I can only speak for the UK, but the tech market is very different here. We don’t really have large tech companies like in the US. Most tech work in the UK is in sectors like finance, retail, or public sector. While our economy isn’t great and there are lay offs it would be wrong to call it “tech layoffs”.
We have some tech startups here too though, and those are obviously struggling right now, but startups don’t normally lay people off, they simply fail, and that happens all the time anyway.
However, where it is like the US is in the way tech hiring has dropped off a cliff. So if you’re working at a startup and the startup fails, or if you’re a contractor and your contract isn’t renewed then you’re going to find it extremely hard to find work right now. I’m getting a lot of messages from ex-colleagues at the moment struggling to find work but thinking about it I don’t know anyone who actually got laid off unless you’re talking about long-term contracts not being renewed.
The only sector that seems completely fine is public sector work, but there’s just not enough public sector work to go around.
> We don’t really have large tech companies like in the US.
No, but you do have the governemnt, HFT and banking industry which pays contractors well, plus local branches of many top US companies which is still a leg up on the labor market comapred to most EU memebers, meanign salaries at the top end are much higher than most of the EU.
Look for jobs in countries without top banking and no branhces of top US companies and see what salaries are like. UK will seem like a paradise.
In my experience, average contracting rates are not that different between UK and mainland Northern Europe. It’s around 500-600 GBP in UK, and 500-700 EUR in Northern Europe (or local equivalent in SEK, DKK etc.). Southern Europe is much worse, and Eastern Europe also pays less, but in EE the money goes much further, so you might actually be better off than a contractor in London City.
I don’t think this comment is disputing any of that.
It did mention the financial and public sector industries, which you call out, and only being able to speak for the UK however.
While it didn’t include HFT, that doesn’t employee the same number of heads as the others
There are big tech companies in the UK and they’ve done layoffs just like in the US. Plenty of companies still hiring though and overall tech workforce is much higher than pre-pandemic.
It’s bad in Europe as well. Spotify let lots of people go last year, Pitch recently fired 2/3 of their staff. Glovo, Veriff, Xolo are just a few others I heard about, but I’m sure it’s a hell of a lot more.
I’m thinking once this correction has settled we’re probably left with companies that produce actual value instead of just hype, which is good, and I’d rather work for companies with real profits anyway, but it’s rough to ride this wave right now for sure, especially if you get laid off and need to pay bills.
Freelance developer from Germany here. There is a significant drop in projects and a slowdown in permanent offerings, but no layoff wave like in the US. Demand is still high but due to the current recession most companies delay hiring for now.
From my point of view there is also a skill-missmatch in Germany. While firms look for the usual most modern tech stacks, workforce is often conservative, staying years or even decades at one company with outdated technology. Hiring non-EU citizens is almost impossible because of the bureaucracy.
So, in Germany the situation is complicated and different from the US.
>Hiring non-EU citizens is almost impossible because of the bureaucracy.
We want to water down the already mediocre wages even more? If you can’t find workers across the whole 448 million EU block willing to work for you, you’re doing something wrong.
What makes you think that developers from Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Egypt or the US would demand so much lower wages? I helped companies onboarding people from all over the globe, and every developer (at least those we met and signed) know their worth.
Immigrants don’t get a lower COL, they live in the same place and pay the same taxes.
If anything their COL is higher because of the fees related to being an immigrant, they lose out on benefits and on sharing fixed costs with the family.
I’m aware, I’m an immigrant. The thread is discussing outsourcing to lower COL areas not immigration (at least that’s how I interpreted it).
>and every developer (at least those we met and signed) know their worth
What about those you didn’t sign? What about the SW bodyshops aka visa shops, who pray on desperate foreigners from broken countries trying to emigrate at any cost? I know more of those sleezy bodyshops than I have fingers on my hands to count.
I never said your comapny does this, but you can’t pretend immigration wage dumping doesn’t exist and that many companyes aren’t exploiting it.
You also can’t tell me with a straight face that flooding the market with more workers doesn’t lower wages as per the supply/demand of the market.
These foreigners will quickly learn the cost of living in Germany and what their colleagues get, I don’t think it’s a significant factor. What really keeps wages down IMO is the lack of high-margin/high-growth businesses, lack of German “unicorns”, general risk-averseness of German capital (which can be explained by the previous two).
> IMO is the lack of high-margin/high-growth businesses
It’s not really a German-only thing. Other than the US and China almost no other country currently has such things. EU is mostly traditional businesses and risk-averse investors.
> It’s not really a German-only thing.
