If only they were even that - there is still quite big demand for even unskilled labor. Instead they are usually allergic to any type of work, and just looking forward to receive some benefits.
Don't assume this is targeted only at Syrians. Your parent describes a situation we're confronted with in general. Locals and immigrants alike have understood that the optimal quality of life option in europe is to not work. Can't blame them when you see the alternatives at that level of qualification
First of all, only small fraction of so called "refugees" storming EU are actual refugees, and even smaller fraction is from Syria. They come from whole Middle East and North Africa, including Libia, Egypt, Iraq, even Pakistan. And it is well known that they have demanding attitude:
in fact, none of them is refugee, because by definition used in international laws, they stop being refugees the moment they come to first safe country on their way, namely Turkey, so they enter EU as plain old economic immigrants.
No short term benefits but a lot of long term benefits.
Germany has one of the largest aging population in Europe. They have just added a lot of people to their population and can use them however they like. Do not worry about germans they always knew how to screw with people.
Just look at the number of factories that operate outside of Germany and how many people they require in order to keep the machinery running. I do not hate them. I do not detest them. I am just scared at how they run things. And other countries seem to follow because they also want to take advantage of it.
I fail to see how having people translates into having jobs, skilled labor, etc. This crisis is about automation, there is no need for more people. It is also well-accepted that migrants contribute less to the economy, either due to lower wages or simply because they are unemployable.
Germany needs new germans. Or people that will speak german. You can't automate everything. Not yet. A lot of automation today is TOO expensive. Requires too much maintenance and some other stuff cannot be automated at all.
Or are you telling me that wiping old people's asses is something that has been already solved by building robots ?
I had to scan some documents, but otherwise the process was mostly handled by the company. I had to do a couple meetings to finish the process once I moved but they put me on a temporary visa until that happened.
Bollocks. Read the whole article. They can't compete with GB or Germany in terms of salaries nothing to do with shortage of people.
They just want to be able to hire Indians,Pakistanis or whoever will be willing to work for the fraction of what even an unskilled person from a remote village in Romania would ask for.
This is not about SHORTAGE of people for the companies. Companies can hire entire teams overseas and especially developers do not need to be hired in local countries. The thing is people from even the poorest regions of EU do not want to relocate hence Finland is looking to repopulate itself with at least semi-skilled workforce outside of Europe.
This whole thing is disgusting. But Finland is free country and they are free to do whatever they think is the best for the country and its people.
Yes, and in the related links at the right side they even have another article titled "Cost of labour falls in Finland at the highest rate in the European Union".
"Cost of labour falls in Finland at the highest rate in the European Union"
It should be noted that this is a very intentional policy. Finland's current right-wing government has been working hard (and in many quite confused ways too) to bring down cost of labour.
When elected, the Prime Minister's stated goal was a reduction of 5% across all salaries. (The name for this plan was kilpailukykysopimus, "the competitiveness agreement".) Due to expected resistance from unions, it has been watered down to various benefit cuts, promises of raise freezes, etc. But the atmosphere among the country's economic decision makers is very much one that pushes for salary reductions by any means possible.
Another name for this salary reduction plan is "internal devaluation". As a member of the Euro zone, Finland can't simply devaluate its currency to increase the competitiveness of its exports. So the other way to achieve the same goal is to reduce the internal cost of producing those goods.
(If you ask me, this whole thing is chasing a 1980s recipe for a 21st century problem. The problem with Finland's exports is not cost of goods or even quality; it's a combination of wrong industries and lack of global marketing savvy. The pipe dream of a 5% reduction in production costs won't solve any of that.)
Finland leaving euro is among the least likely political scenarios in the near future. Well, I would have said that of Russia invading Ukraine or UK's brexit as well before those happened.
Nobody is seriously talking about leaving the Euro... Primarily because the internal impact could be crushing. Large export industries would benefit, but private citizens would stand to lose greatly and in unpredictable ways.
Finns have quite a lot of housing debt, and spend a disproportionate amount of their income on housing compared to most other European countries. That debt load could become a huge problem for people when their salaries are converted to a new local currency but the debt remains.
If I have a 300k EUR mortgage, what happens to it? If it remains EUR-denominated while my salary is converted into a reborn FIM currency which then depreciates by 30%, suddenly my debt has effectively become 30% larger too. (Alternatively, if the debts were converted to FIM, the lender banks will still have a lot of EUR liabilities. Could they swallow that? One of the large banks, Nordea, isn't even Finnish. How could the government force a Swedish bank to convert loans into another currency?)
