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Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed

• dthal 10y ago
  >>“It’s a paradox,” said Valentin Bote, head of research in Spain at Randstad, a recruitment agency. “The unemployment rate is too high. Yet we’re seeing some tension in the labor market because unemployed people don’t have the skills employers demand. There's no real paradox there. Employment of young people, and therefore normal career progression for that cohort, essentially shut down for 6-8 years. Now the pipeline is a little empty.
  • pvaldes 10y ago
    This is also a big point. One of the problems with teachers and scientists for example.
• davidgerard 10y ago
  Pay. More. This. Is. The. Market. Speaking.
  • sbmassey 10y ago
    €200,000 in Spain seems a pretty good wage
    • sbierwagen 10y ago
      It is self-evidently not.
    • whamlastxmas 10y ago
      "Up to" 200k, allegedly, from a single source. This is either lazy or biased reporting.
    • ldng 10y ago
      Yeah, that's what the client is willing to pay to the consulting firm who don't want to hire the guy at more than 24K ... Sad truth.
  • Spooky23 10y ago
    Markets aren't for working stiffs.
  • ldng 10y ago
    The wages were too low. The skilled spaniard fled the country. Combined that cuting spendings in education. And now act surprised at the result.
    • dmix 10y ago
      > Combined that cuting spendings in education. I highly doubt they were cutting spending to CS courses and medical programs. More education doesn't solve the '5 million people unemployed' problem. Having the right education is what matters. That often doesn't require throwing more money at the problem. Especially when the vast majority of education financing goes down administrative black holes. Just saying 'cutting spending = bad' is about as baseless as this article claims that the problem is lack of employable people when the problem likely involves issues with training/salary and other nuanced issues. Jumping to quick correlations like 'all education = good' this is how massive mismatches in education/market demand happens in the first place.
      • ldng 10y ago
        > Just saying 'cutting spending = bad' is about as baseless as this article I'll grant you that. But Spain is the country who was in the top 5 countries in solar RD in the 200x, a lot of education program in that sector for instance. The cutback were mishandled/misplaced. The Spanish government purposefully pushed to have low skilled labor as they intended to compete with Turkey on manufacturing. The thing is, that not what the market wants so it unbalanced it further.
      • alvarosm 10y ago
        Yeah, but that's the intoxication you can hear in the Spanish media all day long. How the next politician is going to solve everything by throwing money everywhere... you can see how a society that readily swallows that crap can't be very skilled at doing any kind of work.
    • alvarosm 10y ago
      Very few Spaniards are skilled enough to "flee" the country, let alone speak enough English (or any other language) to be able to work abroad. Wages are low because both companies and workers are not very valuable. Companies are not adding enough value to pay good workers and good workers are extremely hard to come by anyway.
  • olegious 10y ago
    I was interested in a product job in Barcelona, then I saw that it pays almost 70% less than I'm making now...
    • droopyEyelids 10y ago
      Why do you say "70% less"? Sorry to pick on you, but I see this usage everywhere and I'm curious. Doesn't "Pays 30% of what I make" convey what you mean much more effectively?
      • hueving 10y ago
        Apparently not or the poster would have used that convention.
        • dguaraglia 10y ago
          I think it might have to do with the poster's mother tongue. As a Spanish-speaker I'd tend to say "pagarían 20% menos" (which roughly translates to "they'd pay 20% less". Some idioms are very difficult to get rid off. I sometimes can distinguish Brazilians from Argentines just by the way they write in English.
          • hueving 10y ago
            I grew up in the US and am a native English speaker raised by native English speakers and I sometimes use the same idiom. I suspect the GP is complaining because English is not a strong language for him/her.
            • nottoday88 10y ago
              What's the meaning of GP? Gilip?
              • sbmassey 10y ago
                Grandparent post
  • flamedoge 10y ago
    Are businesses making their ends meet? This is more important than devs getting not enough. You can only hire so many for so much when your business is getting taxed at 50%.
• Daishiman 10y ago
  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. I'm guessing this is more along the lines of "we want qualified work but we're not really willing to pay for it"?
  • zeveb 10y ago
    > 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.
    • r00fus 10y ago
      > There's nothing to incentivise someone to stay once he's learnt the skills he needs to get a position elsewhere. Are there no velvet/golden handcuffs allowed in .es?
      • WalterSear 10y ago
        Allowed, sure. Practical in the current environment is another question.
    • Daishiman 10y ago
      The benefits were far better too. I've worked at the same place my father did; the benefits he had when he started 35 years ago are literally unobtainable for our generation.
      • ArkyBeagle 10y ago
        I started roughly 31 years ago and I was making $10 an hour, with rent @ $400 a month. That's $22 2016 an hour with inflation against $880 a month rent for a crappy apartment with air conditioning in 90-100 degree heat about 80% of the time, for half a year ( Dallas ). But at least we had a pool. Helicopters chased people down the "creek" at night. "The benefits" are because health insurance has been a slow-moving disaster starting in 1949. And from about 1989 until 1993, I did without health insurance. IT was a low-paying job. I paid my dues and the money's gotten better.
