Fixing Italy, a little bit at a time

Re:Fixing Italy, a little bit at a time by idiocratic on Friday April 17, 2015 @04:44AM (#9392968)

As an Italian living in the UK I'm not sure anything changed in Italy in this field. I see more and more Italians establishing their companies in the UK or Germany, because it's mostly hassle-free and better in the long run. Italy has a problem with business, risk is not something that the few investors are willing to consider and startups are just a tiny fragment of an IT market ruled by short-term contracts with 3 levels of outsourcing.

There are exceptions, but you can count them on the fingers of one hand.

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Re:Fixing Italy, a little bit at a time by 1_player on Friday April 17, 2015 @10:21AM (#9394433)

Fellow Italian here also in the UK. I've been self employed in both countries, and, boy, how easy it is to open a company in the United Kingdom compared to Italy.

The taxation system is much better and fair (although PM Monti's new tax regulations for new small businesses have helped, but they have their share of shortcomings) and the market and average salary for a software engineer is at least 2x compared to the Italian average:

- Good luck earning more than €24000 after taxes in a non-management position.

- Good luck finding full time positions: here in the UK I have the opposite problem, as a consultant I'm often looking for part-time offers and everybody's looking for full-time engineers. You may actually work full time for a company, but more often than not you get a short term contract with much lower benefits that gets renewed until you quit.

- Good luck if you're looking for remote work: nobody likes or trust remote workers here.

- I've quit my job after learning that my salary was filtered through 2 levels of outsourcing agencies, and my take-out pay was 16% (or 1/6th) of what the client was actually paying.

That's my personal 7 year experience in Milan, arguably the best Italian city for service-related work.

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Re:Fixing Italy, a little bit at a time by davidw on Friday April 17, 2015 @07:46AM (#9393650)

Italy certainly hasn't become the place to create a company, but it is improving, slowly.

I think with all the good things Italy has, it doesn't have to be run perfectly, or have the best laws: it just has to suck less. If you think about it, California is similar in some ways. It is not the most "business friendly" state in the US - but it does have a lot of other things going for it, so people go there anyway.

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