“Finland could employ some 2000-3000 developers immediately”
metropolitan.fi
metropolitan.fi
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-technology-idUSKCN...
Make no mistake, this is about dumping the market salaries and shedding worker rights. A lot of things going on in the EU at the moment are exactly that.
>Timo Ahopelto [...] estimates that Finland could hire 2000-3000 talented software developers immediately. He demands that the bureaucracy of immigration must be dismantled.
You can read this as "I want software developers but I don't want to pay them what they are worth". Globalism is the reduction of pay and workers rights by another name.
Globalization improves workers rights, increases pay, and reduces inequality. It's only people who were formerly at the top of the heap due solely to dumb luck that have anything to fear.
This isn't true for China. They use prison labor, they have no right to unionize, they have child labor, they don't follow their own minimum wage law, they don't have anything like a western country's workplace safety laws.
Globalization does not increase wages for people in western countries, that's why these companies are keen on getting H1B visas and getting cheaper labor.
I also don't care about wages "for people in western countries". Why would I care about wages for one group of people to the exclusion of others?
Directly contradicted by your own assertion that someone in India will work for cheaper
> improves workers rights
Citation needed. The only one I can accept off hand is that it reduces inequality between western workers and those in countries with less opportunities. It certainly doesn't reduce the gap between CXOs and their employees
The "elephant graph" is the most important graph in the world of economics: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iVkQuGtP3s2...
Citation needed. The only one I can accept off hand is that it reduces inequality between western workers and those in countries with less opportunities.
See the work of Branco Milanovic - the bulk of inequality in the world is across borders rather than within borders. His book is excellent: http://amzn.to/2dl3sVJ
Worrying about inequality between CXOs and their employees is also a silly distraction by politicians. Inequality in the US is mainly between firms, not within them. Inequality within Google and within Walmart has not gone up much, it's inequality between Google and Walmart that has gone up.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/27/u-s-pay-inequality...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103798/Revealed-Ins...
If Indians could do just as well as Finns, why aren't they, in India?
Many individual Finns didn't make Finland nice. Quite a few just came along for the ride, and some were downright harmful. So it would be equally valid to say "Finns, except Sven, but including Sandeep built a nice country". (Assuming of course that Sven was one of the ones who didn't contribute much.) So we could equally well change the groups and get the same positive claims.
Suppose I were to say "whites built a nice suburb, why shouldn't they be the ones who enjoy the benefits" (with regards to, say, an all-white suburb that they want to keep blacks out of), what principled objection would you make to this claim?
I don't have an objection to people maintaining their own communities, closed or not. I believe in freedom of association. I'm not an American either so US taboos around race don't hold much sway over my opinions.
For example, if A threatens B with violence should B employ C, I believe that's wrong. I don't believe it becomes morally acceptable if A and B are members of the same family, or the same ethnic or national group.
I believe parents owe a certain individual obligation to their children (due to the fact that they chose to birth them), but little else.
If you consider the accident of birth in a certain country unfair. That is, Sven being born in Sweden and Sandeep in India which should be rectified by allowing Sandeep to move to Sweden (or Finland, or wherever), do you consider other instances of inheritance unfair?
For example, if Sven stands to inherit an apartment in Stockholm and a nice cabin in the woods, while Lucas' parents were renters who won't leave him much, should Sven's parents' estate be taxed at 100% to rectify this unfairness (or 50% to pass it to Lucas)? If not, why not? What is the principled objection?
It seems to me that both lines of arguments for inheritance (whether better capital allocation and stewardship, or simple blood ties) work just as well for material goods as they do for citizenship. And property is guaranteed by the threat of violence (often from the same actors) just like borders are.
I have no problem with individuals disposing of their property as they see fit. Just as Sven might like to pass his house to Lucas, I might like to rent my house to Jose the Mexican. And I object to laws that would prevent both of these things.
I guess another disagreement we have is that I don't see citizenship as property.
This does not mean there are no other forces at play when discussing the employment sector at large.
Edit: [0] I was really familiar with this specific sector up to a few years ago.
I'll make this next statement more about the US than Finland because that's what I'm familiar with. Any company complaining about a talent shortage that doesn't have training programs has no business demanding laws change. Be cheap or lazy, but don't be both.
The personnel to arrange all of this is available in Helsinki area. The problem, I think, is that the quantity of people sought is so small that it would be harder to arrange all of this properly than just headhunt for them around the world. It would be awesome, though.
