[Gllug] VACANCY: Junior Systems Support for Unit.tv

[Vidar Hokstad]

On 4 Jul 2008, at 10:53, Jason Clifford wrote:

> On Fri, 2008-07-04 at 10:09 +0100, Paul Lee wrote:
>> I've seen a marked increase in for example Polish staff (as in the
>> building and construction industry). Don't get me wrong, these people
>> are very able and hard working in many cases, but they are  
>> undoubtedly
>> being exploited by UK employers and are undercutting many UK based
>> candidates.
>
> I know lots of Polish people who work here. They are all earning  
> normal
> market rates (considerably more than I am paying). None of them are
> stupid and none of them would work for less than anyone else in the  
> same
> job.

I have to agree with you - where I work more than half the staff is  
from outside the UK (me included), but we've never looked for staff  
based on nationality, nor are they paid differently. The reason we've  
ended up with a very diverse staff is that when we've looked for  
people there have been more candidates from outside the UK than from  
within on the market.

The Polish people looking for jobs here aren't stupid (or we wouldn't  
hire them...). They quickly find out what their going rate is here,  
and while I'm sure the odd person will be tricked into taking low paid  
jobs at some companies, I doubt that will keep happening very long.

>> These are the downsides of globalisation, yes we get cheap goods from
>> China , but we also have the destruction of professions and the  
>> middle
>> classes with more or less every "career" reduced to a casual, "burger
>> flipping" level of existence.
>
> Really? I don't see that in any genuinely professional career.

Having outsourced in the past, here's what I always tell people when  
this comes up:

Salaries for qualified candidates from "low cost" countries are rising  
so fast that any "destruction" happening will stop very quickly, and  
the net result on the contrary will soon be a reversal. Why?

Well, when I was at Yahoo I had team members from the Yahoo office in  
Bangalore reporting to me. We had a nightmare keeping them, because  
salaries were rising so fast there due to lack of people that people  
saw fit to move jobs every 6 months to negotiate raises. The _average_  
increase at that point in time (2003-2005) was 15-20% for many types  
of IT/software related positions. At that point, to get a reasonable  
developer we ended up paying around $15k-$20k/year. A comparable  
developer in rural parts of the US would have cost us $40k or so at  
the same time, or $80-90k in Silicon Valley.

Despite that salary difference, several of the candidates we got were  
actually people moving back to India from Silicon Valley because their  
standard of living in Bangalore at $20k was better than in Silicon  
Valley at $80k-$90k.

Those salaries have continued to rise far above the rate at which they  
have been increasing in Europe and in the US.

For the last two years I worked at a company who outsourced to China.  
PHP developers in Beijing are now at least as expensive as developers  
in India were three years ago, and are as hard to retain as developers  
in India were then. Indian companies are now increasingly outsourcing  
to China, Ukraine, Russia and even African countries to retain their  
margins. But in Beijing the market is more or less dry already,  
despite a huge influx from elsewhere in China - there are _lots_ of  
qualified people, but the local businesses are picking up all the  
people they can get. Last year we paid typically around $100k/year in  
Silicon Valley, and $20k-$25k for developers in Beijing. Even at that  
rate it was hard to avoid people from resigning before they'd even  
started the job because they'd found better offers, or just found  
somewhere closer to where they lived. This is for people who hardly  
speak English - the ones that do are rare finds.

As with India, people have started moving back from the US - the two  
guys who ran the company that handled the staff we had in China were  
graduates from top US universities who'd given up high paid jobs in  
Silicon Valley to move back. When we saw the standard of living they  
got in Beijing, we quickly understood why.

With situations like that in their home countries, you're not going to  
see an ongoing flood from these countries to the UK, US or elsewhere,  
and the ones that do come are certainly not going to put up with lower  
salaries.

Poland is in much the same situation - salaries in high demand sectors  
are going up at a much faster pace than in the UK.

Vidar

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