Hacker News Reader

Comment by ldng | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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 :)

If you know decently French you will learn Spanish extremely fast, give it a try.

Doesn't this give a competitive advantage to early-stage startups in Spain?

Pay a little more than the average, but still way less than in Paris or London, and you'll have your pick of the good devs who don't want to emigrate, right?

Conditions are improving in Madrid and Barcelona for startups, but in general I'd say the laws, the banks, the bureaucrats and the system in general are all very startup unfriendly.

That I think it's the root of the problem. Dev salaries don't rise because there is no real competition for top talent. Many established software companies in Spain can get away with mediocre programmers with low salaries because they operate in captive markets and the quality of their products don't really matter.

If politicians really wanted to fix this problem they'd make it easier for new companies to compete with the old ones, but they are doing just the opposite.

The lower wages are a double-edged sword, because it means that your potential customers also have less money to pay you (or if you try to sell elsewhere, they are farther away which makes them harder to sell to).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com