I was interested in a product job in Barcelona, then I saw that it pays almost 70% less than I'm making now...

Why do you say "70% less"?

Sorry to pick on you, but I see this usage everywhere and I'm curious. Doesn't "Pays 30% of what I make" convey what you mean much more effectively?

Interesting, you're the first one to ever point this out to me. "Pays X of what I make" doesn't seem to flow off my tongue as well in either English or Russian (my native tongue). Also, in the context of my comment, seeing that a salary is 70% less rather than 30% of a salary, seems to better emphasize the vast difference.

Apparently not or the poster would have used that convention.

I think it might have to do with the poster's mother tongue. As a Spanish-speaker I'd tend to say "pagarían 20% menos" (which roughly translates to "they'd pay 20% less".

Some idioms are very difficult to get rid off. I sometimes can distinguish Brazilians from Argentines just by the way they write in English.

I grew up in the US and am a native English speaker raised by native English speakers and I sometimes use the same idiom. I suspect the GP is complaining because English is not a strong language for him/her.

What's the meaning of GP? Gilip?

Grandparent post

I agree with you on this. "30% of my current salary" is much clearer for me than "70% less". I always see a floating "0.3x" when reading this stuff, and it happens way faster if it is just given in that form.

The wages were too low. The skilled spaniard fled the country.

Combined that cuting spendings in education.

And now act surprised at the result.

> Combined that cuting spendings in education.

I highly doubt they were cutting spending to CS courses and medical programs.

More education doesn't solve the '5 million people unemployed' problem. Having the right education is what matters. That often doesn't require throwing more money at the problem. Especially when the vast majority of education financing goes down administrative black holes.

Just saying 'cutting spending = bad' is about as baseless as this article claims that the problem is lack of employable people when the problem likely involves issues with training/salary and other nuanced issues.

Jumping to quick correlations like 'all education = good' this is how massive mismatches in education/market demand happens in the first place.

> Just saying 'cutting spending = bad' is about as baseless as this article

I'll grant you that. But Spain is the country who was in the top 5 countries in solar RD in the 200x, a lot of education program in that sector for instance.

The cutback were mishandled/misplaced. The Spanish government purposefully pushed to have low skilled labor as they intended to compete with Turkey on manufacturing. The thing is, that not what the market wants so it unbalanced it further.

Yeah, but that's the intoxication you can hear in the Spanish media all day long. How the next politician is going to solve everything by throwing money everywhere... you can see how a society that readily swallows that crap can't be very skilled at doing any kind of work.

Very few Spaniards are skilled enough to "flee" the country, let alone speak enough English (or any other language) to be able to work abroad. Wages are low because both companies and workers are not very valuable. Companies are not adding enough value to pay good workers and good workers are extremely hard to come by anyway.

€200,000 in Spain seems a pretty good wage

Yeah, that's what the client is willing to pay to the consulting firm who don't want to hire the guy at more than 24K ...

Sad truth.

"Up to" 200k, allegedly, from a single source. This is either lazy or biased reporting.

It is self-evidently not.

Are businesses making their ends meet? This is more important than devs getting not enough. You can only hire so many for so much when your business is getting taxed at 50%.

Markets aren't for working stiffs.