• whamlastxmas 10y ago
  The 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.
  • ldng 10y ago
    A lot of skilled Spanish dev have fled to Paris and London despite the high cost of living of those cities and being paid less because they're foreigners because it is still more rewarding. In Spain, politician and corruption are pushing skilled people away. I have seen (and heard of) too many people moving out to be just mere coincidence. The subtlety is that most of the time the greedy consulting firm will keep 198K out of the 220K and the be surprised not to find anyone. "Spain is different" as some friends say.
    • adwf 10y ago
      After Brexit, I'm very tempted to move in the opposite direction. If the Spanish consulting firms can be undercut to that extent, there's a potentially lucrative market. Unfortunately I only know French and German, but I could learn Spanish relatively quickly I guess. The corruption and politics is troubling however.
      • calgoo 10y ago
        Its not to bad. I live in Barcelona, the corruption is a problem, and will not be solved soon. But thats such a deep problem thats going to take a long time to solve. There is currently a a lot of talented local people and international people who want to work here. A lot of the agencies pay between 15K and 25K on average for junior developers / administrators. However, you can be stuck in the bracket for a long time unless you are able to find a way to switch to a different position. The issue is once you get a job in the 30K+ group where its a lot harder finding anything. Let me know if you have any other questions :)
• altoz 10y ago
  You 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.
  • charlesdm 10y ago
    Very true. Just compare salaries of software engineers in most EU countries with salaries in the US. If you're a good developer, 99% of the time it's better to work remotely from Europe for a US company. It really is a simple problem to solve -- pay talented people in Europe more. And yet, for some reason, this is often dismissed by CEOs as a ridiculous statement. They're probably the same people who think you need 100 software engineers to complete a complex technology project.
    • scribu 10y ago
      > It really is a simple problem to solve -- pay talented people in Europe more. Playing devil's advocate: If we limit the discussion to pure tech companies that target a global market, then yes, it is that simple. But there is a vast majority of companies that do not belong to that category, yet require software developers. I'm thinking primarily of Spanish software agencies that have other Spanish companies as clients.
      • charlesdm 10y ago
        There's often still significant leeway. I'm based in Belgium - most senior developers probably make between €3-4000/mo (before tax) here. That's for guys in their mid 30s, early 40s. So a bit better than Spain. My cousin's husband owns a small agency (15-20 people) and sells one developer at €2.000 a day on €500k-1m projects. I think on average they're billed out around 150 days a year, so grossing around €300k per developer, per annum. Paying developers more would mean less profits ending up in his pocket.
• HillaryBriss 10y ago
  Starting 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?
  • Findeton 10y ago
    In Spain, we just had elections on the 26th of June, and the conservatives won. There is money, as taxes in Spain are high on wages but low on big companies and the government's budget is 10 points lower % than the EU average... but we have a conservative government.
    • switch007 10y ago
      PP won the most votes but not enough to secure a majority. Rajoy is currently in talks with other parties to form a majority, hopefully "within a month." Technically you still have a conservative government but who knows what will happen.
    • smsm42 10y ago
      If you had elections on 26th of June, it's not likely that this has had any effect on anything happening in Spanish economy. And probably won't be for a while - economy has inertia.
  • 10y ago
• winestock 10y ago
  From the article: "Pimentel’s client asked him for list of candidates trained in “Agile” project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain." So they're willing to pay ten times the going rate, but they're not willing to take the time to train anyone? But wait; there's more! "But such people are thin on the ground in Spain. It takes at least eight months for an experienced software developer to earn an Agile qualification and they also need the ability to deal with senior executives, limiting the pool of people who could potentially fill the roles." Again, note that they're willing to pay ten times the going rate, so training them for eight months and then paying them the regular wage would pay for itself after a few months on the job; but they still won't train. More importantly, look at the part which I italicized. Dealing with senior executives takes special skill? I am but a lowly suburban nerd, and the ways of my betters intimidate me, so could someone enlighten me as to what that journalist is talking about? I have a sneaking suspicion that Clay Shirky knows. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-... "Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d learned. This always struck me as a waste of my time and their money; I was like an overpaid bike messenger, moving information from one part of the firm to another. I didn’t understand the job I was doing until one meeting at a magazine company. "The thing that made this meeting unusual was that one of their programmers had been invited to attend, so management could outline their web strategy to him. After the executives thanked me for explaining what I’d learned from log files given me by their own employees just days before, the programmer leaned forward and said “You know, we have all that information downstairs, but nobody’s ever asked us for it.” "I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came clear: I was getting paid to save management from the distasteful act of listening to their own employees." EDIT: formatting
• macspoofing 10y ago
  This was a frustrating article to read. I got the sense the author missed something. Spain is part of the EU common market which numbers 500 million people - how is it that this is only a problem for Spain, and why can't they recruit fellow EU citizens to make-up the shortfall?
