Totally uninformed hunch: USA attracted perhaps too much talent? I'm just wondering because here in Germany I find it hard to find a good front-end developer for a small company (full remote with German requirement), and I recently saw a video that'd confirm my worries:
“with German requirement” is the issue - you’ve no longer got over 1 billion people who speak English, but only about 150 million, and a lot of those second-language speakers skew old.
If you’re a young person who has learned front-end development, you’re more likely to have picked up English along the way than German. English exposure is casual (documentation, tech communities, American pop culture); German exposure outside of DACH requires seeking it out.
I work at a big, traditional German manufacturing company, and the “old” parts of IT (infrastructure, SAP) generally talk amongst themselves in German and produce obviously translated English documentation stuffed into badly-organized PDFs, while the newer parts (machine learning and its cloud-based infrastructure, web and app development) are a glorious mix of languages and cultures, with English as the means of communication (German colleagues occasionally having arguments and explaining complex things to each other in German) and documentation of varying quality accessible and searchable as HTML.
Several colleagues in the “new” part of IT who speak just enough German to deal with the Ausländerbehörde and order at a Biergarten, but have to interact with our local internal customers in English. They get hired anyway. They’re offered German courses, but as a side benefit, not required training.
Not speaking German well puts a ceiling on your career here, but certainly wouldn’t stop someone getting hired for a hard-to-fill technical role.
As an American this sounds like my fiancee speaking mandarin any time shit gets real lol
English is the new lingua franca, and I'd bet English terms will have as much sticking power 1000 years from now as latin/"Italian" does today as a result.
English having sticking power depends on how the future goes.
Why did Latin stick around so much? Basically because no 2 european countries spoke the same language so it was the only way long-term communication was possible, voth over time and distance. Additional causes were the church clinging to latin, and knowledge in books was in Latin. Both of these were self reenforcing.
So in a future with 100s of tiny languages, English might stick around for a long time. If however a new great empire rises ( China? Arab? Something on nobody's radar?), the days of all previous great languages are over, including English.
I'm not that convinced. Latin was used past the crumbling roman empire because it was sticky. Like you said, the only way to communicate.
And English already spread to all continents, something Latin didn't have at the time.
If e.g. Mandarin Chinese were to become lingua franca they'd have to first simplify the writing system. It's just too much effort for a foreigner to learn. Excluding the Japanese for this, since they share a lot of the writing system. They might have a chance.
Vietnamese shows that you can communicate in a language that was entirely written in Chinese characters before if you add word separation, tone markers and latin characters. Pinyin with tone markers and word separation is quite readable. It could be a way forward.
Korean also has letters and used to be Chinese characters. It's definitely possible but the move would have to come before widespread adoption could happen.
I know plenty of people who tried to learn Chinese for 2-5 years and plainly gave up because it's too hard.
English on a similarly basic level can be adopted in ~6 months with less effort. It's not the same.
Arabic could more easily become a lingua franca by virtue of a) already being widespread, and b) having pretty good standardization already.
If India rises they're already using English to communicate, because Hindi only gets you so far. It would probably be more stickiness for English.
I'll respectfully disagree here. English is one of the worst choices for a latin alphabet based lingua franca, as a mix of germanic and romanic languages, with inconsistent to non-existent rules, differences between sound vs written character. It got its current status by piggybacking on 2 empires, with a bonus of hollywood for planetary indoctrination.
I've seen a few languages lose lingua franca status in their subdomains in my liftime: French as the ex-language of political power in Belgium, and German as the ex-technical documentation language. In fact, seeing more and more Chinese appear in electronic spec cheats, I've wondered if such a change isn't already happening for English. As always, the cultural core of the power in vogue will be the last to notice the disappearance of status.
There was a document regularly appearing here on HN: The fate of empires, linked below. If you follow it's rules, you'd expect a new power appear out of nowhere. So for a new lingua franca, we just can't predict what will be the choice, but the existing big languages might be the worst candidates.
I believe English will be lingua franca until a new empire will rule the world. If the USA disappears and balkanization follows, English will have a long life. But if a global invasion from a new culture comes, English is done for.
I'll respectfully disagree here. English is one of the worst choices for a latin alphabet based lingua franca, as a mix of germanic and romanic languages, with inconsistent to non-existent rules, differences between sound vs written character.
It's funny though how English, despite basically being a language of "every second word is an exception" is still so easy to learn? French is much harder. German is much harder.
In Chinese (and Arab) you not only have to contend with a different alphabet to learn but (at least for Chinese - don't know for Arab) also a completely different style of putting these symbols together to make sense. English at least shares that with other Euro languages and even if you get the structure a bit wrong (you can easily tell German or French sentence structure in an English sentence in many cases) it's still easy to comprehend well enough.
What I do think though is that Chinese or Arab might still take over simply because of numbers of speakers of them being more and dispersing and taking over that way. Firefly universe style.
Seriius question:. How do you compare easy to learn? Afaik, the main thing English has going for it is massive exposure, originally by TV/Hollywood. But if you watch e.g. French or German TV programming long enough, you'll pick up the language soon. I think English succeeded despite its downsides, for geopolitical reasons.
I picked up English very easily despite all the "oh it's all just exceptions". It feels natural even.
Latin on the other hand took much more effort.
French I never could quite get through. Reading sorta works sometimes given Latin, English and German knowledge. The whole language sorta always feels weird though. Can't bring myself to even try any longer.
