Spanish dev here, 3 years in the business, been twice a freelancer and twice an employee. My main complaints:
- The maximum salary a developer can earn at any given company is almost written in stone - around 36000 euros. Every public job posting will have that figure as the max. When it's higher, they'll water it down in the interview.
Why? Probably because they don't have the notion of a 10x programmer at all. We all are perceived as 'equal' or even replaceable.
- Also, companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving. The sole hint of that you may leave will turn their red alarms on, and they'll start searching a replacement.
There rarely exists here the mentality that a work relationship is a commercial exchange, not an intimate family-like relationship. Being open to the market is not 'treason'.
- Tech stacks tend to be years behind San Francisco, whether is languages, frameworks, ops practices...
- Functional programming opportunities extremely scarce. Elixir is gaining traction here though.
It used to be better - I was looking for work in Spain just before the crisis. A senior dev could easily do 50K, banking positions were 70K and up.
Nowadays however, you can't find anything over 35K that is related to development -and- in Spain ( i.e. not a position in Germany)
Anyway - Spain does not have a problem of running out of worker, it has a problem of not paying those workers. I have been looking for years to go back to Spain but the job market is just completely unrealistic. I'm highly skeptical of the 200K figure in the article. Of course, job offers in Spain often do not specify the salary at all, but I have regularly seen director level position for about 70-90K.
Another spaniard here, and I can confirm that it absolutely is a problem of not wanting to pay appropriate wages.
First, most software companies only offer crappy jobs that don't require specific skills. Most of the job postings are for standard developing positions in very common languages such as Java or Python. Considering how many people finish their degree or their FP (Formación Profesional, courses of about two years oriented towards the job market, and often including internships) each year, and how high the unemplyment rate is, I just don't believe that there aren't enough applicants.
Second, a lot of the big companies are what we call cárnicas (roughly, "butcheries"), i.e. companies specialized in outsourcing that pay ridiculous wages (10K a year for an entry level, full-time position where you will get fired if you don't do three hours of overtime a day is not difficult to find). Most developers know better and stay away from these, but because of the unemployment rate, a lot of people end in these places.
In other words, those hard-sought qualifications are more or less "will do a specialized job while getting peanuts in return". The article misleads by giving an example of a position with a 200k salary (which I'm also very skeptical of, like gutnor), and fails to mention that it's a very specific position and does not represent the whole set.
The only way I could believe that there is an actual shortage of workers, and I still doubt that it's true, is if we took into account that many of the good developers fled to greener pastures a lot of time ago.
EDIT: I should also mention that the problem is not that there isn't money and therefore the job market can only offer crappy jobs. On the contrary, most of the big enterprises and especially the cárnicas are very lucrative for their owners. The problem is that there is a very big barrier entry, because these companies strive on public contracts, and because of corruption, new and smaller companies can't stand a chance against the already existing ones.
I have read a number of other articles which say essentially this as well, that essentially you aren't paid a market wage in Spain so the only people who work in Spain in technology have some alternate reason why they can't (or don't want to) leave.
I find these sorts of problems intriguing from a microeconomics perspective. There was a store in a small midwest town which closed because it couldn't afford to pay its workers, and felt if it raised its prices no one would shop there. The next closest store was 20 miles away. So people with the choice of buying something locally for 10 to 15% more than buying it remotely, it would seem would rather drive the 40 miles to get what ever it was they were looking for.
So how do economies get into these inversions? Is it globalization? is it an expectation of price or value? Is it the difference between economic action versus values?
So if Spain did pay a market wage what would impact be on other costs? Who do those companies sell to? In market? Out of market?
I'd say it is multidimensional problem. It's true there is a very high number of unskilled workers that are the ones that were left behind after the construction bubble. Their skills are in construction mainly and it's difficult for them to find a job.
But the low wages in skilled job are a prebubble problem. In fact I think they are due to a "titulitis". People (by traditional family request) needs to have a university tittle, and no real expert technician studies (really skilled electrician, plumbers, woodworkers, etc..) like in other countries like Germany were they are well respected and with high wages.
In fact the entry wage to construction worker was maybe double to the one any university graduate had. It was not uncommon for a construction unskilled worker to make in excess of 3000€/month while a fresh law or economy graduate with English and a Master couldn't find anything better than 1000€/month. Quite a shame and an inverted market.
Of course now with the bubble over, the 3000€ wages in construction are over, but the 1000€ wage for people with a title remains.
It's true that Spanish company owners don't expect that someone with a title will be able to add value behind the 1000€. I've been thinking why for quite sometime, one of the reasons is that most Spanish entrepreneurs used to be self-made, rising their business from the bottom with little formal education. So they didn't find that that education was truly valuable. Also the oversupply of graduates already before the bubble, made finding someone for the job easy. Another reason is that most Spanish people can rely on the family network so it was very rare to see someone moving to another city to find a Job, they rather stick to a low pay and stay close to family and friends. This has changed with the crisis, with people people with studies or experience emigrating to the EU and south America mainly.
I do think that Spanish people that goes abroad to work is mostly as good as the other European or American counterparts, hard-working and well prepared. But it's also true in Spain that a lot of people that is not interested in moving, are also not interested in making an effort in their jobs. I can say this of myself, I work as an airline pilot, and certainly wages are much higher in the middle east or asia. But I'm not interested in earning more just to be stranded in the middle of the dessert or in a megalopolis. I'd rather stay here where quality of life is very high even with a lower wage (family, friends, nature, culture, etc... are just 10 min away with awesome food and nightlife). For example one of my best friends is what you'll call a 10x programmer, is the star programmer and architect in a tour operator, he has built mostly alone and from scratch the core of a hotel reservation company with sales figures close to one billion €. He is the one who is called to put down fires or to handle difficult projects. He is very happy making around 100k€, when I'm quite sure he could be making 5x that in SV, and he is the best paid programmer in his company.