At the same time, the interest rate on those debts would skyrocket: right now it's close to zero, but an independent Finnish central bank would probably have to raise rates by multiple percentage points at once.
This combination would destroy many families' finances. Any government that did this would get a very negative windfall in the next election.
A "FinEuroExit" would be a huge transfer of money and future income from private citizens' pockets to the country's existing established big industries which have been unable to compete in a global market on their own. That doesn't sound like the kind of thing a modern government should be contemplating as their first choice.
Weird, a "right-wing government" pushing a left wing (i.e. explicitly Keynesian) economic plan. It's awesome that your politicians can get past petty partisanship!
Keynesian theory says that to improve the economy (read: put prideful workers back to work and increase outputs), you need to lower real wages. It also postulates that nominal wages are sticky - hence the standard solution for Keynesians is creating inflation to reduce the real value of the same nominal wages. I.e., instead of workers getting 5% fewer Euros, they instead get the same number of Euros but the value of each Euro is reduced by 5%.
For countries on the Euro, inflation isn't possible, so the only solution is to fix nominal wage stickiness.
This 5% internal devaluation part sounds bit crazy. A few days back I was trying to understand what was major blunders during Wiemar republic and one of them IMHO was Heinrich Brüning's attempt at 'internal devaluation' in response to allies' 20% devaluation of their currencies.
Actually, a plenty of Russians may be interested, especially the ones living in Saint-Petersburg area. It takes only several hours by car and the train connection is very good too, so that they can easily visit parents, friends, etc. And salary in Finland are much higher comparing to Russia.
Sorry but you have just proved my point. What % of your team is FINNISH ? I mean you know...real Finns and not russians living in / commuting to Finland ?
I do not make such differences in personal life but this is something that's important for the country. It's a matter of survival.
Again you proved my point. There is not a need to let these people in. Especially if they commute. What's the problem with opening an office in St.Pet area ?
BTW what makes you think you are entitled to "higher salaries" ?
And this is exactly the point.
If you can deliver you should get paid the same thing in St.Pet.
If the company would really need these people they could open an office in St.Pet and offer similar / same salaries.But they do not want to.
"What's the problem with opening an office in St.Pet area "
If the need is to boost existing teams and not create entirely new teams then that's the problem there. It could be lack of imagination or courage as well :)
Salary after taxes adjusted to pricing difference could be comparable or better in Russia. A pal of mine left Rovio and moved back to Russia just because of better income.
I don't even know why the term shortage is even used in the context of potential employees. If potential employees are scarce then salaries will continue to rise until more people decide to pursue that job. Generally shortages happen if the government decides to implement price controls. If I want to buy bananas for $2.50 and bananas sell for $5.00 in the grocery store. It's not a shortage just because I can't afford it. If the government decides that bananas should cost $2.50 then producers will stop producing their goods because of a lack of revenue. This is a shortage.
Though I agree with you in spirit, in practice there are such things as actual shortages. Petroleum engineers in countries that just discovered oil for the first time, for example. Some skills take almost a decade to acquire.
Web development does not generally fall under this umbrella, however.
Knowing how to write a complex web app with decent structured maintainable clean code, keep it optimized and secure, the ability to deploy it to to servers at the touch of a button isn't something I would expect from a junior dev.
>If potential employees are scarce then salaries will continue to rise until more people decide to pursue that job.
This is already happening in areas where there is a shortage (salaries rising) and in the time it takes for new people to acquire the required skills there is a shortage (ie. people would be willing to accept the conditions below the market rate but they can't get trained fast enough/get visas)
I agree with you philosophically, but what you are describing is a market clearing price. That is, regardless of the price, there are not infinite bananas. Even at one million dollars per pound, there is no way for us to allocate bananas that do not exist. At some point, at some price, people simply say: "well, I guess I want no bananas today".
When nominal demand far outstrips nominal supply, I think it's fair to call it a shortage. Temporary. It will correct. In a less than a decade.
It's funny - the management ego part that is in alignment with your comment (that "there is no shortage")... Because coders have become the modern blue-collar assembly line worker, management types often want to pay assembly line worker prices, and are having a difficult time coming to grips with the fact that these workers might make more money than they do. Outrageous!
Sometimes it's much better to hire a few talented people than an entire team. The young digital companies run by savvy technologists are attempting to play by the lean startup playbook.
Seems that salaries in Finland have been consistently dropping for the last 5-10 years. Add that to the incredibly high housing prices and you get why they "lack" developers.
Looks like Finland is moving to the low-tier type of jobs. At least they still have blond girls...
Not really, good developers become good from working, being involved and working together with more experienced developers. Sitting at home while employers moan about lack of skills without investing in employees is perhaps where the distinction lies.
