5 ms·

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 cra

by gordaco 10y ago

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.

Qantourisc 10y ago
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.)
- chris11 10y ago
  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.
- gordaco 10y ago
  It's not that they are bad languages, it's that they are the ones that everyone knows, so I don't believe that there are open positions on those languages that nobody wants, unless the money is obscenely low (which it often is).
  - toyg 10y ago
    > they are the ones that everyone knows, Man, how things change. I remember times when most developers would derisively laugh off Python's indentation. Back in 2006, Python jobs were so few and far between, you'd struggle to get paid to work with it. 10 years later, "everybody" works with it, so apparently you struggle to get paid a decent amount. Why can't I ever find a niche I like and paying well? :(
    - ionforce 10y ago
      Do you like functional programming? That's a sector that's poppin.
      - rebeccaskinner 10y ago
        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 find were jobs that ostensibly wanted to hire Clojure and Scala devs, but really 90% of the job would be maintaining a bunch of legacy enterprise architecturey Java with just enough FP to try to attract people into the positions.
        dozzie 10y ago
        Become a sysadmin that writes tools (which is more like old-school system programmer, the one who wrote grep and syslog and init and bash and awk). Since you're nominally a sysadmin, nobody will look at your workbench to check if you're using "kosher" languages, so you're free to use whatever makes sense to solve a problem (hint: not always a functional language). Been there, done that, been happy with the approach.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  I find it hard to find it hard to find remote jobs in the EU for Python anyway. There are a lot of shops depending on it (Django for instance) in the northern countries but they basically want you to sit in an office there. For Java (PHP, ... ) jobs are far easier to get remotely.
Zardoz84 10y ago
Java and Visual BASIC 6
ChuckMcM 10y ago
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 workers, and felt if it raised its prices no one would shop there. The next closest store was 20 miles away. So people with the choice of buying something locally for 10 to 15% more than buying it remotely, it would seem would rather drive the 40 miles to get what ever it was they were looking for. So how do economies get into these inversions? Is it globalization? is it an expectation of price or value? Is it the difference between economic action versus values? So if Spain did pay a market wage what would impact be on other costs? Who do those companies sell to? In market? Out of market?
- jacquesm 10y ago
  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.
- omegant 10y ago
  I'd say it is multidimensional problem. It's true there is a very high number of unskilled workers that are the ones that were left behind after the construction bubble. Their skills are in construction mainly and it's difficult for them to find a job. But the low wages in skilled job are a prebubble problem. In fact I think they are due to a "titulitis". People (by traditional family request) needs to have a university tittle, and no real expert technician studies (really skilled electrician, plumbers, woodworkers, etc..) like in other countries like Germany were they are well respected and with high wages. In fact the entry wage to construction worker was maybe double to the one any university graduate had. It was not uncommon for a construction unskilled worker to make in excess of 3000€/month while a fresh law or economy graduate with English and a Master couldn't find anything better than 1000€/month. Quite a shame and an inverted market. Of course now with the bubble over, the 3000€ wages in construction are over, but the 1000€ wage for people with a title remains. It's true that Spanish company owners don't expect that someone with a title will be able to add value behind the 1000€. I've been thinking why for quite sometime, one of the reasons is that most Spanish entrepreneurs used to be self-made, rising their business from the bottom with little formal education. So they didn't find that that education was truly valuable. Also the oversupply of graduates already before the bubble, made finding someone for the job easy. Another reason is that most Spanish people can rely on the family network so it was very rare to see someone moving to another city to find a Job, they rather stick to a low pay and stay close to family and friends. This has changed with the crisis, with people people with studies or experience emigrating to the EU and south America mainly. I do think that Spanish people that goes abroad to work is mostly as good as the other European or American counterparts, hard-working and well prepared. But it's also true in Spain that a lot of people that is not interested in moving, are also not interested in making an effort in their jobs. I can say this of myself, I