I know a number of business owners that complain of being unable to find people willing to do the work, it's true that the initial wage will not be very high, but usually are very specific jobs that need learning. And this business are interested in paying better once they have the skills. This includes electricians, beauty parlour worker, car mechanic, boat mechanic (I´m talking just positions I´ve learned are needed this last year). They find that workers are not interested in learning or working hard, just ask for what is the payment the first day, and they don't even know how to do the job!. Even people desperate are not willing to make the effort to learn a new skill or hard work, because most of them have the family that supports them. Even my friend complains that a high percent of his programmers are not interested in improving or learning new things.
In Spain most people want to be civil servants, entrepreneurship is something that just recently has started receiving some recognition. Before entrepreneurs were seen as just bosses that want to take profit of people, some kind of villain. That's why I'm not very bullish of the universal wage as an "universal" thing. You see that a high percentage of people is not interested in working any more once they are able to have enough money to live. We have this institutional envy in Spain were successful people (business or professionals) are seen as cheaters no matter what. You can not make money working hard, just cheating or stealing, so people don't even try. Don't take me wrong, there is very hard working people here, but they do it as their responsibility, because they like their job well done, even when they are poorly paid. Usually no as a way to improve their conditions or earn more.
In Spain living from the public money is for some like an art. Working in "b" jobs that are not registered so they can maintain the government help, or working just enough to have the next 6 months of unemployment, or trying to obtain a health disability (when they are fine). With the crisis all this went down, but still...
You also have to think that that as we had the Euro and we couldn't devalue the currency to keep up with the crisis, they had to devalue the whole country, taking most wages and prices a 15 to 20% down over 6 years. This has been very very painful to the economy, but I don't see they had other way to save the Spanish economy.
I must say that my experience is in Mallorca island and Madrid where the crisis has been melower than in the rest of Spain due to the tourism for example. There are towns in the middle of the peninsula, where unemployment is dramatic an nothing has come to replace construction even after all this time.
It's a complex problem both at the supply and the demand side. Companies don't value properly good workers, and also workers don't see their job as something to nurture, but as an inconvenience and the management as oppressors.
It depends very much on the products you offer. Necessities are much less sensitive to price raises than luxury goods when it comes to distance simply because not everybody is equally mobile.
What is wrong with Java/Python? I don't know about Java, but Python is certainly a nice language to write in in my opinion. (However don't expect raw performance from Python.)
It's not that they are bad languages, it's that they are the ones that everyone knows, so I don't believe that there are open positions on those languages that nobody wants, unless the money is obscenely low (which it often is).
Man, how things change. I remember times when most developers would derisively laugh off Python's indentation.
Back in 2006, Python jobs were so few and far between, you'd struggle to get paid to work with it. 10 years later, "everybody" works with it, so apparently you struggle to get paid a decent amount.
Why can't I ever find a niche I like and paying well? :(
I've actually found it pretty hard to find regular work focused on doing FP. My last job was Erlang when I started, but pivoted to Go because of a lack of Erlang developers. My last two jobs before that were mixes of C and Haskell, but only because I was given the lattitude to select haskell. This time around when I was interviewing I was trying to find something that would let me focus on FP, but the best I could find were jobs that ostensibly wanted to hire Clojure and Scala devs, but really 90% of the job would be maintaining a bunch of legacy enterprise architecturey Java with just enough FP to try to attract people into the positions.
Become a sysadmin that writes tools (which is more like old-school system
programmer, the one who wrote grep and syslog and init and bash and awk).
Since you're nominally a sysadmin, nobody will look at your workbench to check
if you're using "kosher" languages, so you're free to use whatever makes sense
to solve a problem (hint: not always a functional language).
Been there, done that, been happy with the approach.
I know a couple of people who do something like that. I don't think it would work well for me though, since I had to resign from my current job because although it was a developer role there was a good bit of sysadmin required and I just find that work extremely unrewarding.
Go vs. Erlang feels like a pretty difficult comparison to make because they feel entirely different. Erlang isn't a bad language, but it never felt like more than a very flexible DSL to me. If you look at OTP with a critical eye, it's actually not much more than a lot of tooling on top of a state monad; and my limited experience with using the language professional makes me feel like you're buying a lot of code complexity and you need a very strong group of people with a lot of erlang experience to make that complexity pay off. Some of the process management and hot code updates and such that used to be really beneficial are less beneficial now that we have so many other solutions to managing containers and microservices, and the language itself, while functional, never really felt to me like it was achieving the power and expressiveness of other functional languages I've used. A lot of that seems cultural; I wrote a little toy monadic library in Erlang when I was trying to help teach some coworkers about ideas from other functional languages and how we could use them in our codebase (https://github.com/rebeccaskinner/erl_m) but I don't see a lot of libraries like that coming out of the wider Erlang community- there seems to be a much stronger focus on solving a single concrete problem than on making development in the language better overall.
As for Go, I do like the language- well enough that I took another job where I'll be mostly using it. I can't quite shake the feeling that some of the syntactical and stylistic choices were made more to be different than because they are better, but I can move past them. I think goroutines and channels have a lot of potential as atoms of concurrency for building models going forward, and I think it's nice to see a language gaining popularity that is focused on being small (in the sense of the size of the spec) and simple (in terms of feature interactions). I don't think a lot of it's potential has been realized yet, and I hope that we can take some of the lessons learned from other languages, e.g. Conduits and FRP from Haskell. For right now I've seen enough cases of people introducing threading errors and problems introduced by the user of pointers that I think it pays to be wary of third party libraries.
I didn't read it as necessarily knocking those languages, but saying most programmers had experience in those languages. And most jobs did not ask for any unusual skills, so companies should be able to find decent local developers.