Across Scandinavia there is a trend to outsource to eastern Europe to reduce costs, we can't then complain that developers in Scandinavia lack the competence required for the job. Employers have to invest in skills too. I would assume the same goes for Finland.
I've seen this happen where I work at (a rather large international software company). First all coding is offshored to Eastern Europe and/or India - just to wake up a few years later to a crisis where there is a serious lack of senior technical personnel (senior devs and architects) to sit between the local customer and the offshore dev team or do some consulting at customer locations.
Make no mistake, this is about dumping the market salaries and shedding worker rights. A lot of things going on in the EU at the moment are exactly that.
Exactly my thoughts, this candid remark spells it out in neon letters;
>Timo Ahopelto [...] estimates that Finland could hire 2000-3000 talented software developers immediately. He demands that the bureaucracy of immigration must be dismantled.
You can read this as "I want software developers but I don't want to pay them what they are worth". Globalism is the reduction of pay and workers rights by another name.
I'm reading your post as "I'm no better than Indians, but due to being a Nordic blonde I think I deserve a higher salary."
Globalization improves workers rights, increases pay, and reduces inequality. It's only people who were formerly at the top of the heap due solely to dumb luck that have anything to fear.
The "going rate" is whatever rate the lowest qualified candidate will accept. That candidate might be Indian.
You actually want to get something well above the going rate simply because you are Nordic. History hasn't actually looked favorably upon people who insist on special privileges due to Nordic heritage.
It's populist, which globalists despise. Racism is only the cover they use to mask that they're trying to drag down worker protections and wages to the lowest common denominator.
I don't think you are racist. I think you have an equally evil bias based on a different accident of birth (location, rather than ethnicity of the parent). You haven't offered any reasoning to suggest otherwise.
Enough with this white guilt nonsense. Do yourself a favor and study Finland's history to learn all about that Nordic privilege. It's not all sunshine and rainbows.
This isn't true for China. They use prison labor, they have no right to unionize, they have child labor, they don't follow their own minimum wage law, they don't have anything like a western country's workplace safety laws.
Globalization does not increase wages for people in western countries, that's why these companies are keen on getting H1B visas and getting cheaper labor.
Directly contradicted by your own assertion that someone in India will work for cheaper
> improves workers rights
Citation needed. The only one I can accept off hand is that it reduces inequality between western workers and those in countries with less opportunities. It certainly doesn't reduce the gap between CXOs and their employees
Citation needed. The only one I can accept off hand is that it reduces inequality between western workers and those in countries with less opportunities.
See the work of Branco Milanovic - the bulk of inequality in the world is across borders rather than within borders. His book is excellent: http://amzn.to/2dl3sVJ
Worrying about inequality between CXOs and their employees is also a silly distraction by politicians. Inequality in the US is mainly between firms, not within them. Inequality within Google and within Walmart has not gone up much, it's inequality between Google and Walmart that has gone up.
People in Finland have a higher standard of living. That standard is higher because wages are higher. I don't think it's unreasonable to not want to lower the standard of living of your country.
Finns built a nice country (in quite unfriendly environment), why shouldn't they be the ones who enjoy the benefits? Globalization allows people to leech off social (and often real) capital generated by other people elsewhere.
If Indians could do just as well as Finns, why aren't they, in India?
What makes "Indians" and "Finns" morally meaningful groups?
Many individual Finns didn't make Finland nice. Quite a few just came along for the ride, and some were downright harmful. So it would be equally valid to say "Finns, except Sven, but including Sandeep built a nice country". (Assuming of course that Sven was one of the ones who didn't contribute much.) So we could equally well change the groups and get the same positive claims.
Suppose I were to say "whites built a nice suburb, why shouldn't they be the ones who enjoy the benefits" (with regards to, say, an all-white suburb that they want to keep blacks out of), what principled objection would you make to this claim?
What makes Finns a morally meaningful group here is what makes family a morally meaningful group: blood ties and inheritance. It's not unfair that people inherit after their ancestors, whether it's a stamp collection, height, or a country.
I don't have an objection to people maintaining their own communities, closed or not. I believe in freedom of association. I'm not an American either so US taboos around race don't hold much sway over my opinions.
I don't see a family as being a morally privileged group in the way you seem to.
For example, if A threatens B with violence should B employ C, I believe that's wrong. I don't believe it becomes morally acceptable if A and B are members of the same family, or the same ethnic or national group.
I believe parents owe a certain individual obligation to their children (due to the fact that they chose to birth them), but little else.
