> 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, 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.
It used to be better - I was looking for work in Spain just before the crisis. A senior dev could easily do 50K, banking positions were 70K and up.
Nowadays however, you can't find anything over 35K that is related to development -and- in Spain ( i.e. not a position in Germany)
Anyway - Spain does not have a problem of running out of worker, it has a problem of not paying those workers. I have been looking for years to go back to Spain but the job market is just completely unrealistic. I'm highly skeptical of the 200K figure in the article. Of course, job offers in Spain often do not specify the salary at all, but I have regularly seen director level position for about 70-90K.
Leaving aside the validity of the 10x programmer concept, the company still needs to be able to extract that extra performance in actual value. Most software jobs in Spain don't have productivity of that kind. Almost no companies here develop software products or services whose effectiveness translates directly into revenue. Very few of those who have tried have had any sort of long-term success.
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.
>Probably because they don't have the notion of a 10x programmer at all.
I don't think the 10x programmer is a valid concept. If a company believes they can easily replace you for that price, then chances are you aren't working on anything that that makes you irreplaceable. Why should an employer pay you more for the same amount of work? I also have reservations about looking at work as "an intimate family-like relationship". It's all families and sunshines until an investor pulls out and its time for layoffs.
We are on Ruby, Sinatra, Rails, Nginx, Lua & not afraid of new technologies.
Our open positions are on https://www.3scale.net/about/jobs/
We're based in Barcelona, but had remote workers in the past and still might be opened to that after some warmup time. On some hiring sites we were publically posting 50k EUR for Senior Backend Developer.
Being here for 5 years I can say there is plenty of growth space for good developers. Cheers.
I know a lot of employees or freelancers making a lot more working for companies in Malaga or companies elsewhere; more said it but get projects abroad; worked well for us. A problem here is that you need USPs because in Portugal people are working for a lot less than in Spain, all speak English and very willing to take whatever work. Also less rules; easy to fire people in the first few years.
> companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving
where does that come from?
> Tech stacks tend to be years behind San Francisco,
That is a problem? I would say that's kind of an advantage? Most programmers would find it more of a problem to learn new stuff all the time.
Developers are not fungible. But in my opinion: this "10x" term really has to go away. We need a better way to describe the reality that there's a range in quality and capability for developers that doesn't suggest an order of magnitude. That just means corner cutting.
For a senior developer, let's say 10 year working experience, there are some jobs above 50k but they are an small percentage. If I were a fresh graduate, or senior willing to relocate, my advice for any spanish engineer would be to move out of Spain: better salaries, better working conditions and better working culture overall. The EU it's a huge opportunity, don't limit yourself.
36,000 euro in, say, Valencia, that's close to 100,000 dollars in San Francisco when adjusting for purchasing power. Not great but certainly not that bad either. For someone with three years experience. I know a team of developers south of Valencia who make way more than that. They work out of a mansion with an infinity pool. Doing simple websites.
Whereas 36,000 euro in Southern Spain (where the unemployment is high) is not fantastic, it doesn't seem all that bad. In few industries employees would complain about that. And how many years of university education do you need to get to there: often none.
> Also, companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving.
Have they ever considered that programmers might be less likely to leave if they got a decent salary?
I've got to say, much of this sounds familiar. In Netherland, I used to hear companies complain that it was so hard to find technical people (programming and otherwise). At the same time, the jobs I saw didn't really pay all that much. The solution is simple: pay better, and people will come.
The problem is that in Netherland, management is/was seen as better, more important, higher status and deserving of better pay than programming. So for a programmer to move on beyond a certain point, he'd have to go into management. If programming jobs were seen as equal to management (in status and pay), programmers would have no reason to switch. Netherland is very much a management-oriented culture, for some reason.
Another is education. Politicians always kept talking about the knowledge economy, while at the same time cutting costs for education, and there was not a particular stimulus for technical education. And students are more likely to choose something management-related when they think there's more money there.
I'm talking somewhat in the past tense, because it feels to me like things have changed. I made enormous jumps in income over the past couple of years (could be because of the switch to freelancing and mostly working for banks since then), and the management-over-tech attitude seems to have diminished a bit (though that could be because of Scrum, which emphasizes empowered development teams and makes management somewhat redundant at times). I don't have any recent data on this, though. Maybe it's just my personal situation that has gotten better.
Sadly if employers are able to pay so low it's because there's a serious oversupply of devs... On another note how possible is for a non European to get a job in Spain?
There are few, although not many counter-examples. We run Mobile Jazz [1], which is an international boutique agency with headquarters in Barcelona. We're trying to treat our employees extremely fairly and have managed to gain some of the best talent not only in Spain, but also internationally.
Here some of the things we do:
- Pay fair salaries: 54k€ / year (before tax) for those that work full-time
- We distribute the companies profits every quarter with our employees as bonuses. Although we're planning to retain more of that in the future to reinvest in internal projects.