I find it hard to find it hard to find remote jobs in the EU for Python anyway. There are a lot of shops depending on it (Django for instance) in the northern countries but they basically want you to sit in an office there. For Java (PHP, ... ) jobs are far easier to get remotely.
If there's lots of local workers that can't or won't leave, is there opportunities to run outsourcing firms? It sounds like a $50k euro salary would allow you to cherry pick devs, or am I wrong?
1. cárnicas is an awesome term for what native English markets would call a "body shop".
2. You're probably looking more for the term "meat market" than for "butcher". Unless, is part of the implication that a cárnicas somehow chops up the time of a bunch of FTE's?
ps -- in english, meat market colloquially means a bar where young people go to get drunk and meet one night stands. Stereotypically frat boys w/ popped collars and sorority sisters in miniskirts. Before gordaco uses that in conversation, I thought I'd share...
Also true! I just wondered if that was closer to the spirit of the Spanish term. It would be funny if it wasn't, and they really were trying to evoke people being cut up by butchers.
It's super funny to me but unfortunately american english has picked a different meaning already. I just had an image of him dropping that into conversation with some Americans and things being badly misunderstood...
For a while my former employer used a Spanish software consultancy for second level support on an open source solution; they were happy to work with us because we paid well [0] and didn't argue on every bill like their other (mostly south American I think) clients did.
[0]: my boss told me literally to tell them: contract is fine, except for the hourly rate, I should tell them he would not accept to be associated with such a cheap rate so they would have to add 20% to their prices.
I use this now that I hire through upwork as well. Espescially when you hire across the globe you get chances to build good relationships for peanuts compared to around here. (Oh, works with kids as well: you can buy many lifetime friends before they become teenagers.)
As a 18-old Polander I was absolutely thrilled to work part-time for a US company. In hindsight, it was also much more valuable for me than academic education I pursued later.
I would be offended if someone called this child labour and attempted to limit this opportunity.
>> Oh, works with kids as well: you can buy many lifetime friends before they become teenagers.)
> Are you seriously saying you are using child labour?
No, I say I buy myself friends and happy consultants that come back. The link is when you are in an advantage position (parent with small children, western SW company that use remote consultants) it takes next to no effort to make a difference in someones life.
Was your "before they become teenagers" statement perhaps in error? I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, and ethical concerns aside, I have trouble imagining even a brilliant 12-year-old producing code you'd want to use in a commercial product. (Speaking as someone who started coding at 7.)
Perhaps you're mistaken about the meaning of "teenager"?
I'm not mistaken about the meaning of teenager but eiter my writing is unclear or some people are obsessed with reading it as me recommending child labour.
The "work" part is about consultants.
The "friends" part is about mine and relatives kids.
No, I do not try to extract value from kids.
And the youngest person I have seen coding anything useful was a 16 year that managed to complete 70+ days of effective 9-5 work in 14 afternoons.
He got a nice job (at well above market rate IIRC) at the compiler division at one of the big IT companies after finishing his bachelors degree a few years later.
Leaving aside the validity of the 10x programmer concept, the company still needs to be able to extract that extra performance in actual value. Most software jobs in Spain don't have productivity of that kind. Almost no companies here develop software products or services whose effectiveness translates directly into revenue. Very few of those who have tried have had any sort of long-term success.
Several years ago I took over the lead UI position at a company. Jira has a feature to display lines of code contributed by developer. After 10 months of adding features, and getting the product to shipping, I had contributed -1500 lines. There were less lines than when I started, and the code was simpler for it. I'd _almost_ say that LOC is a good measure of bad coding.
It's a general thing about data. Just because it is easy to measure doesn't mean its a useful metric.
My hunch is that as expertise increases for developers, LOC/day initially goes up, as they have to think less about language constructs and how to do certain things. Once a certain level of expertise is reached, LOC/day goes down, as the developer figures out how to do more with less code and spends more time in decision making and planning.
I think you're missing Jare's point. You don't need an amazingly powerful engine in your car to go at 20 miles/hour, just as companies don't need 10x programmers to work on the types of software problems that Jare asserts Spanish companies are working on.
In my experience, the real '10x' productivity bump comes from engineers who can internalize huge swaths of the codebase and make all of the necessary connections. Given a large enough product, that will be out of reach for the majority, due to either dedication or capacity. Hearing about a new feature and instantly knowing the implementation points and consequences instead of having to fumble around parts of the system you're not familiar with is easily '10x,' LOC be damned.
I've worked with developers that commit far far more code than i do. I still find it intimidating. I take solice in replacing those 50kloc subsystems with a few interfaces and a handful of implementations. Those -40kloc days are awesome.
To be fair, those guys that throw out tons of code really explore the problem space. it's tough to start with a clean design when the spec is vague.
You don't have to claim "10x more LOC", if your abstractions are powerful enough to capture a vast breadth of situations in an elegant and not-an-over-inefficient manner.
If you could achieve this feat, I'd say you are already a 10x type programmer. It's good you are better at abstraction, you may not be 10x but you may be 5x/4x and that's significant.
LOC is the worst measure of productivity, but sadly, most managers (mainly, the excel sheet type managers) find it easy because they can use LOC in their shitty formulas.
Have you considered working remotely for a US company? I know a guy making €7 or 8,000 per month, after tax, living in Paris. Best of both worlds: amazing quality of living, cheap cost of living + healthcare, lots of spending (or investing) money! Seems to be working well for him.
Amazing remote jobs exist: I have one. The problem is to find a company that has those remote jobs AND will hire people they don't have a huge background on.
I know a recruiter at a company like that that worked on a point system: Barring a recommendation, to pass his bar you had to have 5 years of experience in the industry for what he considered a major tech company, a degree from a top university, and a history of promotions during those years.