  • DanBC 10y ago
    There are EU wide shortages of some professions (eg nurses, especially mental health nurses; doctors, especially mental health doctors (and especially paediatric MH doctors)) and these professions take some time to train people.
    • NetStrikeForce 10y ago
      What? No. There are countless unemployed nurses in Spain, Portugal and Ireland. Ask the NHS how many they bring in every year.
      • DanBC 10y ago
        ...and yet there are still nursing shortages, with many unfilled posts. These are jobs that have been advertised but unfilled.
        • NetStrikeForce 10y ago
          Any proof?
        • mapt 10y ago
          Suggestion: You're not allowed to use the term 'unfilled' in this conversation. Use the term 'unfilled at the listed salary'.
      • desas 10y ago
        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.
• winestock 10y ago
  Check out this little gem from the article: “Education and work exist in two alternative worlds that don’t really connect,” Gomez said. “While in other nations, like the U.S., college education is designed to get you a job, that’s not the case in Spain.” This may be a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side of the hill."
  • nostrebored 10y ago
    Greener but not false. There is a reason why a US education is highly valued by exceptional international students and by multinational companies.
    • lacion 10y ago
      corporate you mean, most startups and valued tech companies don't give any credit to formal education, and the real balance is moved by experience, seconded only by cultural fit.
• vemv 10y ago
  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 all are perceived as 'equal' or even replaceable. - Also, companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving. The sole hint of that you may leave will turn their red alarms on, and they'll start searching a replacement. There rarely exists here the mentality that a work relationship is a commercial exchange, not an intimate family-like relationship. Being open to the market is not 'treason'. - Tech stacks tend to be years behind San Francisco, whether is languages, frameworks, ops practices... - Functional programming opportunities extremely scarce. Elixir is gaining traction here though.
  • charlesdm 10y ago
    Have you considered working remotely for a US company? I know a guy making €7 or 8,000 per month, after tax, living in Paris. Best of both worlds: amazing quality of living, cheap cost of living + healthcare, lots of spending (or investing) money! Seems to be working well for him.
    • jules 10y ago
      Is the cost of living in Paris less than a normal US city?
      • fchollet 10y ago
        Paris is much less expensive than the bay area, but more expensive than the average US city. In fact, it's barely less expensive than NYC, one of the most expensive US cities. Also, if you are working remotely you cannot command a bay area salary.
        • gorkemyurt 10y ago
          So you are saying NYC is much less expensive than Bay Area?
• jandrewrogers 10y ago
  The gap isn't the pay or the training per se. A growing issue I see frequently is that companies need more highly experienced (read: senior) people, and are willing to pay for it, but there is no fast pipeline from "no experience" to "highly skilled" even if companies did invest in training. Meanwhile, the existing pool is much too small to meet demand; redistributing the talent won't address the underlying issue. Companies are hiring to fill a need now, not 2-3 years in the future. The company or product generating the demand might not even be around in that time. An unfortunate reality that people tend to ignore is that the length of time required to train for the average high skill/high pay job has been increasing. There are many high demand specialties in software that require a minimum of 2 years of hardcore experience to really be "experienced", but you can't manufacture that overnight and the hiring companies have little use for someone without that experience. Many companies with existing teams do recognize this and hire a mix of junior and senior talent to generate an internal pipeline but you still need the senior talent when building teams in the first place. Reallocation of people sounds simple but it doesn't account for the increasing latency of acquiring a different skill set at the level of quality required to perform the jobs that actually exist. It is a sticky problem because it is a bit of a vicious cycle. NOTE: this is a more general observation, Spain has its own peculiarities.
  • kartan 10y ago
    King hired in Barcelona a lot of highly senior developers, people that were leading protects, being architects, etc in other companies. How? Better pay, better conditions and it gives more autonomy to the developers. A fraction of them are talent brough from abroad because they wanted to live in Barcelona. So it is less hard to find talent when you are willing to be competitive.
    • vacri 10y ago
      > willing to be competitive. On the other hand, it's not like businesses have a big bag of gold that they can simply choose to dip into to increase salaries, especially for the smaller shops.
• anjc 10y ago
  Same thing is happening in every country, it seems. Spanish companies have the entire EU from which they can draw workers without any paperwork or issues, and yet they can't find any? From central/eastern Europe even, whose workers may have lower wage expectations? No. They're flagging this "shortage" and will simultaneously petition their government to allow faster issuing of/more visas to non-EU countries, i.e. India etc, with lower wage requirements for incoming workers.
  • UVB-76 10y ago
    How many people from Eastern Europe speak Spanish? Obviously not as important for low-skilled, manual labour, but we're talking about highly skilled jobs in the tech sector here.
    • calgoo 10y ago
      Romania is one example, but there is a bit of a racial issue going on between the countries.
      • NetStrikeForce 10y ago
        Yet Romanians are the second biggest minority in Spain. There are no more problems than the disgusting and systemic racism that Spain has towards any other country and hurt feelings on the other side.
