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Moving IT jobs to Europe should be easy. Salaries are stagnant which is surely a sign of oversupply of workforce.

I think it's partly a result of there being more EU countries with good technical education, than with a strong technical employment sector. Something like ~15, maybe more, EU countries are doing a fairly good job training engineers, computer scientists, etc., but only about 7-8 are doing a good job employing them. Hence a tech company in Copenhagen has as a "feeder" not only Danish schools but also to a significant extent Spanish schools, Greek schools, Romanian schools, etc.

(If not rectified in some way that will produce other problems, since countries like Greece and Romania are spending a bunch of money to train engineers, many of whom emigrate immediately, going to contribute to the economies of places like Denmark, Germany, or the UK rather than finding a role in the local economy. Some remittances do get sent home, but overall, training another country's workforce probably ends up as a net loss for the training-side countries.)

see, also: funding for state colleges in the US

This is a huge problem now in Portugal.

Everyone with a degree with a slight chance to work abroad, just leaves.

I did it back in the first .com crash back in the early 00's, and seldom saw anyone returning.

I'll stick to India. Indians have a better work ethic ("36 hours/week? sacreu blue!"), cost less, and the regulatory environment is vastly better. Someone isn't working out or demand has gone done? Pay them a month or two of transition, they move on, and everything is finished. No real risk of lawsuits or regulators coming to bother you.

(The same is not true in the UK, for example, which I'm told is one of the most relaxed Euro nations. I know someone who managed the RBS shrinkage process, I couldn't deal with that sort of stress.)

Additionally, your competition for work is reduced since a lot of Indian shops are simply terrible places to work. If you pay people well and treat your employees well, they will love you forever.

that's a joke, right?

eastern europe is chock full of awesome talent, talent that can actually get shit done without constant supervision.

outside of the most braindead tasks i have not seen anything productive coming out of indian it shops.

Eastern Europe might be better - I'm mainly familiar with Britain, Spain, France and Italy. Can anyone with firsthand knowledge offer any info?

I'm not proposing one emulate the Infosys model, which I think is what you are criticizing. I'm proposing going to India and hiring developers the same way you would if you were in the US. There is no shortage of excellent developers here - I've had great success in hiring myself.

Estonia is particularly switched-on, and there are small but determined communities in Romania and the Czech republic.

Italy is badly underestimated; the big Italian contribution people will know is the Arduino. Long engineering tradition in the north especially around Milan.

Spain is something of a disaster area after the property boom, but Barcelona seems to have the trendy/techie atmosphere that people admire.

France is probably closest to the stereotype. I knew someone who had to deal with ST Microelectronics (Nice) and they were as bureaucratic and ossified as you'd imagine. Somehow they still manage to ship stuff.

I think you're painting things with an awfully broad brush. What is true for people who have worked for a unionized car factory in France for the past 30 years may not be true for a 25 year old guy who's a Javascript expert in Helsinki or Vienna.

I've found the work ethic within the computer industry to be quite good here in Italy. The wages are also low, by rich country standards. I think it'd be a great place to send work if they were able to lower the taxes and bureaucracy some.

Sorry, but it is my right not to put my health and family in front of capitalist profits.

If work ethic is the right of being exploited, then I need to check my dictionary

You can make people redundant in Europe, you just need to be genuinely making them redundant; if there's no more work for them to do and you can't afford them and they're selected in a fair process, then yes it's a month or two of transition and move on. This is true almost everywhere outside of the few remaining heavily unionised workplaces, of which the public sector is often one.

What you can't easily do is fire people for BS or discriminatory reasons. Oh, and everyone has healthcare so you can't use the threat of taking that away as a stick to corral them with.

What makes so many Indian shops terrible places to work?

Many folks in India are used to working far harder than Westerners. So we call it a sweatshop; they call it a day at the office.

Indian employers and bosses often raise their status by disrespecting and imposing onerous work requirements on their underlings.

A few years ago I worked at a place with a lot of mechanical turks - ladies tagging pictures day in and day out. The expectation they had, and which took me a while to break, was that they were to be subservient. Make me tea, not speak up when I make a mistake, etc. They all considered it unusual that I would engage with them socially, share lunch, or laugh when they played pranks on me.

In software the situation is certainly getting better. In the past few years, I've run into considerably more places that seem like good places to work. Some foreign shops with a local presence, and a number of startups. But being a good place to work and treating employees with respect is still a big competitive advantage in hiring.

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