So he is fine with hiring all over the world, as long as you had already worked at trendy Silicon Valley companies for a while (In practice, using them as a recruiting filter). So, for all intents and purposes, the only people passing that bar would be people that already had a great job. Someone with talent but without pedigree would not even get an interview.
Paris is much less expensive than the bay area, but more expensive than the average US city. In fact, it's barely less expensive than NYC, one of the most expensive US cities.
Also, if you are working remotely you cannot command a bay area salary.
You can command a bay area salary. There are a lot of companies out there who cannot find skills because everyone is in the bay area, and want to work at the coolest company possible.
There are a lot of uncool companies who need those same skills, and will pay to get them.
Hell, they pay consultants far more to fly in and do the work if they can't find someone remotely.
would you be willing to name some of those companies who need and will pay for said skills? I think it's time programmers get away from the propaganda of the big 5 being cool, which artificially supresses the market imho.
Yes. Specifically, rents are much higher in SF/SV than in NYC. SF has even higher rent than Manhattan. Most of NYC (not Manhattan or Williamsburg) can be quite reasonable.
Does SF gave rent brokers you have to go through? Manhattan you have to pay first/last rent to a broker plus deposit you need around 8-$12k to sign any lease up front
Broker's fees of 15% or even 20% seemed to be fairly common last time I was looking in Manhattan several years ago. It's definitely not pegged at one month anymore nowadays even in Brooklyn.
I moved from SF to Manhattan and found the prices and the process of finding an apartment easier. Most of my San Francisco friends dare not move or move to Oakland. People move here in NYC all the time, paying roughly the same in rent accounting for yearly inflation related increases.
Thanks for the reminder! Of course from time to time I consider the possibility. There's no particular reason why I don't give it a shot, other than the global competition for US remote gigs.
Probably it's easier when you specialise in a niche language - which I'm doing lately!
Same here. I know at least 4 people who are making six figure (US) salaries working for a US company from Europe. All for the same company and it's kind of hard to get in, but still...
I know a lot of US companies hiring remotely. Two reasons: 1) costs (you're not competing with Google and Facebook on salary, at least not directly) and somewhat related 2) bigger applicant pool. This is especially true if you're looking for specific skills - much easier to find somebody if you're looking at 10x market. For many developer positions, having a person in the office is not much better than having remote employee, and may be both more expensive. You don't really have to be "very special", just plain good, and there are a lot of good developers all over the globe.
Unfortunately I can't give good advice as I know most of these people after they were hired, and didn't ask them how they were hired. I know there are companies doing that, and social networks are also very useful in it, otherwise there are companies like http://www.safeguardworld.com/ (just one I know, not a recommendation since I never worked with it, but I know some people who did and found good remote jobs) which usually help connecting employers and employees.
Or have to move because of H1B which ends after 3 years, and it's pure luck to get an extension in time. That's how I ended back in Germany doing remote for US.
I find that salary excessive tbh. I understand working remotely for a US company and get a US based salary, truth is that the companies that will do that are mostly startups and I don't think they have the funds for high end salaries. Except if you are a genius dev and they do need you and you go off and tell them that you want to work from home and live in another Country.
I do think though you can get jobs that pay around 2000-3000 euros a month when working remotely, although you have to be very patient as it is some kind of contracting, I mean you won't exactly get all the employment rights you would get if you lived and worked at the country that the company is set.
2000-3000 Euro/month is incredibly low. Fresh devs around here go for $50k+ annually, and experience costs 6 figures easily (and I'm in Philadelphia, I'm not talking SF/NY numbers).
Edit (pressed submit early): some companies use remote workers to reduce costs, but I wouldn't expect to pay such a low $36k max in Europe. Remote, if managed well, is just as good as in-house. You're not worth significantly less.
You have to consider that here in a lot of sud-west EU states 3000e/month allow you to live VERY GOOD even in the main cities. Cost of life here is extremly low compared to that of SV.
Forget Silicon Valley: It's gotten stupid expensive. The rest of the US, however, has not.
I lived in Spain, and moved to the middle of the US, to a city that is about the same size as Valencia: Here, A 4 bedroom house can be had for $200K. Groceries are often cheaper here. Cars are WAY cheaper here, barring a few EU luxury brands. My mother's electricity bill, in an apartment less than half the size of my house, is double mine, so the cost of living is in no way higher than in Spain.
The difference is that someone right out of school will make 60K. A completely average senior dev makes 100K. The last time I had local work I had a long term hourly contract, 40/week average, that paid $125 an hour, so 20K a month. Today I make more.
So in Spain you have a cost of living that is not really any better, far higher taxes, and pay that would be seen as pretty low for a recent college graduate. Every time I visit, and people ask me why I don't come back, I just go through the economics, and Spaniards quickly agree that I'd have to be insane to come back.
Why make €3,000 when you can easily make €6,000 or €8,000 doing the same work? Unlike a lawyer or a doctor, software engineering can easily be "exported" and done from anywhere in the world. You just need to be _good_.
I agree. I was just saying that, anyway, with 3000e/m you are not living a bad life, you are instead pretty """rich""" for the standars here. Indeed, if you can, better improve it.
It depends also on how many hours do you work. Here is pretty common you never go over 38hours week, and if you have to you are compensated very well (1.5~2.5 x normal hour rate).
For what I read (but probably there is a little bias in it) in SV there is a partially workcentered style of life when you have to work often >60h with a salaried contract (that, btw, here in EU they do not exist... you are paid with an explicit amount of hours per week in your contract). For example reading the book of Elon Musk it seems he asks constantly for 80/90h/w working also on the weekend. Consider also that.
Oh and also you have not to pay anything for healtcare.
Basically, as other have already said, if you manage to live in Italy-France-Spain-Portugal-Germany and you are capable to get a remote work for a company in US you will have a incredibly high level of life here.
