A talented developer can earn up to 15.000 Euros a month in Finland
Developers have become a highly sought after resource in Finland. The true race is for "super coders" that can both program and do business development. To find these rare talents, companies working in the field pay handsome recruitment bonuses and take part in competitions for best employer with the best perks, etc.
The Finnish financial journal Talouselämä is reporting that Finland is finally taking the digitalization leap it should have taken years ago. Today digitalizing business is no longer a distant target, but a pure necessity. Each company has to continously grow and evolve continuously. Failing to do so will lead to a lost of autonomy and start a tailspin.
This fear of falling behind is not only for small and medium businesses, but large corporations as well. In addition to consultancies large Finnish companies like Finnair, Kesko and Osuuspankki are building their internal digital services units. The outsourcing boom has turned and companies now want to have digital knowhow inhouse and are hitting full throttle with recruiting as the economy picks up.
Taking use of information technology has become the core business of corporations that is seen as non-outsourcable. At the same time customer behaviour has changed. Everything needs to be available in a heartbeat or there will be no deal and a competitor will take your business.
Pretty much every business is facing digitalization and this has created intense demand for IT professionals. Even large IT consultancies can face challenges in providing services to meet the demans. This is why there is now plenty of work for information technology workers in Finland.
It's a developer's market
Agile developers and system architects are in high demand and it's an employees market at the moment. Some of the new generation IT consultancies in Finland are Gofore, Solita, Vincit, Futurice, Nitor and Reaktor. All of these companies are growing rapidly, while remaining profitable. These companies continue to see proper growth numbers in the tens of percents.
These companies value developer skillset, and this is why they want to be seen as the best employers. The best developers want to work in companies where they are appreciated and the tasks at hand are interesting and challenging. Low hierarchy and meaningful work is the key, and classic bad warden -type management tactiques are not tolerated by employees.
There is high demand for developers, but at the same time there is a large number of unemployed IT workers on the market. This is because their skills have grown stale. Technology changes rapidly and conversion education is slow or nonexistant. This is evident in workforce reductions in more established companies like Tieto and CGI, while both have a number of jobs open. This means that invites to job interviews sent along side with pink slips.
According to TIVIA, an industry representative organization, Finland would need 9000 software developers and estimates peg demand at an additional 3800 developers each year. This has lead to an inflation in developer wages, with the average salary for programmers now hovering at around 4000 EUR working with technologies like Drupal or React.js.
For developers versed in business development can easily earn between 6000-9000 EUR / month, where as very talented individuals can set their monthly price tag at somewhere between 12 000 to 16 000. In a recent article, the CEO of Siili stated their wage cap is set to 10 000 Euros, so you can't get reasonable compensation in every company.