric ratios, we're objecting to using those numbers in the first place. > GDP per capita seems to be a curious way to estimate if a local dev is likely to be productive. Curious is putting it mildly. :) What is being objected to is your _measure_. Stop using the GDP per capita of an entire country as a proxy for software developer productivity. It'…

>Stop using the GDP per capita of an entire country as a proxy for software developer productivity. It's frankly stupid. Outside of entertainment where software is a direct consumer product, the developer's productivity comes from increased efficiency of use of other productive resources. You can't eat code, but you can eat food that comes from higher production due to better software. So software has a multiplicativ…

This way of estimating a dev's likely productivity would operate independent of their individual ability, as well as be applicable across all worker categories. For example a dairy farmer in Switzerland earns more than one in Poland because people pay more for milk products in Switzerland compared to Poland.

So why would the GDP per capita of their country be a useful tool in deciding who to hire?

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

#194

Post by duckingtest » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 6:52 AM UTC

pcrh wrote: post #193

duckingtest wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Stop using the GDP per capita of an entire country as a proxy for software developer productivity. It's frankly stupid. Outside of entertainment where software is a direct consumer product, the developer's productivity comes from increased efficiency of use of other productive resources. You can't eat code, but you can eat food that comes from higher production due to better software. So software has a multiplicativ…

This way of estimating a dev's likely productivity would operate independent of their individual ability, as well as be applicable across all worker categories. For example a dairy farmer in Switzerland earns more than one in Poland because people pay more for milk products in Switzerland compared to Poland. So why would the GDP per capita of their country be a useful tool in deciding who to hire?

>For example a dairy farmer in Switzerland earns more than one in Poland because people pay more for milk products in Switzerland compared to Poland.

A Swiss farmer is much more productive when measured in currency units, but probably not that much in milk volume.

However as we are talking about salary differences it's money that matters.

>So why would the GDP per capita of their country be a useful tool in deciding who to hire?

Why would it be? In this conceptual model the ability of a developer is how much he multiplies the output of whatever he's working on, but his productivity is the absolute value of added output. How could it be counted otherwise, in what? Lines of code?

If productivity didn't depend on location immigration wouldn't exist.

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

#195

Post by cwilkes » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 6:53 AM UTC

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #107

ZenoArrow wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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." Sorry, I still don't understand this attitude. I live in the UK, it's common here to have at least some level of on-the-…

Job culture in the UK is soooo much better than in Spain. I've worked on both places, so this is first hand experience. In Spain I would get sent to a training, because we needed to have someone certified on that product to get discounts, then the company would ask me to sign a contract to either stay with them at least two more years or pay a 2k fine. The idiots only tried to do this after the training, thinking oth…

> - Don't you have work to do? > - Yep, that's why I'm coming back tomorrow again.

Hah, good one.

I'm curious in this toxic situation doesn't it just take a few good companies that treat their employees well to change things around? The good engineers will flock there leaving the bad ones at the old companies.

Granted that probably means the managers will now try and get 2x the work out of the remainders. Maybe some will get a clue though and change their ways.

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

#196

Post by Qantourisc » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 6:58 AM UTC

gordaco wrote: post #191

gutnor wrote: 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…

What is wrong with Java/Python? I don't know about Java, but Python is certainly a nice language to write in in my opinion. (However don't expect raw performance from Python.)

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

#197

Post by gordaco » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 7:01 AM UTC

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #107

ZenoArrow wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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." Sorry, I still don't understand this attitude. I live in the UK, it's common here to have at least some level of on-the-…

Job culture in the UK is soooo much better than in Spain. I've worked on both places, so this is first hand experience. In Spain I would get sent to a training, because we needed to have someone certified on that product to get discounts, then the company would ask me to sign a contract to either stay with them at least two more years or pay a 2k fine. The idiots only tried to do this after the training, thinking oth…

What you describe is sadly very common (and I've seen it happen first hand in a few places, including Tuenti by the way[1]). However, if you look you can find places where it doesn't work that way. I've found that the closest to a sweet spot is working for any European (i.e., not American and not Spanish) company that does in-house software development (i.e., not an outsourcing company).

[1] I mention this because someone else has mentioned that Tuenti infuriated some companies by paying more than the average one. On the other hand, I could name a few people that were literally fired from there because of not doing enough unpaid overtime.

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

#198

Post by tigershark » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 7:03 AM UTC

fiddlesticks22 wrote: post #188

casta wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how it works in Spain, but in Italy the cost of an employee is probably much more than his/her salary. The employer gives you a salary, then they have to pay on top of it ~30% of INAIL, INPS etc. (pension, health "insurance" including sick days and so on) and ~10% of TFR (fund you get back at the end of your career.) In the U.S. those are costs you have to remove from your salary. So, 3000 euros a month…

When hiring contractors the company doesn't have to pay any of these things (it's on the contractor). I'm currently contracting for a company in Italy and getting much more than 3k/mo.

You are speaking about gross salary I guess. I don't really believe that in Italy you can get much more of 3k€ net as a developer. And contracting market in Italy is really fucked up, when I was there on average contractors were paid less than permies.

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

#199

Post by pcrh » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 7:07 AM UTC

duckingtest wrote: post #194

pcrh wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This way of estimating a dev's likely productivity would operate independent of their individual ability, as well as be applicable across all worker categories. For example a dairy farmer in Switzerland earns more than one in Poland because people pay more for milk products in Switzerland compared to Poland. So why would the GDP per capita of their country be a useful tool in deciding who to hire?

>For example a dairy farmer in Switzerland earns more than one in Poland because people pay more for milk products in Switzerland compared to Poland. A Swiss farmer is much more productive when measured in currency units, but probably not that much in milk volume. However as we are talking about salary differences it's money that matters. >So why would the GDP per capita of their country be a useful tool in deciding…

I guess it depends on the sense in which "productivity" is being used.

A remote dev working for a Bay Area company from Spain can be just as productive for his employer as one located in Los Gatos, CA. However the above method would categorize this dev as "objectively less productive", which seems counter-intuitive...

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

#200

Post by chris11 » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 7:07 AM UTC

Qantourisc wrote: post #196

gordaco wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What is wrong with Java/Python? I don't know about Java, but Python is certainly a nice language to write in in my opinion. (However don't expect raw performance from Python.)

I didn't read it as necessarily knocking those languages, but saying most programmers had experience in those languages. And most jobs did not ask for any unusual skills, so companies should be able to find decent local developers.