        • cocotino 10y ago
          Before the crisis we got the worst of Romania and Bulgaria, millions of them, literally. A big chunk of them were very problematic people; not even actual slavs, but gypsies, etc. As if Spanish gypsies weren't enough of a problem already. I remember a friend once went to Bucharest for a trip and was puzzled Romanians are whiter than us! https://blackinmadrid.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/the-romanian-beggars/ https://blackinmadrid.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/the-romanian-... Luckily after the construction bubble burst most of them went back home. Because of Brexit many people have been shittalking A8 countries, but I would not have a problem with Czechoslovaks coming into my country. Unfortunately when you mention easterns here one can only think of the news each and every day, five years ago, talking about robberies in homes and jewelries committed by Albano-Kosovars and Serbians. Romani (not Romanian, but Romani gypsies) kids stealing purses in touristic zones just because they are kids and therefore invulnerable, etc. My two cents about racism in Spain, before you call it "disgusting and systemic", think of stuff like this. What would a Spanish citizen think? http://www.elmundo.es/madrid/2015/07/01/5593898146163ffe428b456c.html http://www.elmundo.es/madrid/2015/07/01/5593898146163ffe428b...
• konschubert 10y ago
  > It takes at least eight months for an experienced software developer to earn an Agile qualification and they also need the ability to deal with senior executives, I am a bit confused by this sentence. How does one "ear an Agile qualification"? Why does it take eight months? What is "the ability to deal with senior executives"?
  • tremon 10y ago
    What is "the ability to deal with senior executives"? Patience and prudence.
    • whyaduck 10y ago
      Actually, I think it's the ability to translate the state of a project into risks, rewards and trade-offs. It's not necessarily an innately understood skill for technical individual contributors.
  • SEJeff 10y ago
    Agreed. I read Jeff Sutherland's Scrum book in about a week, but don't care for a paper certification. Most certificate companies (I'm looking at you CompTia and LPI) just care about selling their worthless paper certificates.
• mooreds 10y ago
  Wonder if it has anything to do with low salaries? Just as an example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12017439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12017439 has a pretty low salary for the skills they want.
  • merqurio 10y ago
    I don't think so.. Most of my friends left Spain looking for better long term opportunities rather than money. Even if our economy (and politicians) sucks, quality of life is pretty high with those salaries. I think the problem is the polarisation in the population. Very well trained people is leaving the country while non-skilled people remain. Skilled people do not trust the system therefore they leave as soon as they can.
    • nostrebored 10y ago
      Quality of life is high, but what if you have a long term goal of moving? Making a lower wage even if proportionally you're taking home more money has a break even point, and 35k in Spain doesn't hit it.
      • merqurio 10y ago
        Totally agree, i wasn't defending low salaries at all, just sharing my insider experience of the reasons why people is leaving Spain.
  • themartorana 10y ago
    "We recently raised $1m and want to exploit you by paying you 1/6 of what we would have to pay talent in the US or most of the rest of the EU."
  • slapresta 10y ago
    It definitely has to do with low salaries: by Spanish standards, I'd say that's a good job offer. Sure, the range advertised is too broad to be useful, but at least there is one; a good one, too, considering that most tech jobs here are on the 18-30k range.
• mathattack 10y ago
  I've seen software projects where this was a big issue. Many ambitious Spaniards wind up working in London or elsewhere. Then Spanish companies have to hire overpriced consultancies to fill local tech positions with underqualified resources. I wonder how much the Brexit will send folks home. My impression is that many companies are looking at Spain as alternatives to London HQs, but those are also the kind of jobs for elites, rather than the 5M unemployed. Very hard to convert housing builders into programmers.
  • patrickaljord 10y ago
    Brexit will happen in 2 years at best. Even so, the UK would still offer work visa to skilled EU workers, there's nothing stopping them from doing that, in fact this is what they said they were going to do. Does everyone really think Brexit is some kind of apocalypse or something for the UK? They love money as much as anyone else and want to remain the finance capital of Europe because money.
    • NetStrikeForce 10y ago
      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 through the burden and uncertainty of visas for me and my family, I might as well just move to Paris, Hamburg or Munich for no visas or Australia or California for good economy and fucking decent weather. You'll still get talent, but the shortage will still be much worse and you'll end up lowering your requirements.
      • patrickaljord 10y ago
        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.
• kartan 10y ago
  Spanish here. I moved to Sweden, I prefer the business culture here. Less non paid extra hours. More respect from managers. Better pay. Etc. They rant about not being able to use more people as part time slaves. It's a problem of using industrial business mentality in the high tech industry. They care only for reducing salaries and getting long hours with no respect for the developers that are expected to be code monkeys. So yes, they don't find as a big supply as they want.