English seems to be a lot more fault-tolerant than German. I've come to see it as jazz (English) vs. classical music (German).
Either that, or native English speakers are lazier than native German speakers, and would rather work out how a non-native speaker is trying to use our language than try to understand that other person's language or a third language we both kind of speak.
Also worth bearing in mind that Pax Britannica was quickly followed by Pax Americana, both English speaking countries.
The major problem with this though is the massive and unparalleled extent of the British empire. English is the first language for most of two continents (NA and Australia) and official languages for significant portions of another two (Africa and Asia).
That global scale is unprecedented in history and it’s hard to see how English would be dislodged without a significant societal collapse.
Point being it seems more likely that English would be replaced by a language that doesn’t exist yet, rather than an existing language.
I (edit: I mean, "we", of course) did relax the German language requirement once, and did find talent from eastern Europe, but for the whole team, it just felt too awkward having to segregate meetings between English and German speaking crowd. Both sides had shown some inflexibility. Especially older Germans finding it too much trouble having to speak English and complaining that they can't fully express themselves, while the few English-speaking complaining about the poor quality of the generated subtitles and leaving, in the extremely rare (once or twice per year) event that they got invited into a German-speaking meeting (things like Townhall meetings and such, nothing too important).
So after a year or two, most left.
On the other hand, many new graduates are complaining that they can't find a job, while most of them fail at fizzbuzz (I hate the silly brain-teaser interviews just as the next person but fizzbuzz, come on!), rest get totally demotivated when they hear that they can't just code 100% greenfield projects and/or show zero interest in learning anything that's not React.
I'm known to be lazy, but I came here 14 years ago as the kid who develops small business sites in Perl/PHP and had the motivation to learn German, learn all the -ends (back, front, embedded, had the "chance" to do weird stuff with RFID gates and such), learned to do ETL stuff, involved in consulting, architecture and so on... Many colleagues did the same as well. Currently in a lead position but I've learned a lot how the Java ecosystem works and involved even in JSF in my current job!
My point is, I never had the worry to be irrelevant because there were always something next, but currently most juniors just want the one true and tested way to go forward.
I think your expectations aren't really inline with the environment from the perspective of these different possible employees.
In Switzerland, my minimum salary expectation was 30k more a year if working in English for a US/International company remotely or here, that was extremely realistic and someone in Germany would be looking at a much larger loss in pay when working for a German firm.
If they are making that choice they may think local job and culture should be rubbing off as a benefit, so you only need to send them to one general event to show their limited potential upside isn't making progress per year despite high cost per year.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I get the last part, are you suggesting that when we send these employees to an event (like a meeting or a town hall), they realize that their potential for growth and progress might be limited because they don't speak the language? If so, I don't think it takes them to be in those events, even, to understand that. This is a problem we simply cannot solve.
By the way, I never heard anyone complain about their salary on the exit interviews. It's almost always the bad integration to the rest of the team/company, and sometimes having to deal with technology they'd rather keep away from (JSF! :) ).
I know the salaries the company offers aren't comparable to what is offered across the pond but they are quite competitive in Europe.
They are taking a lower pay presumably because integration with a local company is important to them. Your exit interview reflects that..
You are showing them that they aren't getting that if they occasionally go to the all hands and realize they have no idea what's going, aren't really able to participate in the larger context and don't really see a way that will improve.
They could continue to look for another local employer that does better at integrating them or they could stop considering integration with any local employer and get an immediate pay rise.
I'm curious where you would put the top pay of say a senior front end or back end engineer in Germany. I would say the Swiss market has a funny soft limit about 130CHF that's similar to the US around 160USD, where HRs level of fidgety in negotiations escalates fast.
Most Germans I know who have gone back and forth between Switzerland and Germany were very unhappy with German compensation but not happy with their integration in Switzerland.
The last sentence is particularly true: lots of important things are being said in French among French-speaking people.
Spoken French is also quite complex because it makes use of many references (usually shared by people of similar age) and relies a lot on second degree (what you hear is not what is meant). This is probably the most complicated part.
My wife learnt to speak French and she initially had issues to understand people nt because she was lacking words but because what she was hearing did not make a lot of sense. It is because it was either a reference or (less common because people knew she was not a native speaker) second degree).
Finally we decide in France to make our own life difficult by reinventing a lot of technical computer-oriented words, but this si the same in German.
The last sentence is particularly true: lots of important things are being said in French among French-speaking people.
Spoken French is also quite complex because it makes use of many references (usually shared by people of similar age) and relies a lot on second degree (what you hear is not what is meant). This is probably the most complicated part.
My wife learnt to speak French and she initially had issues to understand people nt because she was lacking words but because what she was hearing did not make a lot of sense. It is because it was either a reference or (less common because people knew she was not a native speaker) second degree).
Finally we decide in France to make our own life difficult by reinventing a lot of technical computer-oriented words, but this is the same in German.
Can't say anything about the France part but as for the
difficult by reinventing a lot of technical computer-oriented words, but this is the same in German.
This isn't actually the case in German. One reason why it was so easy to run away from Germany was that all the work related stuff was basically in English already anyway. You just had to learn the "regular sentence parts between the work related words" and that you learn in high-school English well enough.
