<story><title>Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-01/spain-is-running-out-of-workers-with-almost-5-million-unemployed</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vemv</author><text>I agree that measuring productivity is a hard, universal problem.&lt;p&gt;While I don&amp;#x27;t claim to commit 10x more LOCs, I do write exceptional abstractions that allow me to get things done in a quick, robust way.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve met far too many &amp;#x27;senior&amp;#x27; developers blatantly breaking DRY because they don&amp;#x27;t really know&amp;#x2F;use all features $language or $framework has to offer.</text></item><item><author>Jare</author><text>Leaving aside the validity of the 10x programmer concept, the company still needs to be able to extract that extra performance in actual value. Most software jobs in Spain don&amp;#x27;t have productivity of that kind. Almost no companies here develop software products or services whose effectiveness translates directly into revenue. Very few of those who have tried have had any sort of long-term success.</text></item><item><author>vemv</author><text>Spanish dev here, 3 years in the business, been twice a freelancer and twice an employee. My main complaints:&lt;p&gt;- The maximum salary a developer can earn at any given company is almost written in stone - around 36000 euros. Every public job posting will have that figure as the max. When it&amp;#x27;s higher, they&amp;#x27;ll water it down in the interview.&lt;p&gt;Why? Probably because they don&amp;#x27;t have the notion of a 10x programmer at all. We all are perceived as &amp;#x27;equal&amp;#x27; or even replaceable.&lt;p&gt;- Also, companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving. The sole hint of that you may leave will turn their red alarms on, and they&amp;#x27;ll start searching a replacement.&lt;p&gt;There rarely exists here the mentality that a work relationship is a commercial exchange, not an intimate family-like relationship. Being open to the market is not &amp;#x27;treason&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;- Tech stacks tend to be years behind San Francisco, whether is languages, frameworks, ops practices...&lt;p&gt;- Functional programming opportunities extremely scarce. Elixir is gaining traction here though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thinkloop</author><text>Several years ago I took over the lead UI position at a company. Jira has a feature to display lines of code contributed by developer. After 10 months of adding features, and getting the product to shipping, I had contributed -1500 lines. There were less lines than when I started, and the code was simpler for it. I&amp;#x27;d _almost_ say that LOC is a good measure of bad coding.</text></comment>
<story><title>Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-01/spain-is-running-out-of-workers-with-almost-5-million-unemployed</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vemv</author><text>I agree that measuring productivity is a hard, universal problem.&lt;p&gt;While I don&amp;#x27;t claim to commit 10x more LOCs, I do write exceptional abstractions that allow me to get things done in a quick, robust way.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve met far too many &amp;#x27;senior&amp;#x27; developers blatantly breaking DRY because they don&amp;#x27;t really know&amp;#x2F;use all features $language or $framework has to offer.</text></item><item><author>Jare</author><text>Leaving aside the validity of the 10x programmer concept, the company still needs to be able to extract that extra performance in actual value. Most software jobs in Spain don&amp;#x27;t have productivity of that kind. Almost no companies here develop software products or services whose effectiveness translates directly into revenue. Very few of those who have tried have had any sort of long-term success.</text></item><item><author>vemv</author><text>Spanish dev here, 3 years in the business, been twice a freelancer and twice an employee. My main complaints:&lt;p&gt;- The maximum salary a developer can earn at any given company is almost written in stone - around 36000 euros. Every public job posting will have that figure as the max. When it&amp;#x27;s higher, they&amp;#x27;ll water it down in the interview.&lt;p&gt;Why? Probably because they don&amp;#x27;t have the notion of a 10x programmer at all. We all are perceived as &amp;#x27;equal&amp;#x27; or even replaceable.&lt;p&gt;- Also, companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving. The sole hint of that you may leave will turn their red alarms on, and they&amp;#x27;ll start searching a replacement.&lt;p&gt;There rarely exists here the mentality that a work relationship is a commercial exchange, not an intimate family-like relationship. Being open to the market is not &amp;#x27;treason&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;- Tech stacks tend to be years behind San Francisco, whether is languages, frameworks, ops practices...&lt;p&gt;- Functional programming opportunities extremely scarce. Elixir is gaining traction here though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jfoutz</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked with developers that commit far far more code than i do. I still find it intimidating. I take solice in replacing those 50kloc subsystems with a few interfaces and a handful of implementations. Those -40kloc days are awesome.&lt;p&gt;To be fair, those guys that throw out tons of code really explore the problem space. it&amp;#x27;s tough to start with a clean design when the spec is vague.</text></comment>