Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>It can be easier and cheaper to hire locally, compared to sponsoring a work visa to a foreigner.

Depends how you define cheaper. The visa sponsorship is a one time sunk cost, but if the candidate you sponsor aggress to work for several thousands or even tens of thousands less per year than the local candidates, then the saving for the company are obvious.

It's an opens secret that companie in Germany/EU usually sponsor the candidates who accept less than the market rate, otherwise they would just pay market rate or a bit higher and hire a local without the visa hassle. D'uh! Even my former German boss was open about this with me that the recruiting department is constantly trying to bring candidates from places with low wages and low QoL like Brasil (their example, not mine) in order to not have to pay higher than market wages to poach local talent.

>the minimum wage for a German work Visa is 56,800 EUR (EU Blue Card) and 44,304 EUR for shortage jobs.

44K/year seems pretty low for a so called "shortage job", and even more so if you consider the rampant inflation in the past couple of years. AFAIK 44K is pretty much around or sometimes even far less than a new grad makes in a skilled field at a good company. So, IMHO such low wages for supposedly "shortage jobs" are there for wage suppression and nothing else. If we had something like 70-80k/year as the bar for a shortage wage then we'd be talking sense.

The secondary effect of immigration is increasing the burden on inelastic services and assets that everyone needs such as doctors and rentals for everyone, as the real estate supply is highly restricted due to NIMBYism and several political and financial reasons around the rigged real-estate market I don't want to get in right now as that always makes my blood boil.

> Depends how you define cheaper. The visa sponsorship is a one time sunk cost, but if the candidate you sponsor aggress to work for several thousands or even tens of thousands less per year than the local candidates, then the saving for the company are obvious.

What i meant was for the same Embedded Linux/C++ jobs - they were willing to pay me 65k/year in Germany - while similar jobs in Netherlands or even other smaller towns in Germany were offering me 36-40k back then. So my old company could have easily scooped up the people from Netherlands as opposed to jumping through hoops to get me a Visa and still save up on a lot of money. But people were reluctant to move there/in general harder to find apparently. I do know what you mean about the "candidates from low wage places". I have seen that happen a lot too. In fact I am seeing it happen a lot more these days because more companies are getting used to remote work and the competition is driving down the wages quite drastically.

> 44K/year seems pretty low for a so called "shortage job", and even more so if you consider the rampant inflation in the past couple of years. AFAIK 44K is pretty much around or sometimes even far less than a new grad makes in a skilled field at a good company. So, IMHO such low wages for supposedly "shortage jobs" are there for wage suppression and nothing else. If we had something like 70-80k/year as the bar for a shortage wage then we'd be talking sense.

Yeah My German Colleagues coming from smaller cities were making around 45k/year even with 4-5 years of work experience back then. Later on they moved to the big cities and got those 75-85k/year Devops jobs (this was around 2020). The companies which paid the bare minimum to sponsor a work visa were usually the ones like yet to be funded startups in Berlin, hectic jobs in Games industry etc...

And Yep. Too much of a good thing can be bad too. There needs to be infrastructure growth to keep up with the incoming population. Real Estate market - it is crazy. People had to be on waitlist for months to rent an apartment even in little cities. God knows how long they have to work there to be able to buy a house.

Idk how this works in software but the demand is so high and in DevOps that Içe not seen less than 80k Gross being paid in Germany (remote). I'm interviewing now.

I just feel the locals are too less in number for ofcourse product based job. Not talking about standard banks or non product roles. Often these non product ones (if big like banks) prefer giving contracts to Indian service based companies to cut cost.

>product based job

Product based tech jobs are quite few relative to the rest. Most is just lame IT and service based jobs like the ones you described that usually offshore or nearshore.

I'm sure they can offer 80k, but from my experience they're also quite demanding and selective when hiring.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com