You just restated the same thing without addressing the core similiarity.
If you consider the accident of birth in a certain country unfair. That is, Sven being born in Sweden and Sandeep in India which should be rectified by allowing Sandeep to move to Sweden (or Finland, or wherever), do you consider other instances of inheritance unfair?
For example, if Sven stands to inherit an apartment in Stockholm and a nice cabin in the woods, while Lucas' parents were renters who won't leave him much, should Sven's parents' estate be taxed at 100% to rectify this unfairness (or 50% to pass it to Lucas)? If not, why not? What is the principled objection?
It seems to me that both lines of arguments for inheritance (whether better capital allocation and stewardship, or simple blood ties) work just as well for material goods as they do for citizenship. And property is guaranteed by the threat of violence (often from the same actors) just like borders are.
I restated my principle in terms of family because I don't think you disagree with my principle there. Do you think my brother should threaten me with violence if I employ someone other than his son?
I have no problem with individuals disposing of their property as they see fit. Just as Sven might like to pass his house to Lucas, I might like to rent my house to Jose the Mexican. And I object to laws that would prevent both of these things.
I guess another disagreement we have is that I don't see citizenship as property.
You are racist against Whites. There are literally millions of whites (Central + Eastern Europe) that have it way worse than your beloved black,asian immigrants in the West ?
What entitles your Sandeep to earn more doing the same job just because he moved his ass and immigrated to Germany and my mother did not ? Because she loves her country and does not want to move elsewhere but her own country is eaten by corruption and can't compete with West's unfair practices ? THE solution is not for everyone to move somewhere else.
LIFE IS NOT FAIR. Get over it. Stop feeling ashamed and stop spitting on your own race.
The talent shortage for companies like Supercell or Umbra is acute. They need for instance computer graphics experts whom Finnish universities haven't trained. The top talent more or less comes from around Demoscene and random enthusiasts and that talent pool is really limited. [0]
This does not mean there are no other forces at play when discussing the employment sector at large.
Edit: [0] I was really familiar with this specific sector up to a few years ago.
Is this not something that can be learned by an experience programmer? Anything that can be taught in a couple semesters at university can be learned faster by a professional learning full time.
I'll make this next statement more about the US than Finland because that's what I'm familiar with. Any company complaining about a talent shortage that doesn't have training programs has no business demanding laws change. Be cheap or lazy, but don't be both.
My specific example - sourcing "real time graphics experts"- was a bit obscure. It's a niche. The first problem arranging training would be to first figure out how to train and by whom. A learn-by-doing projects of increasing complexity from raytracers and scheme interpreters to a real time 3D engine and shader languages would probably do part of the trick. Then add 3D modeling and some drawing courses to make sure they appreciate the art as well. Doable in two years, full time - yeah sure. But what are the economic tradeoffs?
The personnel to arrange all of this is available in Helsinki area. The problem, I think, is that the quantity of people sought is so small that it would be harder to arrange all of this properly than just headhunt for them around the world. It would be awesome, though.
There are trainings for people like SAP experts. The curriculum is fixed and the problem domain fantastically constrained. In this case it's fairly easy to retrain for sought out skills - especially if the number of new experts is counted in the hundreds.
I have to strain once more that my example was obscure and for a specific, fairly small niche. I have no idea where the thousands of missing specialists are needed. Probably for usual backend/frontend development, would be my guess.
The ex-Nokia people with their Symbian skills are not useful for the modern mobile/web dev market. Almost every single IT-company in Finland at the moment is suffering from lack of developers.
We at Toughbyte have recruited and relocated almost twenty mid and senior level developers to Finland for our clients in the last year, more info here: http://toughbyte.com/#recruitment
I can confirm that there is indeed a shortage of developers with the right skills. Salary levels is not the issue here.
I disagree with the point about bureaucracy in the article. Getting a residence permit once you have an offer is fairly straightforward and takes a few weeks, compared to some other countries in Europe (like Malta for example) where it has taken us months.
> developers with the right skills. Salary levels is not the issue here.
In a country that just saw several high-profile tech giants falter and cut thousands of highly-skilled and experienced developers, I find that really difficult to believe, sorry. What sort of skill is so in demand, that legions of C/C++ developers with tons of experience in embedded platforms cannot be retrained for? Are you building teams of brain surgeons?
More likely, demand does not match offer in terms of salary expectations, and employers don't want to adjust for one reason or another. This might fit your business model and that's fine, I'm not attacking you. These processes are not specific to Finland, it's globalization in action: producing a virtually unlimited supply of "reserve army of labor".
