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In Europe, it was nothing like the US. In the UK, which was nowhere as bad as Spain or Italy, programmers were making £17k/year pre-08 outside London. IT was j

In Europe, it was nothing like the US. In the UK, which was nowhere as bad as Spain or Italy, programmers were making £17k/year pre-08 outside London. IT was just a cost base, minimized at all costs, the main job for programmers was academia, most people working in companies were hired out of high school. A job in IT or even a CS degree was career suicide, employment rates were one of the lowest of any degree and if you got a job you were just a cost. It is hilarious to see the change. Companies that have tried to re-sell themselves as tech companies when ten years ago all their "IT" staff were just working on managed services. The reason why this is relevant is because most of the change recently has been spillover from the US. If that spillover stops, there are no jobs domestically, you are a mechanic living in a horse-drawn society. The advantage the US has is compounding rapidly.

sirsinsalot 3y ago
Not sure this is true. I started contracting in the UK as a programmer in 2001, no qualifications, a high school drop out. Outside London (the north) I could make £300 a day back then pretty steady. Never been short of work for long, always contracted. Not needed my CV for 15 years at this point and £800-£900 a day is common amongst peers. My story also doesn't feel unusual amongst people I work with. Subjective account, but I've personally only felt the curve going up. Perhaps I'll have my shock one day.
- skippyboxedhero 3y ago
  Most aren't making £300/day today. Average salary is probably less than half that.
throw__away7391 3y ago
I've spend the past 7 years living in about 25 or so countries around the world and one thing that really surprised is how far most of the world is behind the US in terms of business digitalization at a process level. You don't necessarily notice it at first as a visitor because these companies all have websites and apps and whatnot, many of which are nicer than their US counterparts, but these are often just a superficial gloss and fundamentally there's a lot more companies either literally paper driven or who have created a digital copy of the same paper process they've been using for decades and called it a day without really changing anything at all. Japan in particular stood out because I'd always thought of it as the ultra futuristic land of robots, but a lot of simple tasks I'd expect to do on an app or website involve sending a fax or an in-person visit. This type of approach doesn't add much value to the business. They still employee the same people doing the same work to accomplish the same result in the same amount of time, but now they need to pay a programmer as well. Again, we had this problem in the US in the 90s, people would make jokes about how tech had promised a "paperless office" but they had more paper than ever--but that was only because the old dudes working back then insisted on printing every damn thing they received digitally! So much work at that time used to go into making printer friendly versions of every piece of information, experience with Crystal Reports was always an important box to tick on any job application. I do wonder how willing EU countries would be to do this though, with an older population and a lot more sensitivity to preserving jobs at any cost.
- skippyboxedhero 3y ago
  Yes, people worrying about AI when the gain from computers still isn't really here yet. In Europe, there is still a massive reluctance to hire programmers. So most large corporates/governments are buying from Oracle or SAP, get in an Indian contractor to implement, it inevitably goes wrong, and then they say how unreasonably expensive it all is...and it would be even more expensive if they hired onshore. And then you talk to the person who is managing the contract for the purchaser...struggles with Excel, struggles with basic tasks in Windows...I am sure this happens in the US too btw, but it is just unreasonably extreme in Europe. The dominance of SAP in particular is an indication that something is very wrong with enterprise software.
wkat4242 3y ago
You didn't do any IT work in the late 90s I guess? During the dotcom boom and Y2K hype it was major money. I was only starting so I didn't make a lot but every job came with a company car. They were screaming for people. There was a bit of a lull pre crisis but even in 2008 I wrote custom callcenter integrations and it was really good money. About 50k euro plus car. And this was in Holland, nothing like London kind of money.

sirsinsalot 3y ago

Not sure this is true. I started contracting in the UK as a programmer in 2001, no qualifications, a high school drop out. Outside London (the north) I could make £300 a day back then pretty steady. Never been short of work for long, always contracted. Not needed my CV for 15 years at this point and £800-£900 a day is common amongst peers. My story also doesn't feel unusual amongst people I work with. Subjective account, but I've personally only felt the curve going up. Perhaps I'll have my shock one day.

skippyboxedhero 3y ago
Most aren't making £300/day today. Average salary is probably less than half that.

throw__away7391 3y ago

I've spend the past 7 years living in about 25 or so countries around the world and one thing that really surprised is how far most of the world is behind the US in terms of business digitalization at a process level. You don't necessarily notice it at first as a visitor because these companies all have websites and apps and whatnot, many of which are nicer than their US counterparts, but these are often just a superficial gloss and fundamentally there's a lot more companies either literally paper driven or who have created a digital copy of the same paper process they've been using for decades and called it a day without really changing anything at all. Japan in particular stood out because I'd always thought of it as the ultra futuristic land of robots, but a lot of simple tasks I'd expect to do on an app or website involve sending a fax or an in-person visit. This type of approach doesn't add much value to the business. They still employee the same people doing the same work to accomplish the same result in the same amount of time, but now they need to pay a programmer as well. Again, we had this problem in the US in the 90s, people would make jokes about how tech had promised a "paperless office" but they had more paper than ever--but that was only because the old dudes working back then insisted on printing every damn thing they received digitally! So much work at that time used to go into making printer friendly versions of every piece of information, experience with Crystal Reports was always an important box to tick on any job application. I do wonder how willing EU countries would be to do this though, with an older population and a lot more sensitivity to preserving jobs at any cost.

skippyboxedhero 3y ago
Yes, people worrying about AI when the gain from computers still isn't really here yet. In Europe, there is still a massive reluctance to hire programmers. So most large corporates/governments are buying from Oracle or SAP, get in an Indian contractor to implement, it inevitably goes wrong, and then they say how unreasonably expensive it all is...and it would be even more expensive if they hired onshore. And then you talk to the person who is managing the contract for the purchaser...struggles with Excel, struggles with basic tasks in Windows...I am sure this happens in the US too btw, but it is just unreasonably extreme in Europe. The dominance of SAP in particular is an indication that something is very wrong with enterprise software.

wkat4242 3y ago

You didn't do any IT work in the late 90s I guess? During the dotcom boom and Y2K hype it was major money. I was only starting so I didn't make a lot but every job came with a company car. They were screaming for people. There was a bit of a lull pre crisis but even in 2008 I wrote custom callcenter integrations and it was really good money. About 50k euro plus car. And this was in Holland, nothing like London kind of money.