Tech workers here are paid so much less than they should be; there's tons of unemployment only to earn 15k/yr when theyre at work. Salaries like this are a joke and should rise
No, your avg tech worker is not going to be making 15k/yr. Maybe around 40k/yr and that would be an "average" salary for a non-senior position.
Both of you are wrong for different reasons. The truth is more nuanced.
First, Madrid is very different from the rest of the country. Salaries are higher, still half of what our neighbors of the north have. 15k/20k sounds like a rest-of-the-country average.
Even in Madrid 40k€ is far from average, that it's more likely 28k.
40 is the salary for a very senior o very specialized programmer/analyst.
But there's a caveat that makes you closer to reality for Madrid and it's if you add forced pension and health insurance that the employer pays. It's around 40% on top of the raw salary, so someone earning 30k is really costing 42k to the employer.
What a weird take to defend tech salaries in Spain, I'd love to move but the very top salaries for my level cap around 80-90k EUR so it'd be quite a big drop even compared to the UK
Where do you read a defense of anything? This is not a "weird take", just a statement of a fact (may it be true or false): that the average is ~40k and not ~15k (it is currently illegal to pay less than 15.876 euros per year).
But be aware that the London salaries upper tail is wider, possibly brought up by the quant firms (which are a different kind of company than most are accustomed)
levels.fyi gives 112kE as the median and 200kE/90% for London vs around 60kE for the median and 90kE/90% (pretax for both)
I'm now picturing a slightly different government to ours, where the oversight bodies have the additional function of making sure officials don't talk to one another outside of recorded meetings under the public's eye.
It seems like a huge burden. It is the kind of thing, though, that in a parallel universe would make total sense: our representatives should be beholden to us.
> I'm unconvinced that private, smoke-filled backrooms don't have an
essential place as the grease that keeps things running well.
I hear that, and there's a case for it. Diplomacy, maneuvering and negotiation
require secrets and enclaves.
So to allow for that you need a few things;
- Strict official records of affairs
- Strong penalties for fraud, malinfluence, intimidation
- Whistleblower protection
The last of these essential checks-and-balances has gone to shit our
culture. Even if we pardoned Edward Snowden and made him a "hero of
democracy" tomorrow, it's still a mountain of work to restore the
essential sense of civic responsibility, patriotism and duty that
allows those people who discover or witness corruption to step-up and
challenge it safe in the knowledge that the law and common morality
are on their side.
Billions (the tv show), of all places, made a somewhat similar argument in favor of post-hoc investigations, in the last episode.
Record and share everything immediately = no room for deals
Record nothing = too much room for corruption
So we land at... record everything + only review with just cause + strict whistleblower protections.
Which seems a nice splitting of the matter, but requires a strong, independent third party (e.g. judicial branch) to arbitrate access requests. With tremendous pressure and incentives to breach that limit.
Many governments do have laws like this, called "sunshine laws". Enforcing them can be difficult though, and often enough they fail to achieve the transparency that is their goal while also substantially hindering process.
I didn't read it as a complaint, more of a humorous observation. Either way, there's no need to get aggressive onto someone that hasn't figured it out yet.
I'd say tough luck on this one because it's already adversarial - the power imbalance is too large at Amazon not to implement a union. That way the workers will have a more equal footing.
Yes, I worked in one union job - at a different point of time in my life also a guild. They improved my quality of work dealing with exactly the kind of predatory companies we're talking about here.
From what I gather from your comments, yours must have been a horrible experience (why?). It doesn't cancel the fact that these Amazon workers are being squeezed for a competitive edge in a company that's already a monopoly - in several sectors. They need to battle for fair working conditions which is exactly what a union will provide.