Sure there was the odd professor that would call a stack a "Stapel", but nobody but him would call it that. Now of course the parts of CS that are pure maths, you are correct that they all have German words. But they're had that for hundreds of years. Actual computer-oriented run-of-the-ill words like you describe? Lots of Denglish!
I actually find that I can talk and converse perfectly at work because of it. Never lost for words. But in regular conversation outside of work I do search for words sometimes still.
that gives me hope for finding such a job later this year, thank you. Anyways, the video you posted is an admoneygeneratingtimewaster (length/information ratio, true to its codec: opus google) - one of the comments on its youtube page:
To put it bluntly, yes, economically Germany wants skilled immigration, but socially it doesn't.
>Totally uninformed hunch: USA attracted perhaps too much talent? I'm just wondering because here in Germany I find it hard to find a good front-end developer
How about another view point: there is no such thing as "attracting too much talent", this is the free market at work, and USA and Germany both attracted the exact amount of talent they deserve based on the pay and working conditions they offer for skilled workers, fair and square, and that's considering that getting a US work visa is insanely more difficult than a German one which is a rubber stamp since they left the immigration flood gates wide open to attempt to fix the "labor shortage" which is just corporate b.s. for "we want to get away paying shit wages and need more people desperate enough to accept them".
And I don't mean poor pay in absolute terms, because obviously Germany can compete with USA on pay, I mean pay in relative terms an national levels. SW devs are still paid blue collar wages in Germany when you look at how expensive everything is, especially buying housing. While in the US SW dev is a top % pay relative to the national wages levels and expenses. German workers in finance, controlling, marketing, management, get paid way more in Germany than SW devs which are treated more like cogs.
There's also the somewhat racist traditional old-school German culture at play that sees anything non-German as being of lower quality, including products and also people, making it more difficult for foreign talent to rise through the ranks and get top positions in German companies, as opposed to immigrant friendly countries like US, UK, Canada, Australian that don't have such tough glass ceiling for skilled workers. Case in point, the CEOs and execs in many US, UK, Canadian tech companies have migrant background while in big German companies they're as white German as it gets, with the newsworthy exception of the CEOs of BioNTech and Crytek who're Turkish.
For many SW engineers in Eastern Europe emigrating to Germany is no longer attractive. Take home salaries 50% more than back home, with a 100% in cost of living with ridiculous hoops to jump through to find a decent rental, and 300% in housing price increases. Germany wants workers but doesn't have the housing to attract them because it's also trying to use immigration to enrich the landlord gentry at the same time by squeezing the migrant workers.
When I (an Eastern European) was working for a US tech company, the colleagues in Dallas-FW area owned big houses in the suburbs (on mortgages obviously) while the colleagues in the Munich offices were all stuck renting with no prospects of ever being able to afford to buy something in the greater Munich area unless they had well-off parents, which migrant workers obviously did not. Munich land prices per square foot/meter are similar to SV but not the wages. Absolutely insane.
Germany is just not an innovative powerhouse in the international SW sector that's capable to generate the biggest returns and pay the best wages, nor does it have a great housing market, or the lowest taxes, or the best openness to employing migrants in top positions. Considering all this, they will continue to have a skilled workers' shortage for the foreseeable future that will decimate their international competitiveness. Sure, they make Zeiss mirrors and Trumpf lasers, but those niche low-volume precision manufacturing sectors don't scale as well as SW, which makes it a much more profitable industry that's dominated by the US.
But you don't have to take my word for it, the comments on that Youtube video you shared tell the exact same story.
> For many in Eastern Europe emigrating to Germany is no longer attractive.
Not entirely sure why your comment gets downvoted because this is accurate. Pay in germany is at the same level or lower than most east eu countries, in tech, after factoring in the cost of living. Workers in other industries face abuse on a regular basis, at least based on what i was told by many of them ranging from taxi drivers, to factory workers, to phd students. This supposedly allied country is so hostile that when an east european reaches a leading position it makes the news. Instead germany ends up attracting bad apples since no self respecting person wants to work there or in similarly hostile north European countries (ie Sweden). They treat people like cheap labour, get what they pay for, and then complain.
I can only second this. There is a lot of arrogance and a "wanting to have the cake and eat it"-mentality left over from the fat years, which ended about 25 years ago when Schröder was elected as chancellor and the social systems were cut down...
I just checked out the career page of the company you are working for. First of all, judging from the site, you are not looking for front-end devs at all. You have exactly one programming role (https://www.gipmbh.de/karriere/java-software-entwickler-in), which reads like a pure back end role.
And although I check virtually all the boxes of your backend tech stack and education requirements plus a lot of JS/TS and Angular experience, I would not consider applying. The job ad explicitly mentions a location. So this reeks of a position with no real "home office". I once interviewed with a company which advertised as full-remote and then when it came to the offering was only granting flexibility nominally, but was legally a when push-come-to-shove-your-butt-is-in-our-office-seat contract. Also, it is in my eyes not sensible to exclude the developers with a vocational education (Fachinformatiker Anwendungsentwicklung or MATSE) with your degree requirements.
I went to the office 2 times last year and that was my own decision (wanted to see some people in real life). Sometimes (2-3 times a year) they have these big-ish events, for which they would like you to be there with all expenses paid, but it's still not mandatory. It really is home office, with the option of going to the office if you want it. Best of both worlds really. Please do apply if that's your only worry! I can promise you a completely fair interview with zero mind-trick or useless algorithm questions :)
Your advice on improvements to the job ads, I take with me with pleasure. I'll talk to the HR. That ad is supposed to say front-end developer for front-end components! Well.
