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The Exodus of Tech from Portugal

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Re: The Exodus of Tech from Portugal

#51

Post by Tomek_ »

josemariaruiz wrote: post #16

Same situation in Spain, incredible brain drain of IT people. In the last months ~ 40% of my IT colleagues in Spain have decided to move to other countries (UK and Germany mainly). In Spain people a few years ago said stupid things to justify not moving to other countries where salaries were like 3 times Spanish ones: weather, food and «quality of life». There is another factor for this delayed and flood-like emigrat…

Well, I'm from Germany but working in Spain - regularly getting job offers from UK, Ireland, Germany, even San Francisco, with 2, 3, 4 times bigger salaries. But still: weather, food, people and yes, "quality of life" - those things are keeping me here. Recently visited Porto, and damn, that place is so fantastic that I started to think about moving in there. Because, pardon being a bit cheesy here, life is more than having a good salary, a house and drink a pint of Guinness in a local bar on a Friday night. At least for me, that is.

Re: The Exodus of Tech from Portugal

#52

Post by tluyben2 »

hk_kh wrote: post #43
tluyben2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you live in southern EU you have, as an example, Worten and Mediamarkt => they both do electronic 'stuff', games, tvs, washers, etc. They are quite comparable, except Worten is Portugese and Mediamarkt is German. And that difference is a huge gap. The staff is Worten, in all branches I have been, and, when I had enough, my friends have been, is downright shit. We are talking girls with braces talking to their…

> The younger generation is fat and spoiled and angry. Why? The news probably? Hearing every day your country is going under is not stimulating while the older generation lived with Franco / Salazar and know that this is the best they every had. Way to keep it classy.. The younger generation is not fat, nor spoiled, maybe angry. You just see the most blatant cases, and decide that's the general rule. If the average b…

Where do you live? I live in the montes de Malaga and I travel a lot to the Alpujarra, Cordoba and Ronda. The youth is 'a few kilos' too heavy. If you walk on the beach here the Spanish youth IS fat. It's a HUGE difference from 20 years ago. And their parents buy EVERYTHING for them; a lot of my Spanish friends with kids waste their own life to pay for their +20 year old kids because 'they cannot find a job'. So no, i'm not a tourist and I don't live in or go to tourist traps. Maybe you live in the north of Spain, I have no idea how it is there, nor did I ever pretend to know, I use the word "SOUTH" quite a lot if you didn't notice.

And it was worse during the dictators; old people remember and they tell me.

Edit; Oh and i'm not trying to insult anyone; you can ask my local bar guy; he'll tell you he is a angry sod; he's proud of it. He likes to piss off tourists. He just cannot explain why. Others as well; most are kind of proud of not being nice to tourists. While they know it's their bread.

Re: The Exodus of Tech from Portugal

#53

Post by tluyben2 »

miguelpais wrote: post #46
tluyben2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change comes from the people of the country, not the people who run away. You should fight for change, not take the way of least resistance. Look beyond your personal gains and to the remaking of a whole country. If all brains leave, your country will be dead soon. And yes, of course you don't work for big consultancy companies :) That I have notices a lot; people in Portugal, especially students, seem to be overly o…

To be quite frank I wonder what is better for the country: staying there, working your ass off and getting just enough to survive, or being outside, opening your horizons, maybe being exposed to new ways of thinking, technologies or ideas, and one day come back and strive to offer to the country what you learned outside. These people that are leaving, they still love they country, and I'm sure most of them still thin…

But I don't think that's true. Portugal (and the other southern countries) have a lot of talent; why let that talent be bought up by outside countries (like mine)? The world is very ripe for near shoring and actually good programmers are incredibly hard to find. For anyone. People are getting tired with Asian 'factories' with people who, usually, derive no pleasure from their work. Simply; if you open a company NOW in PT and you train 10 Outsystems guys, you and those guys will be able to live a GREAT life. You can sell them in NL/DE/FR for E100/hour and they don't expect you do 'work nights'. It's just the business sense which seems to be lacking. You need to USE the fact that it's a crisis, PT is going under; it means you don't cost E200, you 'only' cost E100 or E75 an hour. How much do you think the US army is paying per hour to Outsystems for the engineers sitting in Lisbon?

Re: The Exodus of Tech from Portugal

#54

Post by bpedro »

fun2have wrote: post #49

If you are in Portugal and want to work for a fun innovative start up. Come and work for us. So far we have grown from 2 person to over 12 person in a year been here. http://webnographer.theresumator.com/ for a bit more background here on why we did it http://blog.webnographer.com/2010/10/an-rd-office-in-lisbon/

You did it basically because it's cheaper than other countries, right?

“I needed a European base with low operational costs, talented people and a high quality of life."

