Spain tech job market is facing a hiring freeze
samagame.com
samagame.com
I think this didn't change much for the following decade, but COVID turned the tables. Suddenly Spanish programmers could take jobs for global companies for very competitive salaries. I've heard of people making 70-80k euros working from home, which is more than 2x the average national. Recently someone told me that when they offered a Spanish programmer a job for 100k USD, she started crying.
So the "correction" that we are seeing seems more like a logical consequence of the contracting job market, plus the move away from remote work for many companies. It seems more like a correction than a crisis.
Why do you think Paul Graham compares it to communism?
It’s not because of some culture building nonsense - it’s 2023 and by now we know it works.
They do it because they hate the leverage and mobility it gives employees. How someone can’t see why SV investors and the CEOs of various companies and the giant conflict of interest is beyond me.
Link, please?
Communism seems to be his favorite example of something that can work initially from a good starting point, but fails over time, and he also believes that's true of Work From Home.
He might "hate the leverage and mobility it gives employees", but his limited comparison of it to Communism isn't strong evidence in either direction.
Paul Graham is not dumb and he knows what a loaded term communism is.
On top of that, you’re taking his comment and interpreting it in the most superficial way without even attempting to think about his choice of words or why he’s so against the idea in general.
Maybe because fully remote simply doesn't work? Covid was a forced event and people coasted for an year on the relationships build in office until Jan 2020. Over time as people moved on and colleagues one has never met in person showed up, things started fraying.
Also, I believe there are some companies who can be fully remote but that has to be in the DNA of the company culture, right down to how we communicate and collaborate. Very few people have skills to rewire their communication habbits and so they go back to what has worked previously for them.
But the comparison to communism is not along the axes one might expect, so it makes the relationship to your point a little hard to follow.
I actually think that there's room here for a hybrid. Have one track for remote engineers and one for in person. Remote engineers get different work, they generally have a lower ceiling in career potential. In exchange they get what they want, they work mostly by themselves with videoconf/slack as aid.
Of course there's always the exceptions. If you're the top 0.0001% in domain experts in a field, you can do whatever you want.
Citation needed. Most of the people I talk to prefer a hybrid setup - 2/3 days from home, 2/3 days in office. For office days, an obvious caveat is that the entire team has to be present on those days to realize the benefits.
> If businesses want to attract talent, they need to accept this.
Looking around here in SV, plenty of businesses seem to be attracting great talent even with RTO policies.
But with collaboration, sometimes weeks of work can be cut out if one discovers the right work to do. And even better if a new direction or idea can be found. This is all of course technically possible remotely, but it doesn't happen in the general case because we didn't evolve to work by ourselves without f2f contact.
> worldwide, nearly instantaneous communication
This isn't nearly as good of a point as you think it is.
> or even monogamy
Speak for yourself.
> This isn't nearly as good of a point as you think it is.
Why not? If we evolved to relate to a small tribe and now are exposed to huge numbers of people then I'd say there's proof humans can and are adapting.
And you didn't respond to my point about being as effective. This is all relative to baseline in office working.
Taking your logic further, why bother with anything? Why even work remotely? Just don't work. Nothing is as important as putting food on the table and a roof over your head, so become a builder and a farmer.
In fact we have more silos since this idiot stepped in.
This really goes both ways. If you can work from anywhere, I can hire from anywhere, possibly from somewhere where the cost of living is much lower, where people are willing to do the job for less. The leverage really is coming from there still being a limited supply of labor, but that is not a perpetual given.
Today it’s lopsided in the companies’ favor.
There are definitely highly talented individuals in low cost areas, but they quickly realise they can earn a Big Tech wage, and are willing to relocate (often relocation is a bonus; as much as we complain sometimes, quality of life in a HCOL area is comparably quite nice compared to many LCOL areas).
The threat of hiring a bunch of cheap offshore labour is a bogeyman; companies would already have done this if it were feasible.