work as an airline pilot, and certainly wages are much higher in the middle east or asia. But I'm not interested in earning more just to be stranded in the middle of the dessert or in a megalopolis. I'd rather stay here where quality of life is very high even with a lower wage (family, friends, nature, culture, etc... are just 10 min away with awesome food and nightlife). For example one of my best friends is what you'll call a 10x programmer, is the star programmer and architect in a tour operator, he has built mostly alone and from scratch the core of a hotel reservation company with sales figures close to one billion €. He is the one who is called to put down fires or to handle difficult projects. He is very happy making around 100k€, when I'm quite sure he could be making 5x that in SV, and he is the best paid programmer in his company. I know a number of business owners that complain of being unable to find people willing to do the work, it's true that the initial wage will not be very high, but usually are very specific jobs that need learning. And this business are interested in paying better once they have the skills. This includes electricians, beauty parlour worker, car mechanic, boat mechanic (I´m talking just positions I´ve learned are needed this last year). They find that workers are not interested in learning or working hard, just ask for what is the payment the first day, and they don't even know how to do the job!. Even people desperate are not willing to make the effort to learn a new skill or hard work, because most of them have the family that supports them. Even my friend complains that a high percent of his programmers are not interested in improving or learning new things. In Spain most people want to be civil servants, entrepreneurship is something that just recently has started receiving some recognition. Before entrepreneurs were seen as just bosses that want to take profit of people, some kind of villain. That's why I'm not very bullish of the universal wage as an "universal" thing. You see that a high percentage of people is not interested in working any more once they are able to have enough money to live. We have this institutional envy in Spain were successful people (business or professionals) are seen as cheaters no matter what. You can not make money working hard, just cheating or stealing, so people don't even try. Don't take me wrong, there is very hard working people here, but they do it as their responsibility, because they like their job well done, even when they are poorly paid. Usually no as a way to improve their conditions or earn more. In Spain living from the public money is for some like an art. Working in "b" jobs that are not registered so they can maintain the government help, or working just enough to have the next 6 months of unemployment, or trying to obtain a health disability (when they are fine). With the crisis all this went down, but still... You also have to think that that as we had the Euro and we couldn't devalue the currency to keep up with the crisis, they had to devalue the whole country, taking most wages and prices a 15 to 20% down over 6 years. This has been very very painful to the economy, but I don't see they had other way to save the Spanish economy. I must say that my experience is in Mallorca island and Madrid where the crisis has been melower than in the rest of Spain due to the tourism for example. There are towns in the middle of the peninsula, where unemployment is dramatic an nothing has come to replace construction even after all this time. It's a complex problem both at the supply and the demand side. Companies don't value properly good workers, and also workers don't see their job as something to nurture, but as an inconvenience and the management as oppressors.
tptacek 10y ago
1. cárnicas is an awesome term for what native English markets would call a "body shop". 2. You're probably looking more for the term "meat market" than for "butcher". Unless, is part of the implication that a cárnicas somehow chops up the time of a bunch of FTE's?
- x0x0 10y ago
  ps -- in english, meat market colloquially means a bar where young people go to get drunk and meet one night stands. Stereotypically frat boys w/ popped collars and sorority sisters in miniskirts. Before gordaco uses that in conversation, I thought I'd share...
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Also true! I just wondered if that was closer to the spirit of the Spanish term. It would be funny if it wasn't, and they really were trying to evoke people being cut up by butchers.
    - x0x0 10y ago
      It's super funny to me but unfortunately american english has picked a different meaning already. I just had an image of him dropping that into conversation with some Americans and things being badly misunderstood...
x0x0 10y ago
If there's lots of local workers that can't or won't leave, is there opportunities to run outsourcing firms? It sounds like a $50k euro salary would allow you to cherry pick devs, or am I wrong?
- collyw 10y ago
  They ought to be able to do that but most companies have dumb coding challenges and the usual crap hiring procedures.