It is not quite bad as it may seen in SV. Most people work 8am to 5pm as gauged by the traffic peak periods. Some start earlier or later but most work around 40 hours. Rarely do you see much traffic or people at work on the weekends. There are certainly places where people work like long hours but one doesn't have to work in those places. There are plenty of other options.
I don't know how it works in Spain, but in Italy the cost of an employee is probably much more than his/her salary.
The employer gives you a salary, then they have to pay on top of it ~30% of INAIL, INPS etc. (pension, health "insurance" including sick days and so on) and ~10% of TFR (fund you get back at the end of your career.)
In the U.S. those are costs you have to remove from your salary.
So, 3000 euros a month would be 6000 euros before taxes and if you add the other employer costs, it's about 10000. Now convert it to dollars and you have a 130000 dollars a year.
When hiring contractors the company doesn't have to pay any of these things (it's on the contractor). I'm currently contracting for a company in Italy and getting much more than 3k/mo.
You are speaking about gross salary I guess. I don't really believe that in Italy you can get much more of 3k€ net as a developer. And contracting market in Italy is really fucked up, when I was there on average contractors were paid less than permies.
Don't know about Italy, but at least in some EU countries, freelancers do build pension.
In my country, pension payments is mandatory. As well as insurance for maternity/paternity leave. I've full medical insurance. Well, as full as regular workers. The only difference is I don't have paid sick days and can't claim unemployment benefits. Which kinda makes sense when freelancing.
I think I'm eligible for disabled pension though. So if I got hit by car, I'd get free treatment. But no salary compensation. If I was rendered disabled, I may be eligible for disabled benefits based on my previous incomes. Or at least basic disabled benefits.
Cost of employee is always higher than salary. Bear in mind that employee have to pay (feed) himself, government, management, company revenue etc. It's simply not possible to create business value 10 000 € and get all of them into own pocket. At least not as standard employee.
It depedns on definition of gross or super-gross salary. It may vary per country.
But...employee is always the only one who have to create value for customer who will give company his money. It doesnt matter who pay taxes (even health or social "insurance" are kind of taxes) value needs to be created and customer needs to be charged. Employer will not pay (long terrrm view) your bills and taxes from own pocket (dont consider early startup phases)
your feeding corrupt governments in a mandatory way with out a way to get out of the system (i don't want a government pension or the so called "free" social/medical care)
in spain your pretty much putting your money in fund they may not be there by the time you retire.
so making 3k a month is peanuts there is no way you can save for retirement.
most specialist will tell you that you will need to save anything from 500k to 1M for retirement. if you have kids, 3k its probably a stretch specially if you want to give them a good education.
€1500 a month is €18K a year, I believe Portugal has about 28% income tax for €7-20K income bracket (which seems very high), so it is roughly about €25K before taxes.
And you are saying this is a good as it gets for Software Engineers. I was looking up real estate prices in Lisbon and they seemed pretty high. Per my understanding a lot of people from EU (and some outside of EU) are buying real estate in Portugal and that drives prices up. How do local people buy real estate then?
What websites do local people in Portugal use for real estate sales and rentals?
I would advise anyone to stay away from Lisbon regarding housing as there's some kind of bubble over here because of all the tourism. The rest of the country has saner prices, so if you don't really need to live in Lisbon, stay away from it..
Regarding locals, we have a problem which is that when daily workers leave Lisbon, you can only find the tourists looking at each other..
We do lease for everything, TV, computer, car, house, vacation, you name it.
Before the crisis you could get full credits, with 0% entry on your side.
It is also quite common to live with the parents and only leave when you eventually marry, with one salary being used to pay the bank and other running costs.
Or you get to buy a little piece of land with an house that gets built with lot of shortcuts along the years.
Not sure what the best websites are, as I am living abroad, however many local agencies lack Internet presence. The best sources are ads on local newspapers or word of mouth.
Let me correct your numbers. For 1500€ monthly net your employer will pay about 3000€ (~20% income tax + ~30% social security). Multiply by 14 (Yes there are 14 salaries in a year. Don't ask.) and the yearly gross is 42000€.
Edit: https://casa.sapo.pt/ for a look at the real estate market. "para venda" is for sale, "para alugar/aluguer" is for rent.
You're apparently unaware that not all tax appears on your salary receipt. Employers have to pay 20% to SS, on top of the 11% that the employee pays. (This amount doesn't count toward your gross income for IRS purposes though, which is relevant to your point)
The distinction is largely a technicality, all the more because both parts of the SS contribution are paid by the employer directly to the state, but it does have one effect: because the 20% don't show up in the salary receipt, most portuguese people are, like you, blissfully unaware of what the real tax rate on their salaries is.
You're responding to a statement I didn't make. I just corrected the common misconception that the SS tax is 11%, it's not, it's 34.75% [0]
What would happen if those taxes were lowered is for economists to speculate, I'm not one (even then, as the joke goes, put a question to two economists, get three different opinions)
Local people will hardly ever buy a property within Lisbon center. Advantageous tax and citizenship acquiring policies for foreigners drived prices extremely high. Suburbs are the only solution as soon as you get a family and renting a room is not an option anymore.
Even renting is way harder right now. Landlords prefer to rent central properties via AirBnb than to make cheaper long term contracts.
I suggest taking a look at HN's "Who is Hiring" monthly threads. Try to focus on remote work for Bay Area companies - minimum should be $100k/annually for a good dev.
When I have been on the interviewing side, and I see what you are talking about, but there seems to plenty of decent devs when I go to the python meetup group.
>Probably because they don't have the notion of a 10x programmer at all.
I don't think the 10x programmer is a valid concept. If a company believes they can easily replace you for that price, then chances are you aren't working on anything that that makes you irreplaceable. Why should an employer pay you more for the same amount of work? I also have reservations about looking at work as "an intimate family-like relationship". It's all families and sunshines until an investor pulls out and its time for layoffs.