German requirement is a big no go for many non german europeans. A colleague of mine would like to move to Vienna for cultural reason, but not knowing german yet is a show stopper, english is not enough.
At the opposite, you can live in Amsterdam without knowing dutch at all literally for years.
The sad part is many of the people being forced into hybrid work just commute for an hour to the office to sit in zoom meetings with all of their colleagues at home. I see this happening all the time to friends now.
This is just horrible for society in general. People are wasting time, gas, creating traffic, etc. For nothing at all. Never mind the ongoing housing disaster in the US which is only being made worse.
Unpopular opinion: some people are much easier to deal with face-to-face.
I don't know what it is, but there's a sort of personality type which seems common among technical roles. Text communication is curt, feathers get ruffled easily in zoom/email, just really hard to work with.
Then you sit down with them for 15-30 minutes and talk, it's like night and day. They see you as a person, things resolve quickly, you both go about your day.
Even though I do most of my work remotely, I try to schedule interactions with these people on days when we will both be in the same room. They're not bad people, but it makes things so much easier, so much less drama.
This is really unfortunate. I think a couple of key takeaways are that they moved to a remote area with cheaper costs (and lower overall salaries,) but they benefited from their higher salaries that they were still being paid at the companies they were working out in the big city. Then they got laid off. This could've happened to anyone of us, but I don't think there's any way you could really hedge against it. The economy is unpredictable. Being hampered by medical problems, kids, it makes these kind of decisions risky.
We’re certainly in a time of significant change for where people live and how they work.
During the height of the pandemic, the craziest real estate jumps were in nice rural areas where formerly you either had to be retired, independently wealthy, in an unusual profession that was lucrative in rural areas, or take a pay cut to live.
But as soon as people in tech and many other “traditional business” jobs could keep their high salaries and live in Truckee, or Boise or Coeur d’Alene or Bellingham, quite a number of them moved, and liked what they found.
I’ve lived in places like that for most of my life, so I get it. But I’m not sure how it’s going to shake out.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few years. The trends/factors I’ve been thinking about are:
* Will they like these areas long term? E.g., Coeur d’Alene is chock-full of natural beauty, but the winters can be a slog. And the politics are wild. In many ways these migrants have brought with them the things they liked from cities, so that smaller rural communities now are likely to have better coffee and nicer restaurants, but they still can’t compete with major metros on a lot of fronts. I anecdotally know one family that migrated from Portland to our community in Idaho during COVID, liked it, but found they missed what the left in the city and are now moving back. I’ll bet they’re part of a trend, even for workers who have the option to stay remote.
* What’s gonna happen with real estate prices in cities? Tremendously high commercial vacancy in cities has yet to cause a crash. But for all the talk about employers forcing people back to work, I think lots of them are going to continue to take advantage of lower rent opportunities. Will that eventually cause a crash or significant dip in overall real estate values in major urban areas? Will that entice more COVID migrants back?
* What about real estate in popular rural areas? I’ve been seeing a lot more price cuts and new listings for homes in our popular COVID migration community in the past few months. Sprig and early summer are traditionally our hot real estate months, and while people are still asking prices they would be laughable a few years ago, they’re not getting those asking prices. Houses are sitting unsold longer, and taking price cuts on the way. I think the sense of “I’ve got to get out of here” is gone, and people aren’t willing to overpay for an “idyllic” rural dream like they were a year or two ago.
* How long will employers who don’t require in-person work have an advantage? I work at a small marketing agency, and I’ve been hiring for a few positions. We can’t always compete with the big agencies for salary, but we offer a better quality of life (anything outside of 9-5 is very rare), and offer very flexible hybrid arrangements (we prefer people in our time zone, and prefer people in our metro who can come to client meetings a couple times a month without getting on a plane, though neither is a hard requirement). The last few months our job openings have gone from “struggling to find qualified applicants” to “struggling to sort through all the qualified applicants because we’ll never have time to interview them all.” At the same time, we have a few clients who require in-person work for positions that could easily be remote, and are open about the fact that they have to pay above market rates to attract talent.
I’m glad I’m not job hunting at the moment, but my sense is that we’re in a time of turmoil, and things will get better for people like the questioner in the article long-term. Not worse.
As an aside, I think the best advice from the article was to work on relevant continuing education. I’m always impressed with candidates who are working to learn new things, particularly if that seems to be coming from a place of sincere curiosity. In my experience, curious people with broad interests tend to be good problem solvers.
One takeaway should be: avoid credit card debt unless you’re really in dire straits.
But also: while remote employment is the future, whether employers like it or not, it’ll continue to be bumpy as long as all the C-suite fuckheads idolize Musk.
Just sounds like they maxed out their risk and bet everything on the fact the world wouldn't revert to the mean after covid.. Unfortunate, but it is what it is. Sell the rural house and move back to where the jobs are.
Imho the job market is still very good. Loads and loads of people are getting hired. Little worse on the conditions, but frankly nothing to complain about, and nobody that wants a job is going without.
It's just that it's a leaky bucket and a LOT of new jobseekers have been poured in at the top, certainly in a few locations. It will take some time for them to all get processed. But we'll be back to an empty bucket soon.