• muse900 10y ago
  Greek here, living and working abroad. Spain is doing a bit better than Greece but its on the same boat. When I speak with friends back home, I do get a feeling that they don't want to work. Is it because they are lazy? part of me wants to say yes. I can't ignore the fact that the working conditions are awful. Salaries are quite low compared to the rest of Europe, an employer has full control over you, and can fire you any time. An employer won't ever promote you. They will just hold you as long as they can and then they will just hire someone else for less money. Also when you have internet and so much information avaialble to you, and you can see what are the working conditions in other Countries it kinda makes you sad. I live in London, and tbh there have been many times that I've been thinking what am I doing here. London is quite expensive and the salaries are not as high compared to rent, food etc (at least for developers). Now I just made this comment in order to give an overview of whats going on to a country that is on the same boat as Spain.
  • themartorana 10y ago
    Being undervalued in a "global" economy can be way unmotivating (especially the Euro economy where Germany expects Greece to operate in the same currency and economy, but then workers in Greece make far less than their German counterparts).
  • inoop 10y ago
    > I can't ignore the fact that the working conditions are awful one of the great things about the EU is that people can freely move inside it and work wherever they want. Nothing is stopping your friends from doing what you did - seek employment elsewhere. At the same time, if Greek and Spanish companies want to survive they'll have to learn to adapt to the new order and treat their people better, or perish.
    • nommm-nommm 10y ago
      Not everyone is 20 years old with no roots and can pick up and relocate to another country where they might not even speak the language.
    • noinsight 10y ago
• pvaldes 10y ago
  The "you need more skills" issue is a false problem. Is just that the bad guys have kidnapped, blocked for years, or freeze, most of the good jobs. This is a mediocrazy and they need to raise a lot of walls for keeping off the brigther people who give them a bad image by comparison. And all is carefully planned to keep this people unemployed also for the next four years. Requisites to be a minister in Spain?. Speaking english? not necessary. Holding any sort of degree of PhD? Not necessary. Years of experience working for private companies?. Not necessary, but it helps. If you helped a big company to contaminate a bay for example, you could be even be promoted as the next environment minister. Requisites for the rest of guys for a normal job?. A hamster wheel. Well, first of all you need to be fluent in three or four languages, just because maybe one time a year, or once in ten years, you could need to speak with a foreigner; and for some reason you can't just raise a phone and hire a professional translator for this special day. You will burn in hell if you dare to suggest your boss this logic and simple solution. Then you need to have a degree, a PhD, and also a few masters, and being able to hypnotize a goat in less than five minutes, and work for free for some years, and ... Job market in Spain is a question of kinship and means being promoted directly in lots of cases... or never.
  • throwawaymaroon 10y ago
    >This is a mediocrazy That's an absolutely lovely, totally brilliant and apt term, that is unfortunately perhaps over-the-top in a way that will turn people off. I'm vaguely asking permission to steal it.
  • wallflower 10y ago
    > 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?
    • pvaldes 10y ago
      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 for the public, just because you are "an subhuman stubborn charnego". If you born in Euskadi and then go to Barcelona for work, you need to be able to speak fluently four languages (spanish, english, vasque and catalan) just to start talking about having a job. If this guy move to Galicia later, will need to learn the Galizian language also. Oh, If your foreign language in the middle school was french, and a lot of spanish people still studied french in this generation, you will not graduate unless you speak French. If you want as adult to work for a german company you will need a little deutsch of course to be competitive in the job interview. But the worst stupid thing is that most of the time to be fluent or not is not necessary at all for the job because some kind of problems can be solved in any language and because human brain can fill the communication gaps easily. Is just that is trendy to ask for this. For some jobs you will need to be "fluent" also in more languages: C, Ruby, Java, Python... Don't worry. They still will say that you are "unskilled" and will want to pay you in peanuts.
• BjoernKW 10y ago
  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?
  • vacri 10y ago
    Argentines speak fluent Spanish, and will be able to understand complex and subtle business requirements presented in Spanish.
    • BjoernKW 10y ago
      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.
• calgoo 10y ago
  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% < 30K & 30% < 35K. 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, you might get into the higher bracket. If you dont, and for example only have a University degree, then expect to start between 15K and 25K (unless from one of the known private schools, in which case you can normally jump to the next bracket). From what I know, the two places to look are Madrid and Barcelona, but Madrid normally list almost double the amount of jobs that Barcelona does (mainly because a lot of headquarters are located there). Another important thing that I have notices is that its a lot harder to climb internally in companies here. It depends if the company has American business culture or Spanish (but sometimes it tries to be American but its run in a Spanish way). This is in general over all businesses. My wife is currently working at a call-center and have co-workers who have been in that position for over 10 years. There are basically no way to get promoted, unless you get lucky and someone retires or leaves. I have seen this everywhere, basically no way to really grow, no incentives to grow, an over educated workforce, where the cashier in the supermarket has a masters degree in childcare or similar. There is a saying here, where they call people "mil eurista" meaning thousand euroist more less. The amount of the working population that earn around 1000e a month is quite high but its something thats accepted here basically. People are not happy about it, but "At least I got a job" attitudes are everywhere. A last thing, take care regarding any unemployment numbers that appear during the month of May, as thats basically when the tourist season starts. That alone probably employs over 1,000,000 workers during the summer months.