by gordaco 10y ago

Qantourisc 10y ago

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.)

chris11 10y ago
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.
gordaco 10y ago
It's not that they are bad languages, it's that they are the ones that everyone knows, so I don't believe that there are open positions on those languages that nobody wants, unless the money is obscenely low (which it often is).
- toyg 10y ago
  > they are the ones that everyone knows, Man, how things change. I remember times when most developers would derisively laugh off Python's indentation. Back in 2006, Python jobs were so few and far between, you'd struggle to get paid to work with it. 10 years later, "everybody" works with it, so apparently you struggle to get paid a decent amount. Why can't I ever find a niche I like and paying well? :(
  - ionforce 10y ago
    Do you like functional programming? That's a sector that's poppin.
    - rebeccaskinner 10y ago
      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 find were jobs that ostensibly wanted to hire Clojure and Scala devs, but really 90% of the job would be maintaining a bunch of legacy enterprise architecturey Java with just enough FP to try to attract people into the positions.
      - dozzie 10y ago
        Become a sysadmin that writes tools (which is more like old-school system programmer, the one who wrote grep and syslog and init and bash and awk). Since you're nominally a sysadmin, nobody will look at your workbench to check if you're using "kosher" languages, so you're free to use whatever makes sense to solve a problem (hint: not always a functional language). Been there, done that, been happy with the approach.
tluyben2 10y ago
I find it hard to find it hard to find remote jobs in the EU for Python anyway. There are a lot of shops depending on it (Django for instance) in the northern countries but they basically want you to sit in an office there. For Java (PHP, ... ) jobs are far easier to get remotely.

Zardoz84 10y ago

Java and Visual BASIC 6

ChuckMcM 10y ago

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 workers, and felt if it raised its prices no one would shop there. The next closest store was 20 miles away. So people with the choice of buying something locally for 10 to 15% more than buying it remotely, it would seem would rather drive the 40 miles to get what ever it was they were looking for. So how do economies get into these inversions? Is it globalization? is it an expectation of price or value? Is it the difference between economic action versus values? So if Spain did pay a market wage what would impact be on other costs? Who do those companies sell to? In market? Out of market?