Sure, relatively (compared to what one can have in the US) low salaries for software engineers is a EU wide thing. Some countries pay more some less, Germany is probably closer to the top if you consider EU.
I’m also a freelance developer living in Germany. I’ve been lucky enough to be on a fairly large, ongoing project for the last year, so I haven’t been affected. But new project inquiries/leads have basically dropped to zero for me.
From work, to housing, it feels like the population is in “wait and see” mode.
Most of the remote jobs I see from Germany also hire only those who live in Germany, so it seems to me that Germans don’t even want EU citizens, just Germans.
That’s in every EU country for tax and social security reasons, they want you to also be a tax resident there because that dicatates your tax, labor laws and employee benefits meaning it’s familiar and predictable for the company.
There’s no EU wide citizenship, employee regulations and tax liability for employees but are local for each country. They don’t want you earning money in one country but spemding it and taxing it in another.
This is where the EU is weaker than the US and will keep missing the mark in software.
You pay income tax based on where you live though. So I can earn money from Germany, but if I live in Estonia, my taxes go to Estonia. Most remote workers I know are set up as LLC’s, and they simply invoice their clients for the work, entirely avoiding any tax or social security issues for the employer, since you the employee have to deal with it yourself in your own country.
At first you pay taxes in the country the company you work for is registered (there might be b2b options, which might differ). Then you pay rest in the country where you have a tax residency.
In your example, at first you pay taxes in Germany and if Estonian taxes are bigger, you pay the difference there.
I am partly working for an Italian company from Germany. Billing is very simple. I invoice the Italian company according to the so-called reverse charge procedure: My invoice does not include VAT, but only the European VAT number of my and the customer’s company. The customer must settle the VAT with his tax office. I only have to inform my tax office at regular intervals about the turnover with the individual companies, so that the European tax authorities can check whether the customer has declared his taxes correctly.
I invoice via my own company. But this is not mandatory. You can also apply for a VAT number as an individual and follow the same procedure. I did this before I set up the company.
At least in Germany there are strict rules for what is called a pretence of self-employment. A freelancer needs to have more than one client, the client cannot set working hours, access to systems also cannot be the same as for employees etc. US has something similar AFAIK, I would expect most EU countries to have it too.
Well yes, EU/Europe is a collection of many independent countries, unlike U.S which is one country. And you can’t work in a country as an employee without having a residence permit in that country. The comparison to U.S here makes absolutely no sense.
>The comparison to U.S here makes absolutely no sense.
Why not? My ex German boss moved to the US to work for a company there and since the position is remote, he can live and work in any state he wants. You can’t do that in the EU which limits labor mobility which hurts the EU economy and innovation versus the US.
United States is one country. European Union is not a country, it is a collection of many independent countries with separate laws, languages, cultures, governments. You can also live and work from any corner of the same country in EU if you want, provided that your job is also in the same country, just like in the U.S. This is not any different.
What you’re saying is like can you work for a Canadian company while living in the U.S? Or an Argentinian company while living in the U.S? I don’t think so. So I fail to see how U.S is somehow better here, and you’re comparing European Union to 1 country, which is just ridiculous, since EU is not a country. European Union “states” are not the same as U.S states. They are actual countries.
> What you’re saying is like can you work for a Canadian company while living in the U.S?
Yes, of course. You do need government approval, but generally they are willing.
However, one of the supposed goals of the EU’s creation was to allow free movement of labour across member countries. Exactly so you can work in another EU country without having to secure government approval.
It is interesting that you say not only did the EU fail on that front, but that it has managed to create a situation worse than countries that have never made a formal attempt to go down that road.
Well yes, free movement of labor, aka people _moving_ to their job. Not people fleeing their country to enjoy cheap Greek beaches on German salaries
The EU “freedom of movement” for work was drafted something like 60 years ago, well before the advent of remote work or even the internet itself, and is in a dire need of an update to modern times and modern ways of work.
Labor mobility doesn’t just mean me being free to moving across countries for work.
Labor mobility means me being free to work for whichever company I want in the EU as an EU citizen, it doesn’t have to mandate that I have to physically be there in that country for that particular job if physical presence is not required for that job (aka the majority of the white collar laptop-class, which we learned in the pandemic)
Does my code run better at my German employer if run from a German home wifi instead of a Romanian or Bulgarian home wifi? Then why should I have to be in Germany to do that job and not any other EU state suffice?
Yes, I know about all the different laws and taxes of each country and all that legal mumbo-jumbo, but those laws that hinder this can always be changed in order to facilitate this, same how we changed them to have free trade of goods, free EU wide emergency healthcare for EU members, or how we abolished GSM roaming fees such that my SIM hooks on to any cell tower on EU soil and I don’t have to pay extra, ain’t that amazing.