  • NetStrikeForce 10y ago
    Being a mileurista was a concern before 2008. Now it would be a blessing for many people.
    • calgoo 10y ago
      Yes true, but I think it applies, but for the people earning 2K before 2008...
• mikerichards 10y ago
  So Spain isn't Germany, but I'm curious why even in the midwest (St. Louis no less), senior developers easily command $120k+. But I guess this also goes to the point why SV is only playing "normal" senior developers $150k/yr? Unless you're really digging the Bay Area lifestyle (or "I'll get my chance in the next cool startup), why even bother.
• forthefuture 10y ago
  It looks like Spain has almost reached the US' rate of economic non-participation. http://www.ine.es/en/prensa/epa_prensa_en.htm http://www.ine.es/en/prensa/epa_prensa_en.htm
• smsm42 10y ago
  So, if they don't have enough qualified workers, why don't they start creating on-the-job training programs? I understand there's risk in such investment (i.e., you train a person and then they leave for a higher salary) but there are many ways to counter it. Is there something like that happening in Spain? If not, why?
• franciscop 10y ago
  Spanish dev here. I created with some friends the most active Maker group in Spain [1]. We won contests like Hyperloop's, NASA's SpaceApps (once winners, twice finalists), making robot competitions [2], teaching to everyone, etc. A couple of days ago we were talking about who would continue it, since ALL of us are leaving the country for different reasons. So I can say that I know what it means that skilled workers are leaving first hand. Now I reverse the question, why would we stay? Spain has some great things, such as weather, food and party, but it's horrible in any tech-related industry. For instance, I did a couple of internships to help with my University credits and earn some money. I got paid per month almost the same that I'm getting paid now every couple of days working as an US contractor. Not only that, now I'm doing things that I really love, challenging but rewarding, collaborating with the best people I know and living wherever I want. We made https://www.angularattack.com/ https://www.angularattack.com/ , now we're launching a new one way better (not yet public though) and I'm helping doing two websites for two of the biggest Venture Capital firms in USA. Now tell me, why should I go back to working 9-5 for some company that doesn't care at all about developers and treat us as code monkeys, for peanuts and in horrible conditions? I had a horrible chair for example but there was "no budget" for a better one. It's a pity because the country gets worse, but it's also good since the hard working Spaniards get the best -- even if it has to be outside. I am lucky I can visit my sister in UK and my friends in Japan, Sweden, Germany and USA :) [1] http://makersupv.com/ http://makersupv.com/ [2] https://orchallenge.es/ https://orchallenge.es/
  • imaginenore 10y ago
    Same shit in Italy and the Netherlands. I get with very low offers, recruiters are shocked that I bill $100-150 per hour.
    • franciscop 10y ago
      Actually I think that my experience in Spain has set me back as I asked for way lower compensation than I realize now that I could be earning as it just seemed crazy. I remember when they asked me about "what is your hourly rate?" the first time, I said a number while shaking as it was beyond my dreams and now I realize it's totally pennies compared to the money they are probably making out of my work. Now I know for the future though (:
• Animats 10y ago
  That's what the US has done. There are lots of available workers in the US with non-salable skills.
• SixSigma 10y ago
  The agriculture sector employs many North African illegal immigrants. Visit the greenhouses of Almeria and see what happens when you take your camera from its bag.
  • patrickaljord 10y ago
    The do so because local people don't want to do these jobs.
    • SixSigma 10y ago
      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.
      • patrickaljord 10y ago
        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.
        • SixSigma 10y ago
          The EU restricts agricultural imports, fixes prices and pays out massive subsidy for non-production via the CAP. Perhaps market manipulation by the EU should be reassessed if the consequence is widespread and necessary use of illegal labour by some of the richest farmers in Europe. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/atyourservice/en/displayFtu.html?ftuId=FTU_5.2.1.html http://www.europarl.europa.eu/atyourservice/en/displayFtu.ht... Objectives Article 39 TFEU sets out the specific objectives of the CAP: 1 to increase agricultural productivity by promoting technical progress and ensuring the optimum use of the factors of production, in particular labour; 2 to ensure a fair standard of living for farmers; 3 to stabilise markets; 4 to ensure the availability of supplies; 5 to ensure reasonable prices for consumers.
• Oletros 10y ago
  I've seen offer for senior .NET developers for 20.000€/year before taxes and going through outsourcing companies. 20.000/year is 15.000/year after taxes.
• tluyben2 10y ago
  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 trying; we have been trying for at least 5 years. In my experience it has nothing to do with payment. This is just limited to Andalusia ofcourse; my colleague says it's better up north, however some people I met from other parts and who have companies complain about the same thing. Then another issue with the country is the extremely hard time you have in hiring someone ; paperwork, you cannot fire them even if they are crap etc. And the paperwork to get grants for hiring people (which are there) is incredible. We have a company in PT as well and it's quite different there. The gov needs to take their finger out. Luckily we have a very helpful (Spanish) mayor who loves entrepreneurs and helps us with whatever, but he also shakes his head when talking about hiring people locally.
