“Finland could employ some 2000-3000 developers immediately”

http://metropolitan.fi/entry/finland-could-employ-some-2000-3000-developers-immediately

by velmu • 10 years ago

61 87 10 years ago

metropolitan.fi

majewsky2• 10 years ago

And simultaneously, my government (Germany) is only capable of thinking about how to make immigration even harder.

Avalaxy• 10 years ago

That's because the immigrants you're receiving are the wrong ones (the unskilled labor instead of high skilled labor).

mamon2• 10 years ago

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.

easytiger• 10 years ago

thinking about how to make immigration even harder.

Well they just let in over 1 million new state aid dependants. Hardly a formula for growth.

barpet6• 10 years ago

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.

Yaziyumaru2• 10 years ago

Immigration to Germany as a skilled worker was very easy for me.

sunilkumarc• 10 years ago

Could you please let me know how you applied for the German company and what the interview and visa processes were like?

barpet6• 10 years ago

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.

AlbertoGP• 10 years ago

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".

barpet6• 10 years ago

Yup. Programmer is a new derogatory term for a "worker".

pavlov3• 10 years ago

"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.)

zihotki• 10 years ago

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.

olegp4• 10 years ago

Yup, we're seeing that at Toughbyte as well, see my other comment. In fact we even have some candidates commuting to Helsinki from St Pete.

barpet6• 10 years ago

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.

kushti• 10 years ago

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.

imtringued• 10 years ago

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.

3pt141592• 10 years ago

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.

rubber_duck• 10 years ago

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)

ci5er• 10 years ago

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!

fsloth6• 10 years ago

"Companies can hire entire teams overseas"

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.

mavdi• 10 years ago

OK, problem understood. But how would you fix it?

forgottenacc56• 10 years ago

"Developers" or "good developers"? Important distinction.

kagamine• 10 years ago

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.

meekins• 10 years ago

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.

nippples2• 10 years ago

That's great, because we have far more than that unemployed skilled developers in 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.

retox3• 10 years ago

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.

yummyfajitas8• 10 years ago

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.

fsloth6• 10 years ago

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.

cheriot• 10 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.

retox3• 10 years ago

What's not explained is why those new employees MUST come from outside the EU.

olegp4• 10 years ago

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.

toyg3• 10 years ago

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".

olegp4• 10 years ago

Here's a good post that explains this in a lot more detail: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/7-hurdles-ex-nokia-employee-n...

lagadu3• 10 years ago

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.

olegp4• 10 years ago

Developers in Finland don't value salary as much as those in other countries, see here: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#mone...

There's also the progressive tax which should be taken into account.

ccozan• 10 years ago

The whole article is about the workers/developer from _outside_ EU.

Any EU citizen wouldn't need anything, just go there, get the job, register with the authorities and find some housing.

lucaspiller• 10 years ago

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'.

germanier• 10 years ago

Which usually just shifts the paperwork to the "freelancer". Most potential employees cannot just pickup work as a freelancer without hassle.

mercer• 10 years ago

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.

ex_amazon_sde• 10 years ago

Meaning: "nimble" Estonia allows sweatshops "without bureaucracy" that employ only people on trial period.

tluyben22• 10 years ago

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.

lagadu3• 10 years ago

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.

tluyben22• 10 years ago

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.

“Finland could employ some 2000-3000 developers immediately”

Related Stories