
“Finland could employ some 2000-3000 developers immediately” - velmu
http://metropolitan.fi/entry/finland-could-employ-some-2000-3000-developers-immediately
======
nippples
That's great, because we have far more than that unemployed skilled developers
in Finland.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-technology-
idUSKCN...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-technology-
idUSKCN0Z01D9)

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.

~~~
fsloth
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
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.

~~~
fsloth
My specific example - sourcing "real time graphics experts"\- was a bit
obscure. It's a niche. The first problem arranging training would be to first
figure out how to train and by whom. A learn-by-doing projects of increasing
complexity from raytracers and scheme interpreters to a real time 3D engine
and shader languages would probably do part of the trick. Then add 3D modeling
and some drawing courses to make sure they appreciate the art as well. Doable
in two years, full time - yeah sure. But what are the economic tradeoffs?

The personnel to arrange all of this is available in Helsinki area. The
problem, I think, is that the quantity of people sought is so small that it
would be harder to arrange all of this properly than just headhunt for them
around the world. It would be awesome, though.

There are trainings for people like SAP experts. The curriculum is fixed and
the problem domain fantastically constrained. In this case it's fairly easy to
retrain for sought out skills - especially if the number of new experts is
counted in the hundreds.

I have to strain once more that my example was obscure and for a specific,
fairly small niche. I have no idea where the thousands of missing specialists
are needed. Probably for usual backend/frontend development, would be my
guess.

------
tluyben2
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.

~~~
lagadu
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.

~~~
tluyben2
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.

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

~~~
mercer
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.

~~~
toyg
It's not just the paperwork; is that you then have to calculate your rates,
your holidays, your pension payments and so on. You get a number wrong and you
don't go on holiday that year; you get a number wrong, and on the month you
have to pay your taxes you don't have cash to feed your kids. And all this
before we even get to the issue of finding and maintaining business
relationships, without which again your kids go hungry.

In contrast, regular employees don't have to do any of that - they know they
will get a paycheck around X every month, will have Y days off work and (if
the company is not run by crooks and/or nosedives) when s/he retires she'll
have a pension worth Z. It's a completely different mindset, even before you
get to the bureaucratic side of things.

~~~
hellofunk
> your pension payments and so on

It's no big deal. An accountant easily handles all that, and accountants are
plentiful in the Netherlands.

------
ccozan
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.

------
olegp
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](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.

~~~
lagadu
> 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.

~~~
olegp
Developers in Finland don't value salary as much as those in other countries,
see here: [http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016#mone...](http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016#money-matters-more-in-some-countries)

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

~~~
whamlastxmas
Replace "salary" with "compensation package" and the same argument stands.
Offer better salaries, work environments, perks, and vacation days and you'll
get all the qualified candidates you could want.

------
forgottenacc56
"Developers" or "good developers"? Important distinction.

~~~
kagamine
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
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.

------
barpet
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.

~~~
imtringued
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.

~~~
3pt14159
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.

~~~
collyw
Most apps are web based these days.

Knowing how to write a complex web app with decent structured maintainable
clean code, keep it optimized and secure, the ability to deploy it to to
servers at the touch of a button isn't something I would expect from a junior
dev.

~~~
3pt14159
Of course not, but you can get there in a year or three.

~~~
collyw
I wouldn't expect it from a dev of 3 years either. There may be a few out
there but its not the norm.

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

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

~~~
mamon
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.

~~~
pavlov
That's a despicable stereotype to apply to millions of people displaced by war
and drought.

~~~
mamon
First of all, only small fraction of so called "refugees" storming EU are
actual refugees _, and even smaller fraction is from Syria. They come from
whole Middle East and North Africa, including Libia, Egypt, Iraq, even
Pakistan. And it is well known that they have demanding attitude:

[https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6753/germany-migrants-
dem...](https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6753/germany-migrants-demands)

_in fact, none of them is refugee, because by definition used in international
laws, they stop being refugees the moment they come to first safe country on
their way, namely Turkey, so they enter EU as plain old economic immigrants.

