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by narag 5050 days ago
In a word: yes.

I'm subcontracted, so even if my salary is half what it would be in UK, Germany, the cost for the company I work in is not so different. Their fault anyway, why don't they contract me directly?

Add to that that rotation is wild. They hire the cheapest people: those who are unemployed and would take any offer. As soon as you're employed, it's orders of magnitude easier to get a job, so hasta luego, Lucas!

Companies also have a huge burden treating with other companies or government that work terribly and terribly slow, pay when they will and often simply don't answer the phone.

There is little competitive spirit. Virtually all the big companies are there because some concession or "too big to fail" (utilities, banks) so their way to raise profit is to exploit customers and employees.

Beware! There are exceptions to all of these traits! There are good innovative companies, competitive people and internationally successful ventures. But not enough to sustain a disgruntled IT workforce that are treated as spoiled clerks.

1 comments

Why don't foreign companies go there and hire people, though? They can hire people cheaper than having them move to the UK/Germany/US even if they pay above average local rates, they can hire people who otherwise wouldn't move (and even some of the movers will be happier closer to home), and since they're hiring them as part of a large, or at least multinational company, they don't necessarily need those people to have much at all to do with other Spanish/Italian/whatever companies or government.
I think that's precisely the point the author was making. Google could set up shop there and build a massive development centre that would make it easier for them to do stuff for Latin America and Africa - and yet they don't, other than a dinky office selling AdWords.