> There are definitely highly talented individuals in low cost areas, but they quickly realise they can earn a Big Tech wage, and are willing to relocate
Then we're not talking about remote work.
Anecdotally, my friends from India make trips to SV just for in-person interactions. Their claim is that India has good tech talent and a somewhat decent tech job scene, but a bleeding edge expertise (eg. LLMs) can only be found in SV. That doesn't mean there are no experts in India, but they are very few and scattered around. Whereas you can come to SV for a week, attend 2-3 meetups each in SF / Palo Alto coupled with some other expo / conference and you get a great bang for the buck on your trip.
It was similar in the US in the 90s. The pay was OK but nothing compared to the past 15 years or so, and socially it was not well regarded at all. The movie "Office Space" depicts what it was like pretty accurately.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*One where restrictions on advertising and data collection/sales kept software as a pay-to-play enterprise, necessitating higher wages among those who would be users.
Tech incomes got high precisely when Google etc. started making big money from their super scalable services. It also very happily coincided with the age of (well networked) college dropouts being able to found billion dollar companies within just a few years. So the established companies had to dry up the market and make it less profitable to join a startup, on average, than to stay at your FAANG job.
You rather have an engineer develop a service at your FAANG that will never see customers than have them build the competitor to your core money maker.
That, and the demand created by digitalization literally outpacing the number of graduates joining the industry.
What changed - what allowed college dropouts to become billionaires - was first the pre-GFC bubble market (making their net worths essentially inflated). Afterwards, the endless rounds of money-printing used to escape a depression and then sustain growth drove high tech salaries themselves. Without this liquidity, startups would not have had access to VC money and would have had to turn a profit (not just attract further rounds or a successful IPO) or perish within the first few years of existence, kneecapping competition for workers.
This is also why tech salaries in Europe and Asia have stayed relatively sane. Save Japan, they didn't run massive QE regimes and so did not see the same VC environment develop. Why do you think tech companies were the first to see large layoffs after the FFR started rising? It wasn't just that they'd overhired during COVID; that personnel was genuinely needed for the projects they'd had planned. High interest rates screw mightily with their business model, particularly labor pay. You say that demand outpaces the supply of workers, so how could we see layoffs at all? Simple: it's the only alternative to salaries falling when the labor budget is shrunk (through a complex chain of knock-on effects that turn monetary policy into fiscal consequences) by the money printer getting turned off.
As for why tech, and not other industries: in software, networking, etc., it's easy to obfuscate costs and value, particularly when it's unclear what can or has been automated, what a service is worth to a customer, what that customer is actually paying with and for, etc. Arbitrage opportunities abound, and all you have to do is set up shop and choose a growth metric that you can sell the market.
Why would any company fire a Spanish programmer that brings in money to the company, only to hire somebody more expensive in-office?
They’ve tried this before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
All the major Internet properties are falling to pieces. I’ve encountered more hung GMail loading screens and empty IG story trays (which should be impossible if feed loads at all) in the last week than in the decade starting at 2012.
GPT-4 didn’t go hyperbolic or whatever, the regular Internet needs to keep working after all.
They’ll keep kicking for a few more months, they really want hackers brought to heel, but rates aren’t doubling again and “AI” hasn’t hockeysticked.
Nothing like that on my end. Sounds like a confirmation bias story: you think the tech industry is collapsing, so you see failure everywhere.
It's a bit annoying because while I'm mildly interested in other opportunities, most don't even bother reading my profile and just dump their crap on me. I selected the remote only option but most jobs that are shared with me are office based or hybrid. I'm officially hybrid now but I rarely visit the office and I want to keep it that way. Offices have become horrible places now with the hotdesking.
I definitely tend to agree with the outsourcing piece. I would guess that probably has more impact than a recession.
Also seems based on speculation.
This reads as if it was written with a large number of buzzwords that did not translate well.
Also, there's another article on the same site, "End to the great era of layoffs: big technology companies reactivate hiring but with conditions". Which came first? There's no date.