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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 comepete 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.
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.
>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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Once you register your address, you receive your tax ID and social ID. Then, you open a bank account and register for an health insurance. Is this the bureaucracy you are mentioning?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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