- Everyone can choose to work from wherever they like (one guy is currently traveling around the world with his wife) and you can work as much as you like (as long as it is planned properly in advance). Some people prefer to work less and spend more time with their kids or go kitesurfing. Others decided to reduce to 1/2 time and study again (just for fun) the other 50%.
- 3-4 times per year we organize 1-2 month long company retreats [2], where we rent a villa in a nice location with good Internet and work remotely. This year we went to Cape Town and Bali. Last year we went to Thailand and skiing in the Alps. In October we're going to Martinique (Caribbean)
- We support our employees with internal project ideas, even the most crazy ones, like the automated Nespresso Ordering Machine [3] or those that have turned into actual products, like Bugfender [4].
Summarized we treat our employees very well and give them a lot of responsibility and autonomy. And it all pays off. Our clients and customer are extremely happy and since inception (2009) we didn't have to make on single outbound sale. All clients came to us through word of mouth and recommendations from existing clients.
On top of that it gives me personally a lot of freedom and peace of mind, because I know I can fully trust and rely on our employees. For example just two months ago I completely disconnected and decided to work on a small sailing boat for a month (just for fun, as a life and learning experience) crossing the Pacific from Micronesia to New Caledonia [blog post coming soon].
We're also about to launch a niche entrepreneurial community for similar-minded people called: O4H - Optimizing for Happiness (instead of profit) [5].
Feel free to email me (email address in my HN profile). I'm always happy to connect with like minded people.
For those that are looking for a job, check out our Jobs API on our website [1]. Although, to be fair I'd like to mention that we currently don't want to grow a lot more in team size (currently 20 engineers and designers), but rather focus on getting traction with our products. But that will probably change in the future again.
Not only that, another factor to take into account is that very few Spanish companies are willing to sponsor a work visa, and, don't even get me started on the perma-intern scam for professionals with 10years of experience.
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.
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.
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.
I still remember when Tuenti opened and they started paying developers a normal developer salary (instead of the insanely low standard stuff here) and eeeeevery dev business here was mad as fuck about that. They understood it as if Tuenti were stealing developers from them, paying the unpayable for men
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/ , 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 :)
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"?
> 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.
Here in New Zealand you hear employers complain that New Zealanders don't want to work and that they have to get staff in from the islands etc etc. What this actually means is that they can't find any local willing to work 12 hours a day for minimum wage. The amazing unwillingness to see what they are doing is very impressive to witness - asking if they have considered paying more generates the filthiest of looks.
I spent years doing maintenance (and for not much money ) before I really started doing new development. I know for a fact that starting in the late '90s, the freshouts I met were unwilling to do that.
Look, companies are barely able to say what they want, much less evaluate anyone's work, much even less able to hire. Throw in adherence to Paradigm <X> religion and creeping Dunning-Kruger and this is what you get.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>“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.
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.
“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."
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).
> 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"?
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?
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.
[+] [-] knocte|9 years ago|reply
> 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--.)
[+] [-] vemv|9 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] gutnor|9 years ago|reply
Nowadays however, you can't find anything over 35K that is related to development -and- in Spain ( i.e. not a position in Germany)
Anyway - Spain does not have a problem of running out of worker, it has a problem of not paying those workers. I have been looking for years to go back to Spain but the job market is just completely unrealistic. I'm highly skeptical of the 200K figure in the article. Of course, job offers in Spain often do not specify the salary at all, but I have regularly seen director level position for about 70-90K.
[+] [-] Jare|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlesdm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemothekid|9 years ago|reply
I don't think the 10x programmer is a valid concept. If a company believes they can easily replace you for that price, then chances are you aren't working on anything that that makes you irreplaceable. Why should an employer pay you more for the same amount of work? I also have reservations about looking at work as "an intimate family-like relationship". It's all families and sunshines until an investor pulls out and its time for layoffs.
[+] [-] _mikz|9 years ago|reply
Our open positions are on https://www.3scale.net/about/jobs/ We're based in Barcelona, but had remote workers in the past and still might be opened to that after some warmup time. On some hiring sites we were publically posting 50k EUR for Senior Backend Developer.
Being here for 5 years I can say there is plenty of growth space for good developers. Cheers.
[+] [-] tluyben2|9 years ago|reply
I know a lot of employees or freelancers making a lot more working for companies in Malaga or companies elsewhere; more said it but get projects abroad; worked well for us. A problem here is that you need USPs because in Portugal people are working for a lot less than in Spain, all speak English and very willing to take whatever work. Also less rules; easy to fire people in the first few years.
> companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving
where does that come from?
> Tech stacks tend to be years behind San Francisco,
That is a problem? I would say that's kind of an advantage? Most programmers would find it more of a problem to learn new stuff all the time.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plafl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flexie|9 years ago|reply
Whereas 36,000 euro in Southern Spain (where the unemployment is high) is not fantastic, it doesn't seem all that bad. In few industries employees would complain about that. And how many years of university education do you need to get to there: often none.
[+] [-] fovc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JWLong|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcv|9 years ago|reply
Have they ever considered that programmers might be less likely to leave if they got a decent salary?