There are trainings for people like SAP experts. The curriculum is fixed and the problem domain fantastically constrained. In this case it's fairly easy to retrain for sought out skills - especially if the number of new experts is counted in the hundreds.
I have to strain once more that my example was obscure and for a specific, fairly small niche. I have no idea where the thousands of missing specialists are needed. Probably for usual backend/frontend development, would be my guess.
Finally you're ignoring that most companies aren't software houses. They operate in different industries and their IT/development departments rely on being close to their users, to these the effective cost of having remote employees is even higher than what I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
As an aside: My company allows for remote work but I just can't stand it; unless I really need to be home for something I'll always work from the office, where I can work and be social with my colleagues. We've considered moving to cheaper, nearby countries with fewer taxes (Germany most likely) and decided against it because I really don't want to have to work from home despite having a financial incentive to do so. Remote work isn't for everyone.
But yes that is why I said; some satellite offices and people working at home usually is a good mix. Some sit in the office, some at home, all happy.
The main point, going after what is said in the article: If you are in Finland and need 100 coders and those coders are easy to the in St Petersburg then just open an office there.
Isn't this the case for all companies in the EU? You just hire someone (or in reality their company) as a 'freelancer' or 'contractor'.
In less than a day you can register your business, get a business bank account (+ working card!), and send an invoice to your 'employer'. For less than a hundred 'bucks'. Once a year it gets a little more complicated when you have to do your finances, which can trivially be outsourced to an accountant. I know plenty of people (perhaps especially programmers) who do their finances themselves though. For freelancers, and especially programmers, it's (apparently) not that complicated.
Going through this for just one month before you're hired is perhaps still a bit too much of a hassle, but you only really have to do this once and you can then use your freelancer status every time you switch jobs.
I don't know much about the legal aspect of all this though.
In contrast, regular employees don't have to do any of that - they know they will get a paycheck around X every month, will have Y days off work and (if the company is not run by crooks and/or nosedives) when s/he retires she'll have a pension worth Z. It's a completely different mindset, even before you get to the bureaucratic side of things.
It's no big deal. An accountant easily handles all that, and accountants are plentiful in the Netherlands.
Any EU citizen wouldn't need anything, just go there, get the job, register with the authorities and find some housing.
I can confirm that there is indeed a shortage of developers with the right skills. Salary levels is not the issue here.
I disagree with the point about bureaucracy in the article. Getting a residence permit once you have an offer is fairly straightforward and takes a few weeks, compared to some other countries in Europe (like Malta for example) where it has taken us months.
In a country that just saw several high-profile tech giants falter and cut thousands of highly-skilled and experienced developers, I find that really difficult to believe, sorry. What sort of skill is so in demand, that legions of C/C++ developers with tons of experience in embedded platforms cannot be retrained for? Are you building teams of brain surgeons?
More likely, demand does not match offer in terms of salary expectations, and employers don't want to adjust for one reason or another. This might fit your business model and that's fine, I'm not attacking you. These processes are not specific to Finland, it's globalization in action: producing a virtually unlimited supply of "reserve army of labor".
So you're saying with a straight face that if you doubled or quadrupled the salary on offer you still wouldn't find candidates? Are you looking for someone so specialized that only under 10 people in the entire world are able to fill it? Because otherwise it's just a matter of salaries not being enticing enough for people to work for your clients.
There's also the progressive tax which should be taken into account.
Across Scandinavia there is a trend to outsource to eastern Europe to reduce costs, we can't then complain that developers in Scandinavia lack the competence required for the job. Employers have to invest in skills too. I would assume the same goes for Finland.
They just want to be able to hire Indians,Pakistanis or whoever will be willing to work for the fraction of what even an unskilled person from a remote village in Romania would ask for.
This is not about SHORTAGE of people for the companies. Companies can hire entire teams overseas and especially developers do not need to be hired in local countries. The thing is people from even the poorest regions of EU do not want to relocate hence Finland is looking to repopulate itself with at least semi-skilled workforce outside of Europe.
This whole thing is disgusting. But Finland is free country and they are free to do whatever they think is the best for the country and its people.
It should be noted that this is a very intentional policy. Finland's current right-wing government has been working hard (and in many quite confused ways too) to bring down cost of labour.
When elected, the Prime Minister's stated goal was a reduction of 5% across all salaries. (The name for this plan was kilpailukykysopimus, "the competitiveness agreement".) Due to expected resistance from unions, it has been watered down to various benefit cuts, promises of raise freezes, etc. But the atmosphere among the country's economic decision makers is very much one that pushes for salary reductions by any means possible.