I don't think there is such a thing as a 10x programmer if we're just talking about implementation. Where there is easily a 10x factor or more is making the right architectural decisions up front. An experienced dev can avoid making mistakes that can doom a project right out of the gate.
Another way to make an order of magnitude difference is to approach the problem from the 'why' perspective and come up with a different solution that is a lot less work.
> Or, they cannot really appreciate the quality or even the speed of my work. Clueless people abound.
Many "10x programmers" aren't anywhere near 10x faster/better/etc in an environment full of 1x programmers. I think "exponential" would be a better description than 10x. If you watch them in the short term they look similar to the 1x programmers. If you distribute their exponential gains over the whole team then this will always be true. These types are like successful hedge fund managers in the domain of technical investment and debt. If you let them work alone long enough you'll start to see their foresight paying dividends.
I think you can easily be a 10x developer, since 10x is relative. Especially in a world awash in bad developers. Just being familiar with the right algorithms and software approaches vis-a-vis your co-workers will do that. I've seen "enterprise" code that was doing tons of string key-value pair lookups using arrays. Just converting those to hashtables could very well speed up the app by 10+ times if the key-value lookups were the bottleneck. I can imagine a poorly performing database program being sped up by 10 times just by having the right person refactor the code to use caching to avoid database reconnections. This is what I think of when I think of a 10x developer; they may not be literally 10x better but their code can be 10x faster or use 1/10th the memory or be 1/10 the size of competing developers.
Your comment is totally reasonable. You're being down-voted because the sentiment of that statement is so negative but in some ways it's true. There is widespread encouragement from society for individuals to learn how to program. In the last 5 decades the group that operates primarily from this motivation has exploded. The much older fanatical nerd group (originating with Charles Babbage himself) has seen more modest growth. This latter group operates primarily from intrinsic motivation. They would have an earnest desire to achieve the improvements you've stated. Simply to see if they can. Their love for their craft and overall playful orientation eventually accumulates. They quickly familiarize themselves with the whole bag of tricks. They have wet dreams about things like binary search. You just can't compete with someone who loves what they do. The more monetary incentive there is to do something the more those people are few and far between. So yes, I agree that the phenomenon is relative and that it is so extreme (10x) mostly because so many developers are merely "good enough" (1x). I still think there's a lot to be said about how much an environment enables the expression of a 10x programmer. It is most common that "good enough" really is good enough and going extreme doesn't make anything better.
I have no problem speaking of bad developers because I myself was one. Now, I am probably above average and in some organizations maybe even a "10x" developer. But I shudder thinking of some of the code samples that I've sent to prospective employers in my earlier days (~12 years ago) -- code that I thought was good and clever. Probably most junior developers are bad and I suspect a lot more code gets written by junior developers than we'd like to think. The senior developers get to work on the interesting problems and they leave the necessary but boring coding work to the junior developers.
I was also a bad developer. Then I was a "clever" developer. Then I was rewriting everything from nothing because I needed to know how it worked. Doing so is a great way to get a sense of how much "secret sauce" there is in a domain. The C++ standard library has a lot for instance. My naive implementations never came close.
> I suspect a lot more code gets written by junior developers than we'd like to think.
This may be true if you just measure lines of code. But if you couple that measure with the number of times each line was actually executed I suspect you'd see a different story. My library, for example, was comparable in size to parts of the standard library it replaced. So by direct measure a junior developer wrote half the code. But when you measure it by usage you can see the magnificent results of the 10x programmers at Boost and otherwise working on the C++ standard library. Notably their 10x-ness is in the performance of their code and not their performance on the job. Like you described.
People with experience in the field have been telling me I am a very good programmer. I always compare myself to the car mechanic who holds a screwdriver to the engine, puts his ear on it, and immediately hears that the third valve needs replacement.
That's a really nice hierarchy. I'd argue a 10x business value developer is a 10x technical developer AND a 10x product designer. Also that a 10x manager is a 10x business value developer AND a 10x leader/coordinator. The rarity compounds with the number of passions that must converge on a single individual. I'd bet you get a bit of a bump with a partial set. So a 10x technical developer may be able to operate as a 2x business value developer without significant product design skill. A 6x manager may get by with average technical ability.
I'm not sure how much the 10x thing generalizes. I still think it's a terrible name. I sort of gave an argument for why programming ability may have a bimodal distribution. With one half growing and eventually eating the other. I don't necessarily see that same phenomenon in leadership or product design. That is assuming you're looking at people who are actually trying and not just random technical developers.
The 10x thing happens all the time. What should happen is that a way for he 10x person to teach or otherwise influence the other members of the team should be in play, but constructing a robust set of incentives for that is difficult.
We are on Ruby, Sinatra, Rails, Nginx, Lua & not afraid of new technologies.
Our open positions are on https://www.3scale.net/about/jobs/
We're based in Barcelona, but had remote workers in the past and still might be opened to that after some warmup time. On some hiring sites we were publically posting 50k EUR for Senior Backend Developer.
Being here for 5 years I can say there is plenty of growth space for good developers. Cheers.
But the problem I see is that the top people you might want would have no problem finding a similar position in a US company for 2x-3x that salary. So what how do you compete in the global economy with a 50+% salary cut? Do most of your developers only speak Spanish? Or do they have their roots firmly set in Spain (family/friends/relationships)?
I had the chance to interview (and get offered) by a company in the area. For context, I'm from the area but have been living abroad for some time now.
The internal recruiter was honest with their problems finding talent abroad: People have families and, even though there are cheap flights inside Europe, if you have a partner and maybe kids things change. Life there is great with a good salary, but chances are your partner also has a professional career. If it's outside IT, your partner is pretty much screwed: Little jobs, terrible salaries, no English-speaking outside IT and a disdain for foreigners in more traditional industries. "Why hire a foreigner when I can hire someone local?" seems to be an acceptable attitude for a majority of the population, even though we're talking about people with the right to work, so there's no extra effort, paperwork or burden to the employer.