  • Oletros 10y ago
    > you cannot fire them even if they are crap etc. I highly doubt that, it has not been easier to fire someone in Spain since the latests reforms. Not taking into account that there is always a period were the employer and the employee can cancel the contracts without any duty. Normally 6 months
    • tluyben2 10y ago
      When were those because I was discussing this 'recently' with my lawyer on the coast? Yes the 6 months is true and I compare it with NL where firing is also hard but it's very straighforward how it works. Here I haven't been able to get it explained in that fashion. So far people look at us with pity when we talk about hiring people legally. Note; we are a tiny company.
      • Oletros 10y ago
        Basically you can fire anyone when you want. If the cause is justified you pay 10 day for year worked, if it is not justified you pay 20
• jlg23 10y ago
  What I am missing in the article and in all discussions here is: Why not pro-actively train people? Looking 2 months for someone with some kind of certification for "agile" is already a fourth of the time required to train someone who is already working for the client (numbers taken from the article). If one is willing to pay 220k and cannot find anyone while most job offers (according to comments here) max out at 36k, make a deal with a current employee: "We pay for training, after 2 years you get a bonus of 72k and we double your salary." Company does not make a loss even if the dev leaves after 2 years, it has built the experience in-house and it had 16 months to disseminate the newly acquired knowledge to other employees. The mindset that people must already have knowledge about some specific technology and universities accommodating employers there is exactly why we have so many code monkeys who don't know anything about CS finishing with a degree in CS who, after a few years, realize that their knowledge is basically worthless because the IT world has moved on and other languages or stacks are now en vogue.
• rcarmo 10y ago
  I've been pinged by recruiters for positions in Spain pretty much every week, either multinationals who need to grow their presence or local corps looking for experts. Cost of living is about the same as here in Portugal, but my previous experience with local execs makes me leery of those opportunities.
• knocte 10y ago
  > Pimentel’s client asked him for list of candidates trained in “Agile” project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain. > But such people are thin on the ground in Spain. It takes at least eight months for an experienced software developer to earn an Agile qualification and they also need the ability to deal with senior executives, limiting the pool of people who could potentially fill the roles. That part of the article is hilarious, not only because 200K euros is completely made up and untrue (by far surpasses best salaries in other more decent countries), but because of the Agile qualification mention. Do we have Agile certifications now? What a load of bullshit. The only truth in the article is this: > Spanish executives are less-skilled than their competitors in Germany, France or Italy, according to a study of 11 European countries. Only Greece came out worse. And that's the reason why the executives don't find workforce. Being less-skilled means they don't value the engineering profession up to the required level to compromise and give good salaries. (Spanish dev here --working abroad obviously--.)
  • wastedhours 10y ago
    200,000 euros is possible for what's essentially a contract digital transformation consultant, and there are agile qualifications on offer - and when you're dealing with the enterprise, they're often more valued than experience.
    • tluyben2 10y ago
      It is possible, but that's a very niche market. When you need people who can deal with multiple layers, including senior execs, and run tech teams, you are usually not looking for developers anyway. I don't find it very strange there is a shortage of those; I think you'll find that in most countries. It depends on the exact job description as this is all a bit vague though.
      • riprowan 10y ago
        Agreed. I think it's entirely possible that they cannot easily find the skill set they need at 200000€/yr and it's simply that the tech writer did a poor job of communicating the job requirements.
• reledi 10y ago
  There's a lot of talented Spaniards out there. I know because I can proudly say many of them are my teammates. Did I mention we are hiring? Clojure, Ruby, Data. https://www.fundingcircle.com/uk/careers/ https://www.fundingcircle.com/uk/careers/
• p0nce 10y ago
  When you are willing to hire women, older people and provide adequate salaries (dare I say work conditions), suddenly there isn't so much tech shortage.
  • ci5er 10y ago
    Couldn't 100% of your claim be solved with just the salary variable? What evidence do you have that old+female+cheap people are not being considered as part of the option matrix?
    • p0nce 10y ago
      No only anecdotal data that I hear again and again. Likewise, where is the avidence about the tech shortage?
• fiatjaf 10y ago
  > From software developers and mathematical modelers to geriatric nurses and care workers, a mismatch in qualifications means companies are struggling to fill posts, even though the unemployment rate at 20.4 percent is the second-highest in Europe. This is the result of years of malinvestiment in human capital. The Austrian Theory of Business Cycles explain.
• fiatjaf 10y ago
  At the same time, I bet there are a lot of Spaniards getting majors on philosophy and other weed-smoking specialties.
