Ask HN: Are tech layoffs happening abroad?
There’s been a lot of news about layoffs in the US. How is everyone fairing from other countries?
We have some tech startups here too though, and those are obviously struggling right now, but startups don't normally lay people off, they simply fail, and that happens all the time anyway.
However, where it is like the US is in the way tech hiring has dropped off a cliff. So if you're working at a startup and the startup fails, or if you're a contractor and your contract isn't renewed then you're going to find it extremely hard to find work right now. I'm getting a lot of messages from ex-colleagues at the moment struggling to find work but thinking about it I don't know anyone who actually got laid off unless you're talking about long-term contracts not being renewed.
The only sector that seems completely fine is public sector work, but there's just not enough public sector work to go around.
No, but you do have the governemnt, HFT and banking industry which pays contractors well, plus local branches of many top US companies which is still a leg up on the labor market comapred to most EU memebers, meanign salaries at the top end are much higher than most of the EU.
Look for jobs in countries without top banking and no branhces of top US companies and see what salaries are like. UK will seem like a paradise.
It did mention the financial and public sector industries, which you call out, and only being able to speak for the UK however.
While it didn’t include HFT, that doesn’t employee the same number of heads as the others
I'm thinking once this correction has settled we're probably left with companies that produce actual value instead of just hype, which is good, and I'd rather work for companies with real profits anyway, but it's rough to ride this wave right now for sure, especially if you get laid off and need to pay bills.
From my point of view there is also a skill-missmatch in Germany. While firms look for the usual most modern tech stacks, workforce is often conservative, staying years or even decades at one company with outdated technology. Hiring non-EU citizens is almost impossible because of the bureaucracy.
So, in Germany the situation is complicated and different from the US.
They fear miscommunication and the administrative work connected to non-German employees.
There's no EU wide citizenship, employee regulations and tax liability for employees but are local for each country. They don't want you earning money in one country but spemding it and taxing it in another.
This is where the EU is weaker than the US and will keep missing the mark in software.
Why not? My ex German boss moved to the US to work for a company there and since the position is remote, he can live and work in any state he wants. You can't do that in the EU which limits labor mobility which hurts the EU economy and innovation versus the US.
What you're saying is like can you work for a Canadian company while living in the U.S? Or an Argentinian company while living in the U.S? I don't think so. So I fail to see how U.S is somehow better here, and you're comparing European Union to 1 country, which is just ridiculous, since EU is not a country. European Union "states" are not the same as U.S states. They are actual countries.
I hope my point of what I originally meant is clear now and you don't need to explain anymore about why the EU is not a country like the US.
It's an economical alliance, not a federation, each country has different tax, social security, pension, health insurance, labor laws, &c. all of them are as complex as your home country's one, but now you have to deal with them in a foreign language, and your employer hr has to deal with them too
It's just much easier to relocate or hire a local than to play this game for a nomad tech bro that will stay 2 years before jumping to his next adventure
So yes you seem to acknowledge the reality that the EU is composed of different countries but you don't seem to grasp the complexity of the consequences
Yes it is, by design. And why aren't we(the EU) trying to make it easier?
>It's just much easier to relocate or hire a local
Is it? Then what about the famous "m'uh labor shortage" employers are crying about? If they'd be open and have simpler ways to hire people remotely from other EU memebrs, their labor shortages could be over.
Phisical relocation of people/families across countries just for a job that can be done remotely, is also a huge PITA for the environment due to all the back and forth traveling between home country and work country people do, and for the housing market, not to mention for the family unit and communities loosing people having to uproot themveles just to press keys on a laptop but only if done inside the right EU country for the same souless corporation. Do I need to state even more benefits of easy EU wide remote work would bring or is the silliness of the current EU status quo beginning to sink in?
>but you don't seem to grasp the complexity of the consequences
Oh I know the complexities very well, but that was not my point. My point was: why aren't we(the EU) fighting to reduce or emliminate those complexities in order to imporve labor mobility which would help reduce labor shortages and also improve the job prospects of people who can't relocate due to family or whatever personal reasons?
Because, again, the EU is composed of different countries with different laws/culture/opinions/&c. we can't agree on most things do you think it's just a matter of "want". Again it's an economical alliance not a federation, if we wanted a federation we'd have a federation
You seem to imagine this is a detail but it really isn't one. Labor laws didn't materialise out of thin air in anno domini 2024, there are hundreds of years of inertia. The ultra privileged "laptop class" making 2-5x the min wage of their respective country's wage isn't a top priority for our overlords in Bruxelles
Yes, of course. You do need government approval, but generally they are willing.
However, one of the supposed goals of the EU's creation was to allow free movement of labour across member countries. Exactly so you can work in another EU country without having to secure government approval.
It is interesting that you say not only did the EU fail on that front, but that it has managed to create a situation worse than countries that have never made a formal attempt to go down that road.
Labor mobility doesn't just mean me being free to moving across countries for work.
Labor mobility means me being free to work for whichever company I want in the EU as an EU citizen, it doesn't have to mandate that I have to physically be there in that country for that particular job if physical presence is not required for that job (aka the majority of the white collar laptop-class, which we learned in the pandemic)
Does my code run better at my German employer if run from a German home wifi instead of a Romanian or Bulgarian home wifi? Then why should I have to be in Germany to do that job and not any other EU state suffice?