Another name for this salary reduction plan is "internal devaluation". As a member of the Euro zone, Finland can't simply devaluate its currency to increase the competitiveness of its exports. So the other way to achieve the same goal is to reduce the internal cost of producing those goods.
(If you ask me, this whole thing is chasing a 1980s recipe for a 21st century problem. The problem with Finland's exports is not cost of goods or even quality; it's a combination of wrong industries and lack of global marketing savvy. The pipe dream of a 5% reduction in production costs won't solve any of that.)
Finns have quite a lot of housing debt, and spend a disproportionate amount of their income on housing compared to most other European countries. That debt load could become a huge problem for people when their salaries are converted to a new local currency but the debt remains.
If I have a 300k EUR mortgage, what happens to it? If it remains EUR-denominated while my salary is converted into a reborn FIM currency which then depreciates by 30%, suddenly my debt has effectively become 30% larger too. (Alternatively, if the debts were converted to FIM, the lender banks will still have a lot of EUR liabilities. Could they swallow that? One of the large banks, Nordea, isn't even Finnish. How could the government force a Swedish bank to convert loans into another currency?)
At the same time, the interest rate on those debts would skyrocket: right now it's close to zero, but an independent Finnish central bank would probably have to raise rates by multiple percentage points at once.
This combination would destroy many families' finances. Any government that did this would get a very negative windfall in the next election.
A "FinEuroExit" would be a huge transfer of money and future income from private citizens' pockets to the country's existing established big industries which have been unable to compete in a global market on their own. That doesn't sound like the kind of thing a modern government should be contemplating as their first choice.
Keynesian theory says that to improve the economy (read: put prideful workers back to work and increase outputs), you need to lower real wages. It also postulates that nominal wages are sticky - hence the standard solution for Keynesians is creating inflation to reduce the real value of the same nominal wages. I.e., instead of workers getting 5% fewer Euros, they instead get the same number of Euros but the value of each Euro is reduced by 5%.
For countries on the Euro, inflation isn't possible, so the only solution is to fix nominal wage stickiness.
And this is exactly the point.
If you can deliver you should get paid the same thing in St.Pet. If the company would really need these people they could open an office in St.Pet and offer similar / same salaries.But they do not want to.
If the need is to boost existing teams and not create entirely new teams then that's the problem there. It could be lack of imagination or courage as well :)
Web development does not generally fall under this umbrella, however.
This. So very much this.
Software companies always look for people with the latest fad ^H^H^H skill, which is - almost by definition - in short supply.
Knowing how to write a complex web app with decent structured maintainable clean code, keep it optimized and secure, the ability to deploy it to to servers at the touch of a button isn't something I would expect from a junior dev.
This is already happening in areas where there is a shortage (salaries rising) and in the time it takes for new people to acquire the required skills there is a shortage (ie. people would be willing to accept the conditions below the market rate but they can't get trained fast enough/get visas)
When nominal demand far outstrips nominal supply, I think it's fair to call it a shortage. Temporary. It will correct. In a less than a decade.
It's funny - the management ego part that is in alignment with your comment (that "there is no shortage")... Because coders have become the modern blue-collar assembly line worker, management types often want to pay assembly line worker prices, and are having a difficult time coming to grips with the fact that these workers might make more money than they do. Outrageous!
Sometimes it's much better to hire a few talented people than an entire team. The young digital companies run by savvy technologists are attempting to play by the lean startup playbook.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6753/germany-migrants-dem...
in fact, none of them is refugee, because by definition used in international laws, they stop being refugees the moment they come to first safe country on their way, namely Turkey, so they enter EU as plain old economic immigrants.
Well they just let in over 1 million new state aid dependants. Hardly a formula for growth.
Just look at the number of factories that operate outside of Germany and how many people they require in order to keep the machinery running. I do not hate them. I do not detest them. I am just scared at how they run things. And other countries seem to follow because they also want to take advantage of it.
(the main side-effect of the supportive economic policy we've had since is destroying pension savings by transferring wealth into large corporations)
The visa I have is this one:
http://www.bluecard-eu.de/eu-blue-card-germany/
I had to scan some documents, but otherwise the process was mostly handled by the company. I had to do a couple meetings to finish the process once I moved but they put me on a temporary visa until that happened.