Half that post clearly states there are not enough jobs because the Finnish economy is not growing as it used to. The rest boils down to "old people need to retrain", something the government should pay attention to. Importing workforce when natives are jobless is a recipe for social strife.
> I can confirm that there is indeed a shortage of developers with the right skills. Salary levels is not the issue here.
So you're saying with a straight face that if you doubled or quadrupled the salary on offer you still wouldn't find candidates? Are you looking for someone so specialized that only under 10 people in the entire world are able to fill it? Because otherwise it's just a matter of salaries not being enticing enough for people to work for your clients.
Replace "salary" with "compensation package" and the same argument stands. Offer better salaries, work environments, perks, and vacation days and you'll get all the qualified candidates you could want.
I live in a nordic country, I know what you mean. Still if you offer superior conditions than everyone else, be that good money or vacation time people will happilly take it both here and everywhere else.
> Estonia, the southern neighbour of Finland, is much more nimble. In the baltic country employees can be hired for a trial period without bureaucracy. Official arrangements are required only after the decision to hire permanent employees is made
Isn't this the case for all companies in the EU? You just hire someone (or in reality their company) as a 'freelancer' or 'contractor'.
I can't speak for other countries, but at least when it comes to programming, it's really easy to become a freelancer here in The Netherlands.
In less than a day you can register your business, get a business bank account (+ working card!), and send an invoice to your 'employer'. For less than a hundred 'bucks'. Once a year it gets a little more complicated when you have to do your finances, which can trivially be outsourced to an accountant. I know plenty of people (perhaps especially programmers) who do their finances themselves though. For freelancers, and especially programmers, it's (apparently) not that complicated.
Going through this for just one month before you're hired is perhaps still a bit too much of a hassle, but you only really have to do this once and you can then use your freelancer status every time you switch jobs.
I don't know much about the legal aspect of all this though.
It's not just the paperwork; is that you then have to calculate your rates, your holidays, your pension payments and so on. You get a number wrong and you don't go on holiday that year; you get a number wrong, and on the month you have to pay your taxes you don't have cash to feed your kids. And all this before we even get to the issue of finding and maintaining business relationships, without which again your kids go hungry.
In contrast, regular employees don't have to do any of that - they know they will get a paycheck around X every month, will have Y days off work and (if the company is not run by crooks and/or nosedives) when s/he retires she'll have a pension worth Z. It's a completely different mindset, even before you get to the bureaucratic side of things.
I realise this is an unpopulair opinion somehow but as someone who dreamt of the future since my first line of code begin 80s; working from anywhere via 'phone'. I started doing that with friends via BBS. I had a BBS system running at night when my parents did not need the phone and we would work with a few people on assembly, pascal and c. I continued that until (via internet) now and besides some travelling it always worked well. Why do other people insist on offices and closeness all the time? Sure I meet up with people every 1-2 months but we do efficient and cool production software and hardware with a distributed team all over the place. Is it that management wants to be overly controlling or something else? I have nothing against offices but like elsewhere in this thread: make an office in st pete's and put people wanting to work for you there. Did that a few times (200, 50, 40 and 80 people in 3 different countries in different cities) and am doing it again in two countries. This would solve this but, as said as well, this might be just something to violate worker rights instead of something else.
You're not thinking small enough: many, if not most, companies would need like 1-2 new people. The overhead of opening and managing a new office isn't worth it in those scenarios. Plus you're ignoring that most companies aren't ready for remote development: they don't have the infrastructure or the means for remote knowledge transfer, there's a fairly big cost both in money and culture to change that.
Finally you're ignoring that most companies aren't software houses. They operate in different industries and their IT/development departments rely on being close to their users, to these the effective cost of having remote employees is even higher than what I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
As an aside: My company allows for remote work but I just can't stand it; unless I really need to be home for something I'll always work from the office, where I can work and be social with my colleagues. We've considered moving to cheaper, nearby countries with fewer taxes (Germany most likely) and decided against it because I really don't want to have to work from home despite having a financial incentive to do so. Remote work isn't for everyone.
It is a matter of taste: some people like one, some the other. I cannot stand offices myself. And I do not ignore small companies: I always have a few devs somewhere working on things which are not part of the main company. Everything I do starts with 1 or 2 people working home. No issue. You do not like it or even cannot stand it: many others can. And yes, I do ignore industries I am not familiar with: the companies mentioned in the article are software houses. Also I work at a hardware company: software is just as important but the main part is the hardware.
But yes that is why I said; some satellite offices and people working at home usually is a good mix. Some sit in the office, some at home, all happy.
The main point, going after what is said in the article: If you are in Finland and need 100 coders and those coders are easy to the in St Petersburg then just open an office there.