So then why aren’t we(the EU) doing it? Eu-wide remote work labor regualtions(or more like de-regualtuions) would bring more benefits to the block as a whole.
Again, it’s already possible. The EU’s job isn’t to please a couple thousands of code monkeys who want to get German salaries and Spanish lifestyle. The IT sector is one of the least impacted here, because it’s already possible for companies to hire from other EU countries if they really want to
Whilst I agree with you in principle it’s also employers being lazy, they absolutely can take on the burden of paying someone in a different country as an employee.
I work for a US based company in Iceland and they pay me as a FTE here and have done/do so in multiple other European countries.
>it’s also employers being lazy, they absolutely can take on the burden of paying someone in a different country as an employee
It’s less about being lazy and more about the financial, law and tax overhead that comes with legally employing someone in another EU country as a FTE, as in most cases it means opening up a subsidiary/legal entity in that country which means another country who’s laws you have to comply with. Not a huge issue for large enterprises which are already present in most countries anyway, but a big problem for small and medium sized companies. Unlike when doing business, a single EU legal entity is not enough to hire people remotely, you need a presence in each country where your workforce resides.
>I work for a US based company in Iceland and they pay me as a FTE here and have done/do so in multiple other European countries.
May I ask how? Did your employer open up an Iceland entitty or did they use some employer of record?
“You have free movement to any country in the EU you want… Unless you want to keep your job, then you’ve another thing coming!” is not a freedom.
Which is fine. The people of the EU can make whatever decisions they want. But it is funny that it has ended up with less freedom, after wanting to provide more freedom, than countries that have never tried to give more freedom.
Arguably most people’s jobs don’t let them move countries and being able to do so is largely the preserve of the fortunate. I imagine most people would also find it hard to move any significant internal distance.
You’d be amazed at how many people make use of this freedom in the EU though despite the cultural, linguistic and bureaucratic barriers. It was pretty mind blowing to me when I could just move my life from Scotland to Iceland. Particularly as that’s a significantly different transition than moving from one state in the US to another.
Generally, if you have work authorization in a given country, it is unlikely that country cares where you actually do the work. In fact, it is normally considered beneficial for a country to allow domestic work to happen outside of its borders in order to grease international trade.
In a vacuum it may not be surprising that EU member countries have chosen to be more protectionist. However, the EU was created specifically to allow free movement of labour. For it to explicitly deny free movement of labour is… interesting.
>Generally, if you have work authorization in a given country, it is unlikely that country cares where you actually do the work. In fact, it is normally considered beneficial for a country to allow domestic work to happen outside of its borders in order to grease international trade.
That’s false for a lot of the EU. It’s usally the opposite. They force you to do the work within gthe country’s premises so you contribute to the taxes and busineses there instead of abroad.
I never said the EU is a country (nor does it need to be to fulfill my point), but as an economic block, if it wishes to compete with the US in terms of economy and innovation, it needs to do better in terms of labor mobility, and the current status quo is holding it back.
I hope my point of what I originally meant is clear now and you don’t need to explain anymore about why the EU is not a country like the US.
It’s completely possible in theory, just very hard in practice.
It’s an economical alliance, not a federation, each country has different tax, social security, pension, health insurance, labor laws, &c. all of them are as complex as your home country’s one, but now you have to deal with them in a foreign language, and your employer hr has to deal with them too
It’s just much easier to relocate or hire a local than to play this game for a nomad tech bro that will stay 2 years before jumping to his next adventure
So yes you seem to acknowledge the reality that the EU is composed of different countries but you don’t seem to grasp the complexity of the consequences
>just very hard in practice
Yes it is, by design. And why aren’t we(the EU) trying to make it easier?
>It’s just much easier to relocate or hire a local
Is it? Then what about the famous “m’uh labor shortage” employers are crying about? If they’d be open and have simpler ways to hire people remotely from other EU memebrs, their labor shortages could be over.
Phisical relocation of people/families across countries just for a job that can be done remotely, is also a huge PITA for the environment due to all the back and forth traveling between home country and work country people do, and for the housing market, not to mention for the family unit and communities loosing people having to uproot themveles just to press keys on a laptop but only if done inside the right EU country for the same souless corporation. Do I need to state even more benefits of easy EU wide remote work would bring or is the silliness of the current EU status quo beginning to sink in?
