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

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

#361

Post by paol » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 5:32 PM UTC

marcocampos wrote: post #358

paol wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're apparently unaware that not all tax appears on your salary receipt. Employers have to pay 20% to SS, on top of the 11% that the employee pays. (This amount doesn't count toward your gross income for IRS purposes though, which is relevant to your point) The distinction is largely a technicality, all the more because both parts of the SS contribution are paid by the employer directly to the state, but it does ha…

If companies all of the sudden didn't have to paid those 20% would I see that reflected on my paycheck? I bet you I wouldn't nor anyone else. I've heard that falacy time and time again: "Oh, if I didn't have to pay so much taxes for each worker I could pay higher salaries."

You're responding to a statement I didn't make. I just corrected the common misconception that the SS tax is 11%, it's not, it's 34.75% [0]

What would happen if those taxes were lowered is for economists to speculate, I'm not one (even then, as the joke goes, put a question to two economists, get three different opinions)

[0] This conversation made go check the exact values, you can find them here: http://www.economias.pt/contribuicoes-para-a-seguranca-socia...

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

#362

Post by cylinder » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 5:45 PM UTC

aianus wrote: post #327

_mikz wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you actually get cool place to work, meet people and maybe even make friends. Might not be for everyone, but sometimes money is not everything. Personal interaction can be strong motivator. We are in the same building as MobileJazz and both of our offices have a big terrace and BBQ which we put to fair use!

> But you actually get cool place to work, meet people and maybe even make friends. You can do this at co-working spaces with other people who work remotely for US companies.

Not all of us want to go on retreats overseas with coworkers, especially if we have a spouse and kids, but definitely some people prefer that kind of environment at work.

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

#363

Post by codygman » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 5:47 PM UTC

rebeccaskinner wrote: post #345

ionforce wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you like functional programming? That's a sector that's poppin.

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.

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

#364

Post by dlandis » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 5:48 PM UTC

JBReefer wrote: post #286

feklar wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does SF gave rent brokers you have to go through? Manhattan you have to pay first/last rent to a broker plus deposit you need around 8-$12k to sign any lease up front

Brokers fee is one month, not two, and the outer boroughs are much cheaper.

Broker's fees of 15% or even 20% seemed to be fairly common last time I was looking in Manhattan several years ago. It's definitely not pegged at one month anymore nowadays even in Brooklyn.

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

#365

Post by throwaway_9191 » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 5:48 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #347

throwaway_9191 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please, spare the HN crowd of your anti-Catalan obsessions. Or, on second thought, please continue to educate the community on the anti-Catalan sentiment that is unfortunately so common throughout Spain. > If you don't speak Catalan and live in Cataluña you just will never finish the middle school. Or you will learn Catalan which is kinda the fucking point of education? Boo-hoo, Catalonians want kids to learn Cata…

> Try getting a job in the public administration in Spain without speaking Spanish, in France without speaking French, in Italy without speaking Italian, in the UK without speaking English... see the pattern? Yes, I see it, and is not the same as you think. Would be, "Try getting a job in the public administration in Spain without speaking Spanish AND catalan, in France without speaking French AND Patóis, in Italy wi…

Again, you mirror the Spanish public opinion very well.

The pattern is clear: you only respect state backed cultures, my culture and language are mere nuisances that waste people's time.

That's one of the main reasons we need to break away from Spain ASAP. Before it can complete the cultural genocide it has repeatedly attempted during the last 3 centuries.

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

#366

Post by cplanas » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

alvarosm wrote: post #335

acchow wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or they leave.

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

#367

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #333

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…

I have read a number of other articles which say essentially this as well, that essentially you aren't paid a market wage in Spain so the only people who work in Spain in technology have some alternate reason why they can't (or don't want to) leave. I find these sorts of problems intriguing from a microeconomics perspective. There was a store in a small midwest town which closed because it couldn't afford to pay its…

It depends very much on the products you offer. Necessities are much less sensitive to price raises than luxury goods when it comes to distance simply because not everybody is equally mobile.

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

#368

Post by NetStrikeForce » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

desas wrote: post #261

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? No. There are countless unemployed nurses in Spain, Portugal and Ireland. Ask the NHS how many they bring in every year.

They bring in 1000s of nurses from the EU and 1000s from outside the EU. I'm not sure that it's true to say that they're all unemployed when they're poached though.

They probably are. The Spanish healthcare system pays fairly well, but right now it's difficult to get in.

The NHS doesn't pay really well. Nurses brought from South Europe are getting offered between £23k and £25k, including for hospitals in London zone 1.

That makes me doubt that many nurses poached from Spain were actually employed.

Source: Someone close to me is a Spanish nurse working for the NHS :)

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

#369

Post by heisenbit » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 6:25 PM UTC

Mr. Pimentel is a Managing Partner and regional director over several countries and as such the main job is to talk the playbook and drum up business. Finding good people is hard and we are the right guys to talk to. Finder fees are proportional to salary so aiming high is important. He claims on his web page to hire country sales directors and country managers so talking salaries of 200k+ is probably quite natural for him. Maybe he is more thinking of a person who can turn a dead end organization into an agile one - such a feat is hard and requires a multitude of skills. In any case it is likely that some things were mixed up in the interview.

One thing is clear - after the property bust in Spain and Portugal a lot of the higher skilled and mobile people were heading elsewhere. There has been a brain drain in the region. Disproportionally high (vs. average Spanish) salaries may be required if mobile top talent is needed. Agile project management or product ownership for run of the mill projects aren't those. But when talking about roles that shape organizations then things may be different.

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

#370

Post by internaut » Sat, Jul 02, 2016, 6:28 PM UTC

Europe in general, with some rare exceptions, does not value the kinds of skills that are selected for in SV.

The culture is bad. The incentives are all wrong. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.

The typical business person in Europe considers him or herself top of the pecking order. This only looks to be true relatively because they hire less capable workers. These are the exact kind of people who imagine hiring twice as many developers gets the job accomplished faster i.e. simpletons.

The typical software engineer is at least one standard deviation above them. Just not in one specific area. In everything. I have friends who did part-time degrees in literature or language studies while they were also studying for computer science at some of the most elite european universities. Most geeks are systems thinkers and have no trouble in grokking areas outside of their main thing. Many of us refuse to be put into a box.

Having interests in exclusively one thing is a pretty fair indicator of not being very adaptive, I'd say it's almost defintional. That is the kind of person they want to hire. You can hire them, but they won't be very good.

Then you get these idiots who think they can run circles around us because they have the phone number of a venture capitalist or bank manager. Get a grip boys, your money doesn't count for much when a software engineer can be ramen profitable so easily. I have all manner of skills I don't bother to put on the market because the rates of pay are so pitiful and I can obtain better results by doing my own thing. Lots of other people just physically move. This is then misread by the business community as 'not enough skills'.

The other thing is that most projects they offer are really boring grunt work where you learn nothing by doing them. If there was an actual project we found cool or innovative we'd probably work for lower base salary plus some equity, but that's not the kind of work we get here in Europe, those kinds of benefits are reserved for Clod-Class. A good many programmers would prefer to work 20 hrs a week as janitors and then work on interesting projects rather than put up with this bullshit plus work 60-70 hour weeks. How many European programmers are told they'll be paid 20-30 euro per hour but actually are required to work three or four hours a day for free? Apparently they like to think we can't do arithmetic but can order a machine to do floating point operations just fine.

Diagnosis: Failure to Coordinate. Failure of Imagination.