99 comments
[ 9.1 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadhttps://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6753/germany-migrants-dem...
in fact, none of them is refugee, because by definition used in international laws, they stop being refugees the moment they come to first safe country on their way, namely Turkey, so they enter EU as plain old economic immigrants.
Well they just let in over 1 million new state aid dependants. Hardly a formula for growth.
Just look at the number of factories that operate outside of Germany and how many people they require in order to keep the machinery running. I do not hate them. I do not detest them. I am just scared at how they run things. And other countries seem to follow because they also want to take advantage of it.
(the main side-effect of the supportive economic policy we've had since is destroying pension savings by transferring wealth into large corporations)
The visa I have is this one:
http://www.bluecard-eu.de/eu-blue-card-germany/
I had to scan some documents, but otherwise the process was mostly handled by the company. I had to do a couple meetings to finish the process once I moved but they put me on a temporary visa until that happened.
They just want to be able to hire Indians,Pakistanis or whoever will be willing to work for the fraction of what even an unskilled person from a remote village in Romania would ask for.
This is not about SHORTAGE of people for the companies. Companies can hire entire teams overseas and especially developers do not need to be hired in local countries. The thing is people from even the poorest regions of EU do not want to relocate hence Finland is looking to repopulate itself with at least semi-skilled workforce outside of Europe.
This whole thing is disgusting. But Finland is free country and they are free to do whatever they think is the best for the country and its people.
It should be noted that this is a very intentional policy. Finland's current right-wing government has been working hard (and in many quite confused ways too) to bring down cost of labour.
When elected, the Prime Minister's stated goal was a reduction of 5% across all salaries. (The name for this plan was kilpailukykysopimus, "the competitiveness agreement".) Due to expected resistance from unions, it has been watered down to various benefit cuts, promises of raise freezes, etc. But the atmosphere among the country's economic decision makers is very much one that pushes for salary reductions by any means possible.
Another name for this salary reduction plan is "internal devaluation". As a member of the Euro zone, Finland can't simply devaluate its currency to increase the competitiveness of its exports. So the other way to achieve the same goal is to reduce the internal cost of producing those goods.
(If you ask me, this whole thing is chasing a 1980s recipe for a 21st century problem. The problem with Finland's exports is not cost of goods or even quality; it's a combination of wrong industries and lack of global marketing savvy. The pipe dream of a 5% reduction in production costs won't solve any of that.)
Finns have quite a lot of housing debt, and spend a disproportionate amount of their income on housing compared to most other European countries. That debt load could become a huge problem for people when their salaries are converted to a new local currency but the debt remains.
If I have a 300k EUR mortgage, what happens to it? If it remains EUR-denominated while my salary is converted into a reborn FIM currency which then depreciates by 30%, suddenly my debt has effectively become 30% larger too. (Alternatively, if the debts were converted to FIM, the lender banks will still have a lot of EUR liabilities. Could they swallow that? One of the large banks, Nordea, isn't even Finnish. How could the government force a Swedish bank to convert loans into another currency?)
At the same time, the interest rate on those debts would skyrocket: right now it's close to zero, but an independent Finnish central bank would probably have to raise rates by multiple percentage points at once.
This combination would destroy many families' finances. Any government that did this would get a very negative windfall in the next election.
A "FinEuroExit" would be a huge transfer of money and future income from private citizens' pockets to the country's existing established big industries which have been unable to compete in a global market on their own. That doesn't sound like the kind of thing a modern government should be contemplating as their first choice.
Keynesian theory says that to improve the economy (read: put prideful workers back to work and increase outputs), you need to lower real wages. It also postulates that nominal wages are sticky - hence the standard solution for Keynesians is creating inflation to reduce the real value of the same nominal wages. I.e., instead of workers getting 5% fewer Euros, they instead get the same number of Euros but the value of each Euro is reduced by 5%.
For countries on the Euro, inflation isn't possible, so the only solution is to fix nominal wage stickiness.
And this is exactly the point.
If you can deliver you should get paid the same thing in St.Pet. If the company would really need these people they could open an office in St.Pet and offer similar / same salaries.But they do not want to.
If the need is to boost existing teams and not create entirely new teams then that's the problem there. It could be lack of imagination or courage as well :)
Web development does not generally fall under this umbrella, however.
This. So very much this.
Software companies always look for people with the latest fad ^H^H^H skill, which is - almost by definition - in short supply.
Knowing how to write a complex web app with decent structured maintainable clean code, keep it optimized and secure, the ability to deploy it to to servers at the touch of a button isn't something I would expect from a junior dev.