On the other hand, you have beach, culture, food, night life, mountains (even the Pyrenees), a cosmopolitan city in such a tiny radius that you can enjoy each of those every so often. Plus an international airport that can get you in a few hours anywhere in Europe and North Africa. And it's cheap to live there.
If someone is wondering now why I didn't go back, these were my concerns: Career development (none was offered) and stability. I'm up for well paid risks, but if that position disappears (it was newly created) I have to move country again. Such a pain in the ass.
> finding a similar position in a US company for 2x-3x that salary
Remote or ? Because I don't think it's that easy to find them remote with (often) hampered English language skills and very different interviews than we have here in Europe. And moving to the US is also not that easy even if you have a job, partially because it's a life altering decision which moves you far away from family. For a lot of people that's not worth the increase.
Edit: also, it is really cheap, depending on where you (want to) live to buy houses. So your 'compared low' salary actually brings you quite far. I am a weirdo in that regard though (at least compared to most on HN); I don't like living in cities. But even there it's not expensive if you look in the right places. Exceptions are there ofcourse yadayada.
I am sorry I was talking about the best people, and I haven't yet met anyone who is really great technically but has hampered English skills.
> "Remote or ?" / "And moving to the US is also not that easy even if you have a job, partially because it's a life altering decision which moves you far away from family. For a lot of people that's not worth the increase."
Totally agree, that is why some people choose to stay even if it's not the best for their career. The salary is definitely not the only reason to move out of Spain in Tech.
Maybe because working remote is not for everyone. I actually really enjoy working with people in our office. They are awesome. I relocated there few years ago and we are not only colleagues but also friends. Some people don't speak Spanish at all. Everyone has to speak English. That is official language of the company.
I'm from Barcelona, living in Denmark and moving to SF soon. I have a couple of friends working in 3scale, and they seem happy. It looks like a good company to work for.
My plan is going back to BCN at some point, so if you are still searching for backends then, I will give you a call. ;)
I know a lot of employees or freelancers making a lot more working for companies in Malaga or companies elsewhere; more said it but get projects abroad; worked well for us. A problem here is that you need USPs because in Portugal people are working for a lot less than in Spain, all speak English and very willing to take whatever work. Also less rules; easy to fire people in the first few years.
> companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving
where does that come from?
> Tech stacks tend to be years behind San Francisco,
That is a problem? I would say that's kind of an advantage? Most programmers would find it more of a problem to learn new stuff all the time.
> I know a lot of employees or freelancers making a lot more working for companies in Malaga or companies elsewhere;
I talked about the rule - undoubtedly there are exceptions. I once interviewed for a senior position for a prominent Malaga company, and they offered me less than my first job ever here in Barcelona.
> Most programmers would find it more of a problem to learn new stuff all the time.
One could argue that London/SF programmers do exactly that - and are compensated accordingly!
We are in the technology business - by definition those who don't keep up are left behind. Maybe not drastically, but gradually and without you noticing.
> We are in the technology business - by definition those who don't keep up are left behind. Maybe not drastically, but gradually and without you noticing.
I agree, i'm saying many programmers would not think that a problem as long as the market demands those 'older' technologies. If you read HN or /r/programming you might think you are missing out all the time; if you make E200k+ at BBVA as senior dev you really wouldn't notice any of that. You would be using stuff that hasn't changed massively for over a decade. I would wager that a lot (most) programmers would prefer the latter to the former. Not me, not you, but many would.
Developers are not fungible. But in my opinion: this "10x" term really has to go away. We need a better way to describe the reality that there's a range in quality and capability for developers that doesn't suggest an order of magnitude. That just means corner cutting.
I've seen order of magnitude differences in performance among developers. The baseline was competent still, mind you; it's just some people are really, really good at their job. And it's not just "oh they put 10x as much LOC while really smart people would focus on proper design": they excel both in theory and practice.
A problem however that you can't really see it in the hiring process. Unlike "0.1x developers" whom you can filter with fizzbuzz, they are indistinguishable from a normal, competent engineer in the interviews, and there aren't many of them around.
Either way, building your company to depend on being staffed by top performers is a dangerous strategy IMO.
I'm sure technical ability falls on a curve like all other human abilities/activities. Like take weight lifting. Most people will be around the middle. Some will be able to lift heavier, some will be able to lift less. But if two people are training I would not expect one person to lift "10x" the next person. No way, no how.
It is a bit silly, but try thinking of it as "one developer who helps makes ten others be twice as productive". It could even be a non-technical manager who is really good at taking care of all of the non-development work for the team, allowing them to focus on what they do best.
Why don't you think the range covers an order of magnitude? Salaries certainly do. There would have to be an explanation for why companies are behaving wildly irrationally for that to not indicate a similar range of employee output.
For a senior developer, let's say 10 year working experience, there are some jobs above 50k but they are an small percentage. If I were a fresh graduate, or senior willing to relocate, my advice for any spanish engineer would be to move out of Spain: better salaries, better working conditions and better working culture overall. The EU it's a huge opportunity, don't limit yourself.
36,000 euro in, say, Valencia, that's close to 100,000 dollars in San Francisco when adjusting for purchasing power. Not great but certainly not that bad either. For someone with three years experience. I know a team of developers south of Valencia who make way more than that. They work out of a mansion with an infinity pool. Doing simple websites.
Whereas 36,000 euro in Southern Spain (where the unemployment is high) is not fantastic, it doesn't seem all that bad. In few industries employees would complain about that. And how many years of university education do you need to get to there: often none.
The wages for a programmer in Indiana aren't bad in context, either. I still chose to move to New York for a better paying job there.