jacquesm 10y ago
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.
omegant 10y ago
I'd say it is multidimensional problem. It's true there is a very high number of unskilled workers that are the ones that were left behind after the construction bubble. Their skills are in construction mainly and it's difficult for them to find a job. But the low wages in skilled job are a prebubble problem. In fact I think they are due to a "titulitis". People (by traditional family request) needs to have a university tittle, and no real expert technician studies (really skilled electrician, plumbers, woodworkers, etc..) like in other countries like Germany were they are well respected and with high wages. In fact the entry wage to construction worker was maybe double to the one any university graduate had. It was not uncommon for a construction unskilled worker to make in excess of 3000€/month while a fresh law or economy graduate with English and a Master couldn't find anything better than 1000€/month. Quite a shame and an inverted market. Of course now with the bubble over, the 3000€ wages in construction are over, but the 1000€ wage for people with a title remains. It's true that Spanish company owners don't expect that someone with a title will be able to add value behind the 1000€. I've been thinking why for quite sometime, one of the reasons is that most Spanish entrepreneurs used to be self-made, rising their business from the bottom with little formal education. So they didn't find that that education was truly valuable. Also the oversupply of graduates already before the bubble, made finding someone for the job easy. Another reason is that most Spanish people can rely on the family network so it was very rare to see someone moving to another city to find a Job, they rather stick to a low pay and stay close to family and friends. This has changed with the crisis, with people people with studies or experience emigrating to the EU and south America mainly. I do think that Spanish people that goes abroad to work is mostly as good as the other European or American counterparts, hard-working and well prepared. But it's also true in Spain that a lot of people that is not interested in moving, are also not interested in making an effort in their jobs. I can say this of myself, I work as an airline pilot, and certainly wages are much higher in the middle east or asia. But I'm not interested in earning more just to be stranded in the middle of the dessert or in a megalopolis. I'd rather stay here where quality of life is very high even with a lower wage (family, friends, nature, culture, etc... are just 10 min away with awesome food and nightlife). For example one of my best friends is what you'll call a 10x programmer, is the star programmer and architect in a tour operator, he has built mostly alone and from scratch the core of a hotel reservation company with sales figures close to one billion €. He is the one who is called to put down fires or to handle difficult projects. He is very happy making around 100k€, when I'm quite sure he could be making 5x that in SV, and he is the best paid programmer in his company. I know a number of business owners that complain of being unable to find people willing to do the work, it's true that the initial wage will not be very high, but usually are very specific jobs that need learning. And this business are interested in paying better once they have the skills. This includes electricians, beauty parlour worker, car mechanic, boat mechanic (I´m talking just positions I´ve learned are needed this last year). They find that workers are not interested in learning or working hard, just ask for what is the payment the first day, and they don't even know how to do the job!. Even people desperate are not willing to make the effort to learn a new skill or hard work, because most of them have the family that supports them. Even my friend complains that a high percent of his programmers are not interested in improving or learning new things. In Spain most people want to be civil servants, entrepreneurship is something that just recently has started receiving some recognition. Before entrepreneurs were seen as just bosses that want to take profit of people, some kind of villain. That's why I'm not very bullish of the universal wage as an "universal" thing. You see that a high percentage of people is not interested in working any more once they are able to have enough money to live. We have this institutional envy in Spain were successful people (business or professionals) are seen as cheaters no matter what. You can not make money working hard, just cheating or stealing, so people don't even try. Don't take me wrong, there is very hard working people here, but they do it as their responsibility, because they like their job well done, even when they are poorly paid. Usually no as a way to improve their conditions or earn more. In Spain living from the public money is for some like an art. Working in "b" jobs that are not registered so they can maintain the government help, or working just enough to have the next 6 months of unemployment, or trying to obtain a health disability (when they are fine). With the crisis all this went down, but still... You also have to think that that as we had the Euro and we couldn't devalue the currency to keep up with the crisis, they had to devalue the whole country, taking most wages and prices a 15 to 20% down over 6 years. This has been very very painful to the economy, but I don't see they had other way to save the Spanish economy. I must say that my experience is in Mallorca island and Madrid where the crisis has been melower than in the rest of Spain due to the tourism for example. There are towns in the middle of the peninsula, where unemployment is dramatic an nothing has come to replace construction even after all this time. It's a complex problem both at the supply and the demand side. Companies don't value properly good workers, and also workers don't see their job as something to nurture, but as an inconvenience and the management as oppressors.

tptacek 10y ago

1. cárnicas is an awesome term for what native English markets would call a "body shop". 2. You're probably looking more for the term "meat market" than for "butcher". Unless, is part of the implication that a cárnicas somehow chops up the time of a bunch of FTE's?

x0x0 10y ago
ps -- in english, meat market colloquially means a bar where young people go to get drunk and meet one night stands. Stereotypically frat boys w/ popped collars and sorority sisters in miniskirts. Before gordaco uses that in conversation, I thought I'd share...
- tptacek 10y ago
  Also true! I just wondered if that was closer to the spirit of the Spanish term. It would be funny if it wasn't, and they really were trying to evoke people being cut up by butchers.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    It's super funny to me but unfortunately american english has picked a different meaning already. I just had an image of him dropping that into conversation with some Americans and things being badly misunderstood...

x0x0 10y ago

If there's lots of local workers that can't or won't leave, is there opportunities to run outsourcing firms? It sounds like a $50k euro salary would allow you to cherry pick devs, or am I wrong?

collyw 10y ago
They ought to be able to do that but most companies have dumb coding challenges and the usual crap hiring procedures.