This is already happening in areas where there is a shortage (salaries rising) and in the time it takes for new people to acquire the required skills there is a shortage (ie. people would be willing to accept the conditions below the market rate but they can't get trained fast enough/get visas)
When nominal demand far outstrips nominal supply, I think it's fair to call it a shortage. Temporary. It will correct. In a less than a decade.
It's funny - the management ego part that is in alignment with your comment (that "there is no shortage")... Because coders have become the modern blue-collar assembly line worker, management types often want to pay assembly line worker prices, and are having a difficult time coming to grips with the fact that these workers might make more money than they do. Outrageous!
Sometimes it's much better to hire a few talented people than an entire team. The young digital companies run by savvy technologists are attempting to play by the lean startup playbook.
Looks like Finland is moving to the low-tier type of jobs. At least they still have blond girls...
Across Scandinavia there is a trend to outsource to eastern Europe to reduce costs, we can't then complain that developers in Scandinavia lack the competence required for the job. Employers have to invest in skills too. I would assume the same goes for Finland.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-technology-idUSKCN...
Make no mistake, this is about dumping the market salaries and shedding worker rights. A lot of things going on in the EU at the moment are exactly that.
>Timo Ahopelto [...] estimates that Finland could hire 2000-3000 talented software developers immediately. He demands that the bureaucracy of immigration must be dismantled.
You can read this as "I want software developers but I don't want to pay them what they are worth". Globalism is the reduction of pay and workers rights by another name.
Globalization improves workers rights, increases pay, and reduces inequality. It's only people who were formerly at the top of the heap due solely to dumb luck that have anything to fear.
You actually want to get something well above the going rate simply because you are Nordic. History hasn't actually looked favorably upon people who insist on special privileges due to Nordic heritage.
This isn't true for China. They use prison labor, they have no right to unionize, they have child labor, they don't follow their own minimum wage law, they don't have anything like a western country's workplace safety laws.
Globalization does not increase wages for people in western countries, that's why these companies are keen on getting H1B visas and getting cheaper labor.
I also don't care about wages "for people in western countries". Why would I care about wages for one group of people to the exclusion of others?
Directly contradicted by your own assertion that someone in India will work for cheaper
> improves workers rights
Citation needed. The only one I can accept off hand is that it reduces inequality between western workers and those in countries with less opportunities. It certainly doesn't reduce the gap between CXOs and their employees
The "elephant graph" is the most important graph in the world of economics: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iVkQuGtP3s2...
Citation needed. The only one I can accept off hand is that it reduces inequality between western workers and those in countries with less opportunities.
See the work of Branco Milanovic - the bulk of inequality in the world is across borders rather than within borders. His book is excellent: http://amzn.to/2dl3sVJ
Worrying about inequality between CXOs and their employees is also a silly distraction by politicians. Inequality in the US is mainly between firms, not within them. Inequality within Google and within Walmart has not gone up much, it's inequality between Google and Walmart that has gone up.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/27/u-s-pay-inequality...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103798/Revealed-Ins...
If Indians could do just as well as Finns, why aren't they, in India?
Many individual Finns didn't make Finland nice. Quite a few just came along for the ride, and some were downright harmful. So it would be equally valid to say "Finns, except Sven, but including Sandeep built a nice country". (Assuming of course that Sven was one of the ones who didn't contribute much.) So we could equally well change the groups and get the same positive claims.
Suppose I were to say "whites built a nice suburb, why shouldn't they be the ones who enjoy the benefits" (with regards to, say, an all-white suburb that they want to keep blacks out of), what principled objection would you make to this claim?
I don't have an objection to people maintaining their own communities, closed or not. I believe in freedom of association. I'm not an American either so US taboos around race don't hold much sway over my opinions.
For example, if A threatens B with violence should B employ C, I believe that's wrong. I don't believe it becomes morally acceptable if A and B are members of the same family, or the same ethnic or national group.
I believe parents owe a certain individual obligation to their children (due to the fact that they chose to birth them), but little else.
If you consider the accident of birth in a certain country unfair. That is, Sven being born in Sweden and Sandeep in India which should be rectified by allowing Sandeep to move to Sweden (or Finland, or wherever), do you consider other instances of inheritance unfair?
For example, if Sven stands to inherit an apartment in Stockholm and a nice cabin in the woods, while Lucas' parents were renters who won't leave him much, should Sven's parents' estate be taxed at 100% to rectify this unfairness (or 50% to pass it to Lucas)? If not, why not? What is the principled objection?