>but you don’t seem to grasp the complexity of the consequences
Oh I know the complexities very well, but that was not my point. My point was: why aren’t we(the EU) fighting to reduce or emliminate those complexities in order to imporve labor mobility which would help reduce labor shortages and also improve the job prospects of people who can’t relocate due to family or whatever personal reasons?
> why aren’t we(the EU) fighting to reduce or emliminate those complexities
Because, again, the EU is composed of different countries with different laws/culture/opinions/&c. we can’t agree on most things do you think it’s just a matter of “want”. Again it’s an economical alliance not a federation, if we wanted a federation we’d have a federation
You seem to imagine this is a detail but it really isn’t one. Labor laws didn’t materialise out of thin air in anno domini 2024, there are hundreds of years of inertia. The ultra privileged “laptop class” making 2-5x the min wage of their respective country’s wage isn’t a top priority for our overlords in Bruxelles
Yeah, but those rules are in place mostly to accomodate cross border commuters. I can’t easily be employed by a Belgian comapny while living and working in Portugal same as those living in Belgium, but involves extra hoops like either me working as a LLC or the company setting up an office in Portugal or hiring me through a local Porthughese third party, adn most caompnies don’t want this hassle just for one employee.
I’m not in Portugal, that was just for the sake of an example.
Unfortunately this is effectively useless as you need to submit your employees one by one to get this exception. I know of an employer ($4bn revenue) who said this is simply not feasible.
EU bureaucrats are just stupid.
Many managers I got to know have a hard time expressing themselves in English properly.
They fear miscommunication and the administrative work connected to non-German employees.
Most of German job offers I’ve seen require proficiency in the German language. That’s unlike offers from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Israel, where you’re only required to speak English. Nothing else is ever even suggested in those offers. My sister works in Germany and says that while Germans are pretty easy to talk to in English on the street, in a shop etc., they’re reluctant to do so in a work context and she gets irritated looks when she only speaks at B1 level. Germany is pretty uniquely hostile to foreigners in that regard. I suspect that the requirement you’re speaking of is set up mainly to filter out those who don’t speak German very well.
Note that we also had COVID and shifted to remote gigs in Germany. This means that we compete with people located in smaller cities or even villages which probably have a pretty good pay rate bump.
What is the bureaucracy in question? Required salary for the blue card is really low now, especially for tech workers, so basically you just go ahead and hire as I understand.
I run a website about this for a living.
1. It takes forever to get a residence permit and get permission to start working.
2. It’s increasingly difficult to find housing, which is required for the residence permit.
3. The bureaucracy is notoriously slow and outdated, and full of catch-22 situations. It’s especially apparent when you need everything at once.
4. The language barrier makes everything harder.
In other words, if you meet all the requirements, you’re looking at a multi-month slog before you’re finally allowed to start working. People sometimes lose their job before they start due to the immigration office delays.
You can of course hire a contractor and tax them as usual business costs. But for a permanent position the employee needs a European Social ID, a Tax ID, health care account and a bank account. All this is needed before you can pay the employee’s first loan.
Germany: as a senior the market looks ok, although a bit slower and customers seem more hesitant to start expensive projects/hire additional contractors. I get a few job offers now and then, enough to not be unemployed long if I wanted/had to switch my employer.
From my (limited) perspective in Berlin, I see much more layoffs than previously, and a lot more friends looking for work for a longer time. It’s especially hard on tech-adjacent roles like UX design.
Yeah, sounds about right. Companies try to save money by hiring more juniors and skipping roles like UX. Rarely works out though.
For some reason, there seems to be enough money for AI, wast amount of meetings and convoluted interviewing and vetting processes.
According to Bitkom, the German IT trade association, there are 149,000 open IT positions reported in Germany as of 2023-12-13, which is 12,000 more than one year ago.[1] The absolut numbers are not so significant here, because this is only what is reported and a lot of IT positions exist outside of the IT industry in the narrow sense, but the trend is quite meaningful.
As someone who had a difficult time finding a job last year I took a look at press release and I found exactly what I thought I would find: 61% of companies say that the applicants’ salary expectations “do not match the company’s established salary structure”, 35% of them see poor German language skills as a difficulty, and 48% are putting their hopes on AI to solve the skilled workers’ shortage.
To my cynical eyes this looks like “we want skilled workers, we want them to speak fluent German, and we want them cheap”. And as the saying goes, you can choose two of those things but rarely all three.
Japan: It’s very hard for companies to lay off employees here, and I haven’t seen any reports of large layoffs in the Japanese business press. However, a lot of IT work is subcontracted to smaller companies, and cutbacks in subcontracting might not make the news. Employment cutbacks by smaller IT firms might fall under the media radar, too.