Why? Well, firstly, it's a real kick in the pants to get paid half what you could elsewhere, even if you're paying rent and eating out for half the price. Secondly, computers, student loans, automobiles, and AWS services cost the same whether I'm in New York or Indiana, so I'd rather get paid twice as much, thank you very much.
It's amazing how often "structural unemployment" is just "we don't want to pay what people want to be paid".
> I know a team of developers south of Valencia who make way more than that. They work out of a mansion with an infinity pool. Doing simple websites.
Sounds like a great setup to raise a family... not.
Just saying, what sounds amazing for young and single white guys might not be great for the rest of the population. Wouldn't it be better if each of them could have their own flat and privacy for the same price?
I guess Upwork is the leading place to find freelancers. It's a race to the bottom (i.e. competing with third-world devs) though so that can discourage one.
Then there's Linkedin. Personally if I receive a job offer from outside Spain I assume it's clueless recruiter spam. Your message should be extremely clear that you are actively seeking remote developers from abroad.
Basically yea, LinkedIn, hacker news, local recruiters. When searching or posting an offer, do it in Spanish, if not most Spanish people searching wont find it.
> Also, companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving.
Have they ever considered that programmers might be less likely to leave if they got a decent salary?
I've got to say, much of this sounds familiar. In Netherland, I used to hear companies complain that it was so hard to find technical people (programming and otherwise). At the same time, the jobs I saw didn't really pay all that much. The solution is simple: pay better, and people will come.
The problem is that in Netherland, management is/was seen as better, more important, higher status and deserving of better pay than programming. So for a programmer to move on beyond a certain point, he'd have to go into management. If programming jobs were seen as equal to management (in status and pay), programmers would have no reason to switch. Netherland is very much a management-oriented culture, for some reason.
Another is education. Politicians always kept talking about the knowledge economy, while at the same time cutting costs for education, and there was not a particular stimulus for technical education. And students are more likely to choose something management-related when they think there's more money there.
I'm talking somewhat in the past tense, because it feels to me like things have changed. I made enormous jumps in income over the past couple of years (could be because of the switch to freelancing and mostly working for banks since then), and the management-over-tech attitude seems to have diminished a bit (though that could be because of Scrum, which emphasizes empowered development teams and makes management somewhat redundant at times). I don't have any recent data on this, though. Maybe it's just my personal situation that has gotten better.
Sadly if employers are able to pay so low it's because there's a serious oversupply of devs... On another note how possible is for a non European to get a job in Spain?
There are few, although not many counter-examples. We run Mobile Jazz [1], which is an international boutique agency with headquarters in Barcelona. We're trying to treat our employees extremely fairly and have managed to gain some of the best talent not only in Spain, but also internationally.
Here some of the things we do:
- Pay fair salaries: 54k€ / year (before tax) for those that work full-time
- We distribute the companies profits every quarter with our employees as bonuses. Although we're planning to retain more of that in the future to reinvest in internal projects.
- Everyone can choose to work from wherever they like (one guy is currently traveling around the world with his wife) and you can work as much as you like (as long as it is planned properly in advance). Some people prefer to work less and spend more time with their kids or go kitesurfing. Others decided to reduce to 1/2 time and study again (just for fun) the other 50%.
- 3-4 times per year we organize 1-2 month long company retreats [2], where we rent a villa in a nice location with good Internet and work remotely. This year we went to Cape Town and Bali. Last year we went to Thailand and skiing in the Alps. In October we're going to Martinique (Caribbean)
- We support our employees with internal project ideas, even the most crazy ones, like the automated Nespresso Ordering Machine [3] or those that have turned into actual products, like Bugfender [4].
Summarized we treat our employees very well and give them a lot of responsibility and autonomy. And it all pays off. Our clients and customer are extremely happy and since inception (2009) we didn't have to make on single outbound sale. All clients came to us through word of mouth and recommendations from existing clients.
On top of that it gives me personally a lot of freedom and peace of mind, because I know I can fully trust and rely on our employees. For example just two months ago I completely disconnected and decided to work on a small sailing boat for a month (just for fun, as a life and learning experience) crossing the Pacific from Micronesia to New Caledonia [blog post coming soon].
We're also about to launch a niche entrepreneurial community for similar-minded people called: O4H - Optimizing for Happiness (instead of profit) [5].
Feel free to email me (email address in my HN profile). I'm always happy to connect with like minded people.
For those that are looking for a job, check out our Jobs API on our website [1]. Although, to be fair I'd like to mention that we currently don't want to grow a lot more in team size (currently 20 engineers and designers), but rather focus on getting traction with our products. But that will probably change in the future again.
Not all of us want to go on retreats overseas with coworkers, especially if we have a spouse and kids, but definitely some people prefer that kind of environment at work.
Interestingly enough, this may be the kind of scenario that you may face in London if the UK really leaves the EU and shut down the free movement of workers, ie, being unable to find skilled workers inside your own borders..
Not only that, another factor to take into account is that very few Spanish companies are willing to sponsor a work visa, and, don't even get me started on the perma-intern scam for professionals with 10years of experience.
- The maximum salary a developer can earn at any given company is almost written in stone - around 36000 euros. Every public job posting will have that figure as the max. When it's higher, they'll water it down in the interview.
Why? Probably because they don't have the notion of a 10x programmer at all. We all are perceived as 'equal' or even replaceable.
- Also, companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving. The sole hint of that you may leave will turn their red alarms on, and they'll start searching a replacement.
There rarely exists here the mentality that a work relationship is a commercial exchange, not an intimate family-like relationship. Being open to the market is not 'treason'.
- Tech stacks tend to be years behind San Francisco, whether is languages, frameworks, ops practices...
- Functional programming opportunities extremely scarce. Elixir is gaining traction here though.