It seems to me that both lines of arguments for inheritance (whether better capital allocation and stewardship, or simple blood ties) work just as well for material goods as they do for citizenship. And property is guaranteed by the threat of violence (often from the same actors) just like borders are.
I have no problem with individuals disposing of their property as they see fit. Just as Sven might like to pass his house to Lucas, I might like to rent my house to Jose the Mexican. And I object to laws that would prevent both of these things.
I guess another disagreement we have is that I don't see citizenship as property.
LIFE IS NOT FAIR. Get over it. Stop feeling ashamed and stop spitting on your own race.
This does not mean there are no other forces at play when discussing the employment sector at large.
Edit: [0] I was really familiar with this specific sector up to a few years ago.
I'll make this next statement more about the US than Finland because that's what I'm familiar with. Any company complaining about a talent shortage that doesn't have training programs has no business demanding laws change. Be cheap or lazy, but don't be both.
The personnel to arrange all of this is available in Helsinki area. The problem, I think, is that the quantity of people sought is so small that it would be harder to arrange all of this properly than just headhunt for them around the world. It would be awesome, though.
There are trainings for people like SAP experts. The curriculum is fixed and the problem domain fantastically constrained. In this case it's fairly easy to retrain for sought out skills - especially if the number of new experts is counted in the hundreds.
I have to strain once more that my example was obscure and for a specific, fairly small niche. I have no idea where the thousands of missing specialists are needed. Probably for usual backend/frontend development, would be my guess.
The ex-Nokia people with their Symbian skills are not useful for the modern mobile/web dev market. Almost every single IT-company in Finland at the moment is suffering from lack of developers.
I can confirm that there is indeed a shortage of developers with the right skills. Salary levels is not the issue here.
I disagree with the point about bureaucracy in the article. Getting a residence permit once you have an offer is fairly straightforward and takes a few weeks, compared to some other countries in Europe (like Malta for example) where it has taken us months.
In a country that just saw several high-profile tech giants falter and cut thousands of highly-skilled and experienced developers, I find that really difficult to believe, sorry. What sort of skill is so in demand, that legions of C/C++ developers with tons of experience in embedded platforms cannot be retrained for? Are you building teams of brain surgeons?
More likely, demand does not match offer in terms of salary expectations, and employers don't want to adjust for one reason or another. This might fit your business model and that's fine, I'm not attacking you. These processes are not specific to Finland, it's globalization in action: producing a virtually unlimited supply of "reserve army of labor".
So you're saying with a straight face that if you doubled or quadrupled the salary on offer you still wouldn't find candidates? Are you looking for someone so specialized that only under 10 people in the entire world are able to fill it? Because otherwise it's just a matter of salaries not being enticing enough for people to work for your clients.
There's also the progressive tax which should be taken into account.
Any EU citizen wouldn't need anything, just go there, get the job, register with the authorities and find some housing.
Isn't this the case for all companies in the EU? You just hire someone (or in reality their company) as a 'freelancer' or 'contractor'.
In less than a day you can register your business, get a business bank account (+ working card!), and send an invoice to your 'employer'. For less than a hundred 'bucks'. Once a year it gets a little more complicated when you have to do your finances, which can trivially be outsourced to an accountant. I know plenty of people (perhaps especially programmers) who do their finances themselves though. For freelancers, and especially programmers, it's (apparently) not that complicated.
Going through this for just one month before you're hired is perhaps still a bit too much of a hassle, but you only really have to do this once and you can then use your freelancer status every time you switch jobs.
I don't know much about the legal aspect of all this though.
In contrast, regular employees don't have to do any of that - they know they will get a paycheck around X every month, will have Y days off work and (if the company is not run by crooks and/or nosedives) when s/he retires she'll have a pension worth Z. It's a completely different mindset, even before you get to the bureaucratic side of things.
It's no big deal. An accountant easily handles all that, and accountants are plentiful in the Netherlands.
Finally you're ignoring that most companies aren't software houses. They operate in different industries and their IT/development departments rely on being close to their users, to these the effective cost of having remote employees is even higher than what I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
As an aside: My company allows for remote work but I just can't stand it; unless I really need to be home for something I'll always work from the office, where I can work and be social with my colleagues. We've considered moving to cheaper, nearby countries with fewer taxes (Germany most likely) and decided against it because I really don't want to have to work from home despite having a financial incentive to do so. Remote work isn't for everyone.
But yes that is why I said; some satellite offices and people working at home usually is a good mix. Some sit in the office, some at home, all happy.
The main point, going after what is said in the article: If you are in Finland and need 100 coders and those coders are easy to the in St Petersburg then just open an office there.