I know some people who permanently move from Spain or Italy to Czechia. In their own words, there was no work in their home country. They tried super hard to get a job at home, but came up with nothing. Here they have some sort of non-technical office jobs in tech companies and are quite happy with the pay.
> In EU the share of ICT workers is pretty much homogeneous among the different countries.
Italy has a population of ~58m but an ICT service population of ~500k [0].
Romania has a population of 19m but an ICT service population of ~200k [1]
And this masks the large Romanian tech diaspora in Germany, the UK, and ofc a portion in Italy.
So the question is, why are so few Italians work in tech in comparison to a much poorer country?
> It's much easier to get a decent wage for a Romanian in Italy than for a Romanian tech worker in Romania
Just using levels.fyi (which imo is skewed) Romanian dev salaries are higher [2] than Italian ones [3] and as a former hiring manager for one of those MNCs Europeans keep trying to apply to, I can attest that salaries for the 50th percentile and above are comparable across Europe, which ofc means CEE based tech employees end up having less of an incentive to move out West (excluding UK and Switzerland) when factoring CoL.
There's a reason Big Tech employers like Amazon have a major developer presence in Tier 2 Romanian cities like Cluj or Iasi and not Tier 1 Italian cities like Milan or Rome.
> Italy has a population of ~58m but an ICT service population of ~500k [0].
> Romania has a population of 19m but an ICT service population of ~200k [1]
Yeah and in Italy around ~9% of the population was not born in Italy (mostly coming from non EU/ poorer countries with no tech skill whatsoever, not a judgement, just a fact) while in Romania is basically 0%
So, as I've said, ICT workers are pretty much 10% everywhere in EU
You're putting your biases in your stats. We're also not taking into account many other factors such as the type of jobs we are referring to
Many countries have lots of tech workers doing mechanical turk kind of work (not saying it's true for Romania, just a data point that is missing here)
Moreover, hiring managers of course prefer to pay less than to pay more in absolute, regardless of the buying power
If I had to live with a Romanian salary in Italy, I would be in the lower tier while now I am in the top 10%, but of course tech workers have better salaries on average everywhere in Europe,so they are less incentivized to move especially coming from poorer countries, where their more than average salary would immediately become normal or less than average abroad.
To get a better salary in Europe I should move to Netherlands or Ireland and work for some US Company. Not even UK is competitive in my case, all things considered, including the lifestyle I am used to.
Last, but not least. Amazon employes ~20 thousand people in Italy and of course has a strong presence in Milan (I worked for them in Milan) while it's only about 3.5k in Romania.
>Yeah and in Italy around ~9% of the population was not born in Italy (mostly coming from non EU/ poorer countries with no tech skill whatsoever, not a judgement, just a fact) while in Romania is basically 0%
9% is low in three ways: lower than most western european countries, lower than many countries with a thriving IT industry and, finally, low enough that it wouldn't change the overall numbers too much
> 9% is low in three ways: lower than most western european countries, lower than many countries with a thriving IT
Same question as before:
where are you taking your stats?
Foreign born population in Italy is around 10% of the total, it is similar to similar countries in a similar position: France, Greece, Portugal.
We also do not count naturalized foreign-born and children born here, while other countries do.
But you're still missing the point: those millions of foreign born living in Italy have little to none tech literacy.
I have used the 9% measure because I assume that the remaining 1% are people who have some tech literacy.
In Germany there are (officially) 700 thousand Italians, unofficially it's 2 times that. They count in Germany as foreign born, but are highly educated immigrants, while immigration in Italy, given its geographical position, is mostly lower/no education immigrants.
> lower than many countries with a thriving IT industry
replace many with some. For example in UK officially 12.7% by the latest census data of 2011 of the population is foreign born, except they often times count as foreign born people born outside of the UK and their direct descendants. Which mostly is people from the former colonies. But also 6% of the total (or 50% of that 12% are people from the EU)
The foreign-born will include some people who are born abroad to UK citizen parents. However, it is usually still the preferred definition when using data on the migrant population, and especially change in the population over time.
Moreover, data on non-UK citizens also include many UK-born children of migrants who have themselves never migrated.
At the time of the UK census conducted in April 2001, 8.3 per cent of the country's population were foreign-born. This was substantially less than that of major immigration countries such as Australia (23 per cent), Canada (19.3 per cent) and the USA (12.3 per cent)
Wasn't UK already a tech hub in 2001? Am I wrong?
Last but not least, according to Statista Romanian annual average salary is around 20,000 (19,139) Euro while in Italy is 31,500 Euro.
Or Switzerland and the UK?