The picture of the overall employment situation as conveyed by the news media here is of a tight labor market and of difficulty for companies in finding and retaining employees.
Also I think Japanese companies are super risk-averse in general anyways. Not many of them hyperexpanded and overhired in COVID, so there weren’t many extra employees to layoff anyways.
Haven’t heard much from my family in Japan. Layoffs are rare in Japan in general and unemployment is generally always in the 2% range there. I’m sure startups are struggling there though as that seems to be the global trend, but the software engineers I know there at bigger companies haven’t mentioned anything about layoffs and seem to be doing fine.
I have no direct experience with the situation in Japan, so take with a grain of salt: my understanding was that, as with much of Asia, the issue is not so much layoffs as burnout and the difficulty of getting one’s foot in the door. “Low unemployment” where a significant portion of the youth population is working one or two arubaito or has landed a plum corporate gig that requires 12 hours in the office a day. I don’t know how much I’d trust casual conversation about the situation, since it’s not kosher to complain so forwardly.
It’s just very well regulated and you fall on the very comfortable safety net of 12 months of unemployment benefits (a bit more than 60% of your salary).
The average Joe will have a much better time being fired in Germany than in countries like the US or Switzerland
I haven’t heard much this year in New Zealand but ’21/’22 was pretty bad for Xero and a handful of smaller companies. But overall companies here didn’t see the insane 2020 growth of American firms. Hiring has slowed across the board, hugely.
Yeah I would say the same thing. Slower hiring overall but less big layoffs. I’m a contractor and haven’t had much of a shortage in work for a while now, but we did have a big contract drop off in 2022 when the company went through a double-digit layoff.
Indonesia: Huge layoffs from the unicorns correcting their valuations and a large number of earlier stage startups shutting down. Lots of disillusionment from tech workers over whats been happening, many are trying to move to large corporates / banks, many are struggling to find work.
Theres some sectors doing well, some new fundings happening, but overall slow and layoffs continue.
I’m at a mid sized SaaS company in the Nordics (European). No layoffs, but hiring has slowed down and we no longer actively try to recruit junior devs. We used to have lots of active job ads, now they’re reduced to only the most in-demand roles. The company is profitable and we have big important projects going on so not too worried.
SE Asia had been hit hard for a while. The thing is we never really had a dot com bubble. Unicorns were raising hard, selling $1 stuff for $0.90, outsourcing everything, skyrocketing growth, raised billions, repeat. VCs would frown on companies that were raising money to use it as a warchest, YC style.
It choked out funding for cautious YC style growth especially after Grab acquired Uber operations here. So everyone else did it too, the fake it until you make it mindset became prominent. Eventually everyone runs out of fund sources and have to become profitable, but it’s hard when you’re now public and used to losing millions every quarter. The costs is often in employees, so waves of layoffs it is.
A lot of it isn’t American money, but it’s bad timing.
The layoffs aren’t bad in the US (yet). Hiring has slowed down considerably, but we’re not seeing massive layoffs yet.
For those in the Bay Area. Remember, you’ll know that things are bad when rush-hour commute looks like non-rush-hour commute.
India- multiple companies are laying off . First 1000+ laid off from payment unicorn, then Google lays off. From what I can see( collecting job data) slowness is there and companies are letting people go and will hire again in few months ( Google tech)
Google is laying off 1000 in Singapore.
Lazada and Shopee, online marketplaces, are also reporting double-digit percentage layoffs. For one of them, more than 50% of the C-suite was let go.
Heard that S. Korea tech scene is in a similar situation. It’s much harder to do mass layoff in the country, but many people are leaving their companies in a form of “voluntary resignation”. Also hiring slowdown is happening as well as project cancellation.
We are hearing about tech layoffs in some of the largest “tech” companies, but I’m not sure that we’re seeing that in the many companies where tech serves the needs of the business.
In Indonesia, I’ve heard that several big startups/companies are laying off their employees almost every month. Some have suddenly announced that they’re closing their business too.
Not sure how it is in other countries, but my department is hiring more internationally than domestically this year. Seems to me the pattern is layoff domestically and hire internationally.
In France I didn’t heard a lot of layoff. It’s recently way more difficult to find a good job, but you can still find a shitty job overnight at consulting companies
I know the answer is “because neolibs,” but I think at least one politician might want to campaign a little on how companies are replacing US employees with cheap labor abroad. I don’t even need to take a side on the matter. Objectively it seems they’re dropping the ball rather hard.
