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by albertogh
5329 days ago
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I'm Spanish and my GF is Portuguese. I can vouch for everything you said. As an enterpreneur, I work really hard every day to meet my goals. 14 hours days are not unusual to me and working some 3-4 hours a day on weekends is the norm. When others know I work from home, they either assume that I just sit browsing Facebook all day and I'm really just collecting unemployment for the government or that I'm a lazy asshat whose parents pay for everything. A year and a half ago, I was lucky enough to be featured by the most popular regional newspaper (~1M people live in this area) because of some work I did. A lot of the people who know me IRL congratulated me by it, but you should have seen some of the comments in the newspaper's website: they were incredibly vitriolic, calling me a lot of things like "lucky code butcher" or suggesting I was friends with someone in the newspaper because what I did was not newsworthy. Combine that with the absurdly high unemployment rate, the incredibly high amount of people who prefer collecting 600€ of unemployment rather than working for 1000€ and the ridiculously high taxes we have to pay (an employee taking home ~1300€ a month would cost me around ~2700€) and you end up with the nightmare for startups we have here. |
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Hats off to you if you are an entrepreneur in Spain. Some 20 years ago or so when I was in college and trying to be self-employed or create my own company I would go to the government offices in my hometown (with 40% or so unemployment rate) to know what to do and they would look at me like I was crazy.
In one office nobody knew anything and I had to come back later to talk to the guy who supposedly knew something but was out having coffee. In another office they pretty much kicked me out because my questions led them to believe I was trying to find some loophole in order to commit fraud or something. And these were the “Offices for Employment Creation” or whatever they called it back them.
Everybody in Spain just tells you to go work for the government (and there are 4 or 5 levels of government that exist in Spain), competing in the “oposiciones” or tests for a position, where the ratios are like one position for a thousand applicants. This is so because not only government employment is stable (they basically cannot ever fire you no matter what) and usually relaxed but they often make more money that their counterparts in the private sector.