Third, education has gotten a lot worse. I find it baffling but Germany is producing less software engineers than they were 10 years ago. It's absurd, but true. Yet the need for software engineers hasn't gone down one bit.
Plus, all of Europe is turning racist more and more and more. And one slight advantage of that is the decreased mobility. Please take note where you are in Europe, because moving is rapidly becoming a harder and harder. BUT this does mean competition for jobs is going down a lot. But if you're looking to move somewhere, now's the time, for you might not have the opportunity in 10 years. Hell, I'm starting to wonder if there are going to be limits on moving back soon.
Look at the changes in immigration laws. 15 years ago citizenship within 5 years was an option in a bunch of places. Now 10 years at 100% (not 95%) employment is the minimum, despite labor shortages. And, more worrying, now just about every country has laws about taking away citizenship from people, even people born in the country.
Sparingly used so far, but in a bunch of places these laws could be applied very widely without changes to the law (ie. it would not require a 2/3 majority or anything like that, just an executive that changes a few judges around). The next Trump (probably "Le Pen" - remember that name, you'll be hearing it a lot) will make that happen, and she's probably got 40-45% of the vote (right now it might even be 60%, but that's mostly because everyone hates Macron). We are one election away from that happening.
Being born in a country is not grounds for citizenship in most of Europe. Jus Solis is only common in the Americas.
While I don't agree with a lot of the far right rhetoric, I can understand the reason why people are fed up with immigration. Skilled labor is mostly excluded from all the laws on immigration. The intended target of the policies are people of MENA origin. 40 years of mostly failures with integrating them into the work force and picking up the tab for them leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
I mean that citizenship can now be taken away, in most of Europe, from people who have it and were born in the country and don't have any other citizenships (which is a direct violation of Human Rights: it's not allowed to take someone's last citizenships. Only double citizenships can be taken away)
Also, I doubt very much that worldwide competition for skilled labor is a real problem for voters of right-wing parties. Or left-wing parties for that matter. Skilled labor is just not a sufficient percentage of the population to matter for voting.
As an Italian the government can’t really take away my citizenship (there are only 2 cases in which it can and both involve working for a foreign government and refusing to cease to work for it). And with my citizenship I can work everywhere in the EU. In fact I have been living for the past 15 years in France and I have no intention to get the French citizenship.
I'm not sure about Italy. But right now in France the situation is that the French government certainly can take away anyone's citizenship, without much justification. They just, at the moment, don't do it. You have to be an "enemy of the state", but there is no definition what that means. I find it very hard to believe this is merely an oversight.
And like I said, all it would take is a change in the executive.
I don’t get why people are acting so surprised that remote work is winding down. The reality is that productivity falls off the rails after 12 months or so working remotely for most people.
I remember thinking back at the beginning of the pandemic how stupid is for people to make rash decisions that impact the future to deal with a short term problem (Covid pandemic)
Couple of things not mentioned in the Slate article.
1. Network - ensure everyone you know especially social media friends knows you are looking for work and what you can do. Build new networks if you have to in your local area and in your field of employment.
2. If you have a low income year, convert your traditional IRAs to Roth while your tax is low.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fKhUyF0xbM
I wonder how the situation will develop across Europe and the US.
If you’re a young person who has learned front-end development, you’re more likely to have picked up English along the way than German. English exposure is casual (documentation, tech communities, American pop culture); German exposure outside of DACH requires seeking it out.
I work at a big, traditional German manufacturing company, and the “old” parts of IT (infrastructure, SAP) generally talk amongst themselves in German and produce obviously translated English documentation stuffed into badly-organized PDFs, while the newer parts (machine learning and its cloud-based infrastructure, web and app development) are a glorious mix of languages and cultures, with English as the means of communication (German colleagues occasionally having arguments and explaining complex things to each other in German) and documentation of varying quality accessible and searchable as HTML.
Several colleagues in the “new” part of IT who speak just enough German to deal with the Ausländerbehörde and order at a Biergarten, but have to interact with our local internal customers in English. They get hired anyway. They’re offered German courses, but as a side benefit, not required training.
Not speaking German well puts a ceiling on your career here, but certainly wouldn’t stop someone getting hired for a hard-to-fill technical role.
English is the new lingua franca, and I'd bet English terms will have as much sticking power 1000 years from now as latin/"Italian" does today as a result.
Why did Latin stick around so much? Basically because no 2 european countries spoke the same language so it was the only way long-term communication was possible, voth over time and distance. Additional causes were the church clinging to latin, and knowledge in books was in Latin. Both of these were self reenforcing.
So in a future with 100s of tiny languages, English might stick around for a long time. If however a new great empire rises ( China? Arab? Something on nobody's radar?), the days of all previous great languages are over, including English.
And English already spread to all continents, something Latin didn't have at the time.
If e.g. Mandarin Chinese were to become lingua franca they'd have to first simplify the writing system. It's just too much effort for a foreigner to learn. Excluding the Japanese for this, since they share a lot of the writing system. They might have a chance.
Vietnamese shows that you can communicate in a language that was entirely written in Chinese characters before if you add word separation, tone markers and latin characters. Pinyin with tone markers and word separation is quite readable. It could be a way forward.
Korean also has letters and used to be Chinese characters. It's definitely possible but the move would have to come before widespread adoption could happen.
I know plenty of people who tried to learn Chinese for 2-5 years and plainly gave up because it's too hard.