I've got to say, much of this sounds familiar. In Netherland, I used to hear companies complain that it was so hard to find technical people (programming and otherwise). At the same time, the jobs I saw didn't really pay all that much. The solution is simple: pay better, and people will come.
The problem is that in Netherland, management is/was seen as better, more important, higher status and deserving of better pay than programming. So for a programmer to move on beyond a certain point, he'd have to go into management. If programming jobs were seen as equal to management (in status and pay), programmers would have no reason to switch. Netherland is very much a management-oriented culture, for some reason.
Another is education. Politicians always kept talking about the knowledge economy, while at the same time cutting costs for education, and there was not a particular stimulus for technical education. And students are more likely to choose something management-related when they think there's more money there.
I'm talking somewhat in the past tense, because it feels to me like things have changed. I made enormous jumps in income over the past couple of years (could be because of the switch to freelancing and mostly working for banks since then), and the management-over-tech attitude seems to have diminished a bit (though that could be because of Scrum, which emphasizes empowered development teams and makes management somewhat redundant at times). I don't have any recent data on this, though. Maybe it's just my personal situation that has gotten better.
[+] [-] holografix|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bombthecat|9 years ago|reply
I don't know where they pull the numbers from that wages increased.
A former company I worked with went to shit. So the best ones are leaving first.
All, of, them, earn less now. I'm the only one getting more now.
And they are seniors mostly with a ton of experience and dozens of projects under there belt...
[+] [-] znq|9 years ago|reply
Here some of the things we do:
- Pay fair salaries: 54k€ / year (before tax) for those that work full-time
- We distribute the companies profits every quarter with our employees as bonuses. Although we're planning to retain more of that in the future to reinvest in internal projects.
- Everyone can choose to work from wherever they like (one guy is currently traveling around the world with his wife) and you can work as much as you like (as long as it is planned properly in advance). Some people prefer to work less and spend more time with their kids or go kitesurfing. Others decided to reduce to 1/2 time and study again (just for fun) the other 50%.
- 3-4 times per year we organize 1-2 month long company retreats [2], where we rent a villa in a nice location with good Internet and work remotely. This year we went to Cape Town and Bali. Last year we went to Thailand and skiing in the Alps. In October we're going to Martinique (Caribbean)
- We support our employees with internal project ideas, even the most crazy ones, like the automated Nespresso Ordering Machine [3] or those that have turned into actual products, like Bugfender [4].
Summarized we treat our employees very well and give them a lot of responsibility and autonomy. And it all pays off. Our clients and customer are extremely happy and since inception (2009) we didn't have to make on single outbound sale. All clients came to us through word of mouth and recommendations from existing clients.
On top of that it gives me personally a lot of freedom and peace of mind, because I know I can fully trust and rely on our employees. For example just two months ago I completely disconnected and decided to work on a small sailing boat for a month (just for fun, as a life and learning experience) crossing the Pacific from Micronesia to New Caledonia [blog post coming soon].
We're also about to launch a niche entrepreneurial community for similar-minded people called: O4H - Optimizing for Happiness (instead of profit) [5].
Feel free to email me (email address in my HN profile). I'm always happy to connect with like minded people.
For those that are looking for a job, check out our Jobs API on our website [1]. Although, to be fair I'd like to mention that we currently don't want to grow a lot more in team size (currently 20 engineers and designers), but rather focus on getting traction with our products. But that will probably change in the future again.
Links:
- [1]: https://mobilejazz.com/philosophy
- [2]: https://optimizingforhappiness.com/remote-office-cape-town-2...
- [3]: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/with-nom-youll-never-be-out-of-c...
- [4]: https://bugfender.com/
- [5]: https://optimizingforhappiness.com/
[+] [-] davidgerard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamonZ|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|9 years ago|reply
Sadly, this wil be the norm everywhere eventually.
[+] [-] albertop|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altoz|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] whamlastxmas|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cocotino|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franciscop|9 years ago|reply
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/ , 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/
[2] https://orchallenge.es/
[+] [-] Daishiman|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lostlogin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArkyBeagle|9 years ago|reply
Look, companies are barely able to say what they want, much less evaluate anyone's work, much even less able to hire. Throw in adherence to Paradigm <X> religion and creeping Dunning-Kruger and this is what you get.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jandrewrogers|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] muse900|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kartan|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] calgoo|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tluyben2|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jlg23|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pvaldes|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wallflower|9 years ago|reply
My understanding is that English to CEFRL level B1 was mandatory to work at a multi-national company. Are there other languages required?
[+] [-] throwawaymaroon|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dthal|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anjc|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|9 years ago|reply
Draw your arbitrary tribal boundaries at the exact same place I do!
[+] [-] UVB-76|9 years ago|reply
Obviously not as important for low-skilled, manual labour, but we're talking about highly skilled jobs in the tech sector here.
[+] [-] winestock|9 years ago|reply
“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."
[+] [-] joeyspn|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] konschubert|9 years ago|reply
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"?
[+] [-] HillaryBriss|9 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] mtrn|9 years ago|reply
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.