Comment by busterarm
4 years ago
Market forces are moving in your favor. Most European companies have completely saturated their target markets for outsourcing (Barcelona, Estonia, Czech Republic) and Russia & Ukraine are suddenly unavailable options due to a war. Also the local markets have much more demand for engineers than are available to fill it.
There has been a large push in the last two years to recruit Americans and Canadians to fill their unmet needs and salaries have been climbing rapidly. Salaries for new job postings in Berlin are about where they were at in New York 3-4 years ago which is EXCELLENT for that market (seriously, two years ago salaries were maybe half of what they are now).
If you're in Europe and you haven't been interviewing you should look around and maybe even use a recruiter. My own recruiter has been feeding me opportunities across Europe with pretty much equal money to what I'm getting here in the States.
It's likely that if you haven't changed jobs in the last two years that you're leaving significant amounts of money on the table. That said, I know that chasing after money isn't fashionable or socially acceptable to most Europeans...but the new hires are going to get it -- why shouldn't you?
There's over 4 million (and counting) Ukrainian refugees in Europe right now, and quite a few of those people are software engineers. Then there's over 100k (and counting) Russians that rushed to leave the country before the new iron curtain goes down - and I wouldn't be surprised if most of those are software engineers.
Ukraine and Russia certainly do vastly better in gender balance in programming than western countries, but that's counterbalanced by the fact that Ukrainian refugees are almost all women, children and the elderly. Men of fighting age aren't allowed to leave. And even in Ukraine, most programmers are men, so it may not lead to an influx of skilled people as you'd imagine.
You do know that refugees legally aren't allowed to work, right? You must fully complete your asylum-seeking process before you are allowed to seek employment. That often takes years if not decades.
And because of various financial embargos it's historically very hard to hire Russians in European countries unless they have bank accounts in those countries, which without EU citizenship or long-term residency are very, very hard to get.
Neither of these countries' citizens are allowed to freely travel and work within the EU the way that EU members can.
The EUs Temporary Protection Directive grants a residency permit (including right to work) to Ukrainian refugees. (for at least a year, to be extended as needed as the situation develops)
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> Neither of these countries' citizens are allowed to freely travel and work within the EU the way that EU members can.
True, but they still have temporary residency permit. And I suspect that their refugee status won’t take that long to be worked out. And then, from a realpolitik perspective, most EU countries cannot afford to have hundreds of thousands of additional people using infrastructure and resources whilst not working (I mean they could, but the whole continent is shifting to the right, so that won’t be a stable political situation). All of this to say, I am pretty sure most of them will be able to get residency permits, which includes right to work in a country and freedom of movement to the others, for at least a couple of years.
How can we get access to your recruiter?