English on a similarly basic level can be adopted in ~6 months with less effort. It's not the same.
Arabic could more easily become a lingua franca by virtue of a) already being widespread, and b) having pretty good standardization already.
If India rises they're already using English to communicate, because Hindi only gets you so far. It would probably be more stickiness for English.
I've seen a few languages lose lingua franca status in their subdomains in my liftime: French as the ex-language of political power in Belgium, and German as the ex-technical documentation language. In fact, seeing more and more Chinese appear in electronic spec cheats, I've wondered if such a change isn't already happening for English. As always, the cultural core of the power in vogue will be the last to notice the disappearance of status.
There was a document regularly appearing here on HN: The fate of empires, linked below. If you follow it's rules, you'd expect a new power appear out of nowhere. So for a new lingua franca, we just can't predict what will be the choice, but the existing big languages might be the worst candidates.
I believe English will be lingua franca until a new empire will rule the world. If the USA disappears and balkanization follows, English will have a long life. But if a global invasion from a new culture comes, English is done for.
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
In Chinese (and Arab) you not only have to contend with a different alphabet to learn but (at least for Chinese - don't know for Arab) also a completely different style of putting these symbols together to make sense. English at least shares that with other Euro languages and even if you get the structure a bit wrong (you can easily tell German or French sentence structure in an English sentence in many cases) it's still easy to comprehend well enough.
What I do think though is that Chinese or Arab might still take over simply because of numbers of speakers of them being more and dispersing and taking over that way. Firefly universe style.
I picked up English very easily despite all the "oh it's all just exceptions". It feels natural even.
Latin on the other hand took much more effort.
French I never could quite get through. Reading sorta works sometimes given Latin, English and German knowledge. The whole language sorta always feels weird though. Can't bring myself to even try any longer.
Either that, or native English speakers are lazier than native German speakers, and would rather work out how a non-native speaker is trying to use our language than try to understand that other person's language or a third language we both kind of speak.
Also worth bearing in mind that Pax Britannica was quickly followed by Pax Americana, both English speaking countries.
The major problem with this though is the massive and unparalleled extent of the British empire. English is the first language for most of two continents (NA and Australia) and official languages for significant portions of another two (Africa and Asia).
That global scale is unprecedented in history and it’s hard to see how English would be dislodged without a significant societal collapse.
Point being it seems more likely that English would be replaced by a language that doesn’t exist yet, rather than an existing language.
So after a year or two, most left.
On the other hand, many new graduates are complaining that they can't find a job, while most of them fail at fizzbuzz (I hate the silly brain-teaser interviews just as the next person but fizzbuzz, come on!), rest get totally demotivated when they hear that they can't just code 100% greenfield projects and/or show zero interest in learning anything that's not React.
I'm known to be lazy, but I came here 14 years ago as the kid who develops small business sites in Perl/PHP and had the motivation to learn German, learn all the -ends (back, front, embedded, had the "chance" to do weird stuff with RFID gates and such), learned to do ETL stuff, involved in consulting, architecture and so on... Many colleagues did the same as well. Currently in a lead position but I've learned a lot how the Java ecosystem works and involved even in JSF in my current job!
My point is, I never had the worry to be irrelevant because there were always something next, but currently most juniors just want the one true and tested way to go forward.
I sincerely don't get why.
In Switzerland, my minimum salary expectation was 30k more a year if working in English for a US/International company remotely or here, that was extremely realistic and someone in Germany would be looking at a much larger loss in pay when working for a German firm.
If they are making that choice they may think local job and culture should be rubbing off as a benefit, so you only need to send them to one general event to show their limited potential upside isn't making progress per year despite high cost per year.
By the way, I never heard anyone complain about their salary on the exit interviews. It's almost always the bad integration to the rest of the team/company, and sometimes having to deal with technology they'd rather keep away from (JSF! :) ).
I know the salaries the company offers aren't comparable to what is offered across the pond but they are quite competitive in Europe.
You are showing them that they aren't getting that if they occasionally go to the all hands and realize they have no idea what's going, aren't really able to participate in the larger context and don't really see a way that will improve.
They could continue to look for another local employer that does better at integrating them or they could stop considering integration with any local employer and get an immediate pay rise.
I'm curious where you would put the top pay of say a senior front end or back end engineer in Germany. I would say the Swiss market has a funny soft limit about 130CHF that's similar to the US around 160USD, where HRs level of fidgety in negotiations escalates fast.
Most Germans I know who have gone back and forth between Switzerland and Germany were very unhappy with German compensation but not happy with their integration in Switzerland.
The last sentence is particularly true: lots of important things are being said in French among French-speaking people.
Spoken French is also quite complex because it makes use of many references (usually shared by people of similar age) and relies a lot on second degree (what you hear is not what is meant). This is probably the most complicated part.
My wife learnt to speak French and she initially had issues to understand people nt because she was lacking words but because what she was hearing did not make a lot of sense. It is because it was either a reference or (less common because people knew she was not a native speaker) second degree).
Finally we decide in France to make our own life difficult by reinventing a lot of technical computer-oriented words, but this si the same in German.
The last sentence is particularly true: lots of important things are being said in French among French-speaking people.
Spoken French is also quite complex because it makes use of many references (usually shared by people of similar age) and relies a lot on second degree (what you hear is not what is meant). This is probably the most complicated part.