• joeyspn 10y ago
  It's a catch 22 1 - Spanish Universities not in tune with the market reality, pouring out thousands of unemployed people into the market... 2 - Graduates living in a bubble... 99% not wanting to move their asses and thinking that the academic degree is all they need. Get a crappy job or move to another country. Let others create the jobs... 3 - Zero entrepreneurial spirit and risk aversion, making starting up a remote to non-existing option. Blame it on the executives of your crappy company, and obviously, the government... 4 - Gov not having a clue about scientific research, innovation and entrepreneurship, with policies that fail to build a proper ecosystem for startups, and also fail to connect academic and industry worlds (I.e: Silicon Valley <-> Stanford). 5 - Back to 1
  • internaut 10y ago
    You're getting the downvote brigade but you're right. It's a many faceted problem with plenty of blame to be shared around. There are almost zero people at the best colleges and universities in Europe who want to start a new company. I remember trying to convince about a dozen people to start a bitcoin exchange several years ago when it was in the single digits. No go. We could have fucked up almost everything and still been millionaires. I did okay but we would have done much better working together instead of looking for 'a good job'. > Graduates living in a bubble... 99% not wanting to move their asses and thinking that the academic degree is all they need. Get a crappy job or move to another country. Whole lot of that going around. They don't realize they will be living in their city living hand to mouth for the rest of their lives. There is no big break coming for them. The smarter ones move, but the core problem is entrepreneurial spirit.
  • SEJeff 10y ago
    And this honestly seems to be common across much of Europe, as an American, why is this? I get it that America is not perfect (we're messed up in plenty of ways), but we do have a very entrepreneurial mindset as a society. Why is so much of Europe risk adverse? It isn't that Europe doesn't have tech workers as good or better than the US, I work with a ton of brilliant Europeans . I just can't get why the Facebooks, the Googles, the Microsofts, the Apples, etc are so US centric. I'm clearly missing something obvious and am curious if you happen to understand why that is. Granted I've only been to maybe 6-7 countries in the EU and Berlin seemed to be the most startup friendly of the cities I've visited, but it still blows my mind why there aren't more successful startups from Europe.
• known 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
• njloof 10y ago
  One of my first jobs (in the US) had a great strategy for getting low cost talent: 1. Hire cheap 2. Train on the job 3. Lock in your investment with a multi-year employment contract, broken down into options to "not renew" the contract at 6-month, then 12-month, intervals. Worked great, they got cheap talent and a means to weed people out, and I got valuable training I used for the next 15 years.
• mtrn 10y ago
  A company once flew me to Madrid for an interview. Unfortunately, I cannot understand Spanish, but the receptionist at the hotel seemed to mumble to a friend: look they are flying people here, but our people are unemployed. It seemed a bit crazy for me as well, since I was unsure, if my person and skills justified that kind of effort. The interview went fine and I think I was offered something around 30k, which was below my current wage in another (non-capital) European city, so I had to decline, although I loved Madrid and the team seemed really nice.
• ValerieY 10y ago
  My best friend lives in Spain. From what I was told, part of the problem is the fact that employers have too many requests, while not offering much in terms of payment and advantages. A lot of them hope to hire immigrants for cheap; this is quite a paradox given the percentage of Spain's population which is nationalistic.
• alienjr 10y ago
  There was a Polish composer, writer and politician Stefan Kisielewski who used to say: "Socialism is a system which bravely fights problems that are not known in any other system". That describes situation of Spain perfectly.
  • pvaldes 10y ago
    Nice cliche. That describes the situation perfectly, except by the small fact that Socialism parties do not rule in Spain since a lot of years. We have the equivalent to the Conservative Party, that... ehem, aren't exactly "socialists".
• SFJulie 10y ago
  It means the expectation of the demand (companies) are not matching what the market provides. Having to look for a job in Europa, I dare say most job offers are laughable. C#, PHP and java are MODERN technologies that no one should be scared of. Windev is a very good tool. Mysql and mssql are the only two worthy databases. Free software is a free as a bier. AGILE is SOOO complex...it has to be officiated religiously like ITIL or ISO norms. They want software devs on the market already proefficient in proprietary/tricky technologies, and no one understand why jobless persons with so much time cannot buy these 10K€ tools and use their worthless time in self formation. And salary expectation are low : a coder MUST not be paid more than any manager. Even the manager responsible for the cleaning team of 500m² office with a headcount of 2. They just have irrealistic expectations. That's all folks.
• heisenbit 10y ago
  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.
• internaut 10y ago
  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.
• vonnik 10y ago
  The skills gap is very real in America, too. It can be hard to find the people you need. And many of the folks who are out of work don't fit the bill. There are specific training programs, sponsored by large companies, that are trying to give post-high-school trainees the right vocational skills... (Can't remember the names atm!)
• ssjohal 10y ago
  So EU was merely a clever plan by stronger economies to suck brains out of struggling economies?
  • fwn 10y ago
    I guess a good rule of thumb is: If you can pack what you think is the motivation for such a big and time intensive project as the EU into one tweet, it's probably far from the truth.