Re: The Exodus of Tech from Portugal

#55

Post by tluyben2 »

josemariaruiz wrote: post #33
tluyben2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you live in southern EU you have, as an example, Worten and Mediamarkt => they both do electronic 'stuff', games, tvs, washers, etc. They are quite comparable, except Worten is Portugese and Mediamarkt is German. And that difference is a huge gap. The staff is Worten, in all branches I have been, and, when I had enough, my friends have been, is downright shit. We are talking girls with braces talking to their…

Everybody hates Endesa. In Spain is highly probable that when someone takes your call to a company he/she will be in South America ;) And about Spanish companies and how they treat their customers, I'm with you. This is ingrained in many mediterranean countries: no ones got rich doing hard work or through a strong work ethic. You can only get rich stealing, abusing and lying. The rate of people who evades taxes is so…

But the fact that everyone 'hates Endesa'. That wouldn't fly in NL, why does it fly in ES?

Re: The Exodus of Tech from Portugal

#56

Post by lifeisstillgood »

miguelpais wrote: post #27

I'm one of those about to graduate students from a technical university in Lisbon, and for me, there is no doubt anymore, I'll start to work outside of Portugal. When you look at it from one side, South European countries have everything: they have the food, the weather, good universities, kind and welcoming people (not to say that other countries don't), talent. They have the potential to be the best countries to li…

Whatever others say, I suggest you take your talent overseas for a while. Portugal will exist and in 10 or 20 years you and the rest of your generation will return - and demand change.

Look at India's vast middle class / consultancy fodder. They are returning home and not simply demanding, but expecting things to be different.

Re: The Exodus of Tech from Portugal

#57

Post by simonh »

josemariaruiz wrote: post #34
justincormack wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Service culture can change relatively fast with the right catalysts, which include better management and getting people more involved. The UK used to have terrible service (Fawlty Towers was based on real life), but has got much better. Immigration helped a lot though... Southern Europe is going to have to change a lot, fast. It is a huge opportunity if done right, but people dont even understand whats going on fully…

The waiter of Fawlty Towers was Spanish :)

Portuguese actually.

Re: The Exodus of Tech from Portugal

#58

Post by josemariaruiz »

tluyben2 wrote: post #55
josemariaruiz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody hates Endesa. In Spain is highly probable that when someone takes your call to a company he/she will be in South America ;) And about Spanish companies and how they treat their customers, I'm with you. This is ingrained in many mediterranean countries: no ones got rich doing hard work or through a strong work ethic. You can only get rich stealing, abusing and lying. The rate of people who evades taxes is so…

But the fact that everyone 'hates Endesa'. That wouldn't fly in NL, why does it fly in ES?

Curiously my answer (I don't know if it's THE answer) is that Spanish people do not like conflict. We don't have class actions as in other countries and people are not used to claim for their rights against big companies. I think we still need a bit of this crazy david-vs-goliath mindset I've seen in other countries where people fight big injustices to the death.

The Spaniard is too preoccupied about what the other will think of him if he makes something... abnormal, which here means anything that will distinguish you from your neighbors . Spanish society is very very alienating and this is why so many foreigners find it so close and unfriendly to people from other cultures.

Re: The Exodus of Tech from Portugal

#59

Post by anil_mamede »

98% of Portuguese IT industry are consultancy and solution development. We have very few product and services development. The game industry is almost zero, applications made here are very rare and services are just copycats. We have a lot of public institutions IT back office projects executed by the same big companies. For a programmer who loves programming: what is the motivation in doing back-offices?

Well there are some efforts in entrepreneurship but most of "startup" ideas falls into the same bin like social networks for cakes or events, project tracking systems or business cards mobile apps. There is much buzz around the startup concept and the idea of having your own business but not on ideas for products that offer real value to people.

In an environment like this it is difficult for a programmer to evolve

Re: The Exodus of Tech from Portugal

#60

Post by andrewl-hn »

A personal anecdote. I know a pretty good PHP developer from Portugal who moved to Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine recently. He started dating a girl from there some time before and visited the country several times. So, when they decided to move in together he preferred to move to Ukraine himself since he could find a much better pay here. For a record, Dnipropetrovsk is not a capital but still a fairy large IT center (one of the top 5 cities) with about 2000 software developers employed in total (growing by 500 each year).

Ukraine might seem a surprising choice to somebody but the tax burden is generally much lower and as a result one can get a pretty good deal salary-wise. For example, right now I'm making significantly more in Kiev than I used to do in Oslo, Norway, which is considered to be a pretty lucrative place to work and live in Europe. The development community is pretty large and thriving. Large part of positions is in outsourcing but there are a plenty of product companies or research centers, too.

The company where I work now started hiring people form US and Western Europe. We are working on NLP systems and there's a lack of local talent with ML and AI skills. For example, we recently hired a machine learning specialist from Spain and we are very happy to have him on board. We also work with linguists from the US.

The world is sure a very different place now!

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