My wife learnt to speak French and she initially had issues to understand people nt because she was lacking words but because what she was hearing did not make a lot of sense. It is because it was either a reference or (less common because people knew she was not a native speaker) second degree).
Finally we decide in France to make our own life difficult by reinventing a lot of technical computer-oriented words, but this is the same in German.
Sure there was the odd professor that would call a stack a "Stapel", but nobody but him would call it that. Now of course the parts of CS that are pure maths, you are correct that they all have German words. But they're had that for hundreds of years. Actual computer-oriented run-of-the-ill words like you describe? Lots of Denglish!
I actually find that I can talk and converse perfectly at work because of it. Never lost for words. But in regular conversation outside of work I do search for words sometimes still.
“Kellerspeicher”, certainly
To put it bluntly, yes, economically Germany wants skilled immigration, but socially it doesn't.
I think you mean "Zeitverschwendungwerbegeldergenerator" ;)
How about another view point: there is no such thing as "attracting too much talent", this is the free market at work, and USA and Germany both attracted the exact amount of talent they deserve based on the pay and working conditions they offer for skilled workers, fair and square, and that's considering that getting a US work visa is insanely more difficult than a German one which is a rubber stamp since they left the immigration flood gates wide open to attempt to fix the "labor shortage" which is just corporate b.s. for "we want to get away paying shit wages and need more people desperate enough to accept them".
And I don't mean poor pay in absolute terms, because obviously Germany can compete with USA on pay, I mean pay in relative terms an national levels. SW devs are still paid blue collar wages in Germany when you look at how expensive everything is, especially buying housing. While in the US SW dev is a top % pay relative to the national wages levels and expenses. German workers in finance, controlling, marketing, management, get paid way more in Germany than SW devs which are treated more like cogs.
There's also the somewhat racist traditional old-school German culture at play that sees anything non-German as being of lower quality, including products and also people, making it more difficult for foreign talent to rise through the ranks and get top positions in German companies, as opposed to immigrant friendly countries like US, UK, Canada, Australian that don't have such tough glass ceiling for skilled workers. Case in point, the CEOs and execs in many US, UK, Canadian tech companies have migrant background while in big German companies they're as white German as it gets, with the newsworthy exception of the CEOs of BioNTech and Crytek who're Turkish.
For many SW engineers in Eastern Europe emigrating to Germany is no longer attractive. Take home salaries 50% more than back home, with a 100% in cost of living with ridiculous hoops to jump through to find a decent rental, and 300% in housing price increases. Germany wants workers but doesn't have the housing to attract them because it's also trying to use immigration to enrich the landlord gentry at the same time by squeezing the migrant workers.
When I (an Eastern European) was working for a US tech company, the colleagues in Dallas-FW area owned big houses in the suburbs (on mortgages obviously) while the colleagues in the Munich offices were all stuck renting with no prospects of ever being able to afford to buy something in the greater Munich area unless they had well-off parents, which migrant workers obviously did not. Munich land prices per square foot/meter are similar to SV but not the wages. Absolutely insane.
Germany is just not an innovative powerhouse in the international SW sector that's capable to generate the biggest returns and pay the best wages, nor does it have a great housing market, or the lowest taxes, or the best openness to employing migrants in top positions. Considering all this, they will continue to have a skilled workers' shortage for the foreseeable future that will decimate their international competitiveness. Sure, they make Zeiss mirrors and Trumpf lasers, but those niche low-volume precision manufacturing sectors don't scale as well as SW, which makes it a much more profitable industry that's dominated by the US.
But you don't have to take my word for it, the comments on that Youtube video you shared tell the exact same story.
Not entirely sure why your comment gets downvoted because this is accurate. Pay in germany is at the same level or lower than most east eu countries, in tech, after factoring in the cost of living. Workers in other industries face abuse on a regular basis, at least based on what i was told by many of them ranging from taxi drivers, to factory workers, to phd students. This supposedly allied country is so hostile that when an east european reaches a leading position it makes the news. Instead germany ends up attracting bad apples since no self respecting person wants to work there or in similarly hostile north European countries (ie Sweden). They treat people like cheap labour, get what they pay for, and then complain.
And although I check virtually all the boxes of your backend tech stack and education requirements plus a lot of JS/TS and Angular experience, I would not consider applying. The job ad explicitly mentions a location. So this reeks of a position with no real "home office". I once interviewed with a company which advertised as full-remote and then when it came to the offering was only granting flexibility nominally, but was legally a when push-come-to-shove-your-butt-is-in-our-office-seat contract. Also, it is in my eyes not sensible to exclude the developers with a vocational education (Fachinformatiker Anwendungsentwicklung or MATSE) with your degree requirements.
Your advice on improvements to the job ads, I take with me with pleasure. I'll talk to the HR. That ad is supposed to say front-end developer for front-end components! Well.
This is just horrible for society in general. People are wasting time, gas, creating traffic, etc. For nothing at all. Never mind the ongoing housing disaster in the US which is only being made worse.
false. for commercial real estate prices.
even martha stewart has been advocating for butts in seats lately.
empty office buildings don’t print money.
I don't know what it is, but there's a sort of personality type which seems common among technical roles. Text communication is curt, feathers get ruffled easily in zoom/email, just really hard to work with.
Then you sit down with them for 15-30 minutes and talk, it's like night and day. They see you as a person, things resolve quickly, you both go about your day.