Yes, I know about all the different laws and taxes of each country and all that legal mumbo-jumbo, but those laws that hinder this can always be changed in order to facilitate this, same how we changed them to have free trade of goods, free EU wide emergency healthcare for EU members, or how we abolished GSM roaming fees such that my SIM hooks on to any cell tower on EU soil and I don't have to pay extra, ain't that amazing.
So then why aren't we(the EU) doing it? Eu-wide remote work labor regualtions(or more like de-regualtuions) would bring more benefits to the block as a whole.
I work for a US based company in Iceland and they pay me as a FTE here and have done/do so in multiple other European countries.
It's less about being lazy and more about the financial, law and tax overhead that comes with legally employing someone in another EU country as a FTE, as in most cases it means opening up a subsidiary/legal entity in that country which means another country who's laws you have to comply with. Not a huge issue for large enterprises which are already present in most countries anyway, but a big problem for small and medium sized companies. Unlike when doing business, a single EU legal entity is not enough to hire people remotely, you need a presence in each country where your workforce resides.
>I work for a US based company in Iceland and they pay me as a FTE here and have done/do so in multiple other European countries.
May I ask how? Did your employer open up an Iceland entitty or did they use some employer of record?
Which is fine. The people of the EU can make whatever decisions they want. But it is funny that it has ended up with less freedom, after wanting to provide more freedom, than countries that have never tried to give more freedom.
You’d be amazed at how many people make use of this freedom in the EU though despite the cultural, linguistic and bureaucratic barriers. It was pretty mind blowing to me when I could just move my life from Scotland to Iceland. Particularly as that’s a significantly different transition than moving from one state in the US to another.
In a vacuum it may not be surprising that EU member countries have chosen to be more protectionist. However, the EU was created specifically to allow free movement of labour. For it to explicitly deny free movement of labour is... interesting.
That's false for a lot of the EU. It's usally the opposite. They force you to do the work within gthe country's premises so you contribute to the taxes and busineses there instead of abroad.
In your example, at first you pay taxes in Germany and if Estonian taxes are bigger, you pay the difference there.
I invoice via my own company. But this is not mandatory. You can also apply for a VAT number as an individual and follow the same procedure. I did this before I set up the company.
I'm not in Portugal, that was just for the sake of an example.
More here https://socialsecurity.belgium.be/en/internationally-active/...
EU bureaucrats are just stupid.
We want to water down the already mediocre wages even more? If you can't find workers across the whole 448 million EU block willing to work for you, you're doing something wrong.
If anything their COL is higher because of the fees related to being an immigrant, they lose out on benefits and on sharing fixed costs with the family.
What about those you didn't sign? What about the SW bodyshops aka visa shops, who pray on desperate foreigners from broken countries trying to emigrate at any cost? I know more of those sleezy bodyshops than I have fingers on my hands to count.
I never said your comapny does this, but you can't pretend immigration wage dumping doesn't exist and that many companyes aren't exploiting it.
You also can't tell me with a straight face that flooding the market with more workers doesn't lower wages as per the supply/demand of the market.
It's not really a German-only thing. Other than the US and China almost no other country currently has such things. EU is mostly traditional businesses and risk-averse investors.
Sure, relatively (compared to what one can have in the US) low salaries for software engineers is a EU wide thing. Some countries pay more some less, Germany is probably closer to the top if you consider EU.
From work, to housing, it feels like the population is in "wait and see" mode.
1. It takes forever to get a residence permit and get permission to start working.
2. It's increasingly difficult to find housing, which is required for the residence permit.
3. The bureaucracy is notoriously slow and outdated, and full of catch-22 situations. It's especially apparent when you need everything at once.
4. The language barrier makes everything harder.
In other words, if you meet all the requirements, you're looking at a multi-month slog before you're finally allowed to start working. People sometimes lose their job before they start due to the immigration office delays.
For some reason, there seems to be enough money for AI, wast amount of meetings and convoluted interviewing and vetting processes.
[1] Source: https://www.bitkom.org/Presse/Presseinformation/Rekord-Fachk... (in German)
To my cynical eyes this looks like "we want skilled workers, we want them to speak fluent German, and we want them cheap". And as the saying goes, you can choose two of those things but rarely all three.
The picture of the overall employment situation as conveyed by the news media here is of a tight labor market and of difficulty for companies in finding and retaining employees.
The average Joe will have a much better time being fired in Germany than in countries like the US or Switzerland
Theres some sectors doing well, some new fundings happening, but overall slow and layoffs continue.
Considering how lowly paid SWEs are in this country, I'd imagine the company would be better off keeping them on payroll.
1: https://www.wolterskluwer.com/es-es/expert-insights/que-es-u...
It choked out funding for cautious YC style growth especially after Grab acquired Uber operations here. So everyone else did it too, the fake it until you make it mindset became prominent. Eventually everyone runs out of fund sources and have to become profitable, but it's hard when you're now public and used to losing millions every quarter. The costs is often in employees, so waves of layoffs it is.
A lot of it isn't American money, but it's bad timing.
For those in the Bay Area. Remember, you'll know that things are bad when rush-hour commute looks like non-rush-hour commute.
Lazada and Shopee, online marketplaces, are also reporting double-digit percentage layoffs. For one of them, more than 50% of the C-suite was let go.