Even though I do most of my work remotely, I try to schedule interactions with these people on days when we will both be in the same room. They're not bad people, but it makes things so much easier, so much less drama.
During the height of the pandemic, the craziest real estate jumps were in nice rural areas where formerly you either had to be retired, independently wealthy, in an unusual profession that was lucrative in rural areas, or take a pay cut to live.
But as soon as people in tech and many other “traditional business” jobs could keep their high salaries and live in Truckee, or Boise or Coeur d’Alene or Bellingham, quite a number of them moved, and liked what they found.
I’ve lived in places like that for most of my life, so I get it. But I’m not sure how it’s going to shake out.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few years. The trends/factors I’ve been thinking about are:
* Will they like these areas long term? E.g., Coeur d’Alene is chock-full of natural beauty, but the winters can be a slog. And the politics are wild. In many ways these migrants have brought with them the things they liked from cities, so that smaller rural communities now are likely to have better coffee and nicer restaurants, but they still can’t compete with major metros on a lot of fronts. I anecdotally know one family that migrated from Portland to our community in Idaho during COVID, liked it, but found they missed what the left in the city and are now moving back. I’ll bet they’re part of a trend, even for workers who have the option to stay remote.
* What’s gonna happen with real estate prices in cities? Tremendously high commercial vacancy in cities has yet to cause a crash. But for all the talk about employers forcing people back to work, I think lots of them are going to continue to take advantage of lower rent opportunities. Will that eventually cause a crash or significant dip in overall real estate values in major urban areas? Will that entice more COVID migrants back?
* What about real estate in popular rural areas? I’ve been seeing a lot more price cuts and new listings for homes in our popular COVID migration community in the past few months. Sprig and early summer are traditionally our hot real estate months, and while people are still asking prices they would be laughable a few years ago, they’re not getting those asking prices. Houses are sitting unsold longer, and taking price cuts on the way. I think the sense of “I’ve got to get out of here” is gone, and people aren’t willing to overpay for an “idyllic” rural dream like they were a year or two ago.
* How long will employers who don’t require in-person work have an advantage? I work at a small marketing agency, and I’ve been hiring for a few positions. We can’t always compete with the big agencies for salary, but we offer a better quality of life (anything outside of 9-5 is very rare), and offer very flexible hybrid arrangements (we prefer people in our time zone, and prefer people in our metro who can come to client meetings a couple times a month without getting on a plane, though neither is a hard requirement). The last few months our job openings have gone from “struggling to find qualified applicants” to “struggling to sort through all the qualified applicants because we’ll never have time to interview them all.” At the same time, we have a few clients who require in-person work for positions that could easily be remote, and are open about the fact that they have to pay above market rates to attract talent.
I’m glad I’m not job hunting at the moment, but my sense is that we’re in a time of turmoil, and things will get better for people like the questioner in the article long-term. Not worse.
As an aside, I think the best advice from the article was to work on relevant continuing education. I’m always impressed with candidates who are working to learn new things, particularly if that seems to be coming from a place of sincere curiosity. In my experience, curious people with broad interests tend to be good problem solvers.
But also: while remote employment is the future, whether employers like it or not, it’ll continue to be bumpy as long as all the C-suite fuckheads idolize Musk.
It's just that it's a leaky bucket and a LOT of new jobseekers have been poured in at the top, certainly in a few locations. It will take some time for them to all get processed. But we'll be back to an empty bucket soon.
Third, education has gotten a lot worse. I find it baffling but Germany is producing less software engineers than they were 10 years ago. It's absurd, but true. Yet the need for software engineers hasn't gone down one bit.
Plus, all of Europe is turning racist more and more and more. And one slight advantage of that is the decreased mobility. Please take note where you are in Europe, because moving is rapidly becoming a harder and harder. BUT this does mean competition for jobs is going down a lot. But if you're looking to move somewhere, now's the time, for you might not have the opportunity in 10 years. Hell, I'm starting to wonder if there are going to be limits on moving back soon.
Facts to back up that wide generic claim?
Sparingly used so far, but in a bunch of places these laws could be applied very widely without changes to the law (ie. it would not require a 2/3 majority or anything like that, just an executive that changes a few judges around). The next Trump (probably "Le Pen" - remember that name, you'll be hearing it a lot) will make that happen, and she's probably got 40-45% of the vote (right now it might even be 60%, but that's mostly because everyone hates Macron). We are one election away from that happening.
While I don't agree with a lot of the far right rhetoric, I can understand the reason why people are fed up with immigration. Skilled labor is mostly excluded from all the laws on immigration. The intended target of the policies are people of MENA origin. 40 years of mostly failures with integrating them into the work force and picking up the tab for them leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Also, I doubt very much that worldwide competition for skilled labor is a real problem for voters of right-wing parties. Or left-wing parties for that matter. Skilled labor is just not a sufficient percentage of the population to matter for voting.
And like I said, all it would take is a change in the executive.
that's what i've noticed. remote jobs get 1000s even 10s of 1000s of applicants. not even worth applying.
and more and more companies are going fully onsite. depressing.
Also be sure it’s easy to sell, if things get tough.
1. Network - ensure everyone you know especially social media friends knows you are looking for work and what you can do. Build new networks if you have to in your local area and in your field of employment.
2. If you have a low income year, convert your traditional IRAs to Roth while your tax is low.