Original TV Interview (catalan)
(0:00 - 5:40)
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Gabriel: Almost all the companies that I have been working on have trouble finding new recruits. It becomes especially difficult to find people with some real programming experience, who can work autonomously.
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Gabriel: For example, I got my first job in the summer after my first year studying my Certificate of Higher Education; when I didn’t still possess any education diploma or real work experience. You get the idea of how many job positions available are here and the huge necessity of finding new developers there is.
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Gabriel: I guess we are living a “boom”, a “boom” where companies want to grow exponentially because there’s a real demand for those services but society can’t still keep up learning to program.
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Narrator: The technology sector wants to grow but it can’t. While in the Balearic Islands there’re 38,000 unemployed citizens, technological companies are not able to find qualified staff for their 10,000 job vacancies in all Spain. According to a “DigitalES” study, 1 of every 4 tech companies have trouble finding the suitable profiles. It's a sad reality that ties the winds of the economic future.
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Narrator: In our Islands, the ones with tech education find a job quickly; even those who arrived to this specialty by hobby, after having worked in different professions. This is Gabriel Romay’s story, who found programming after having emigrated to the United Kingdom as a nurse.
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Gabriel: Basically, I started my Nursing Degree because it was the only thing left on the table that I was interested in. It was a degree that was available at my local University (UIB), and I was attracted to it because I wanted to help others. But working as a nurse I found out that it wasn’t really my passion: I liked helping others, but my job was lacking some creativity and some higher level of intellectual challenge. So in my free time I started learning how to code by myself.
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Gabriel: I believe that what brought me to programming were probably videogames. I always loved them, and the computer's world in general. I started trying it out and I found that there was fun in programming: fixing a bug or building a website from scratch were like a logic puzzle, sometimes even like a riddle. I found out that I could be a developer too, it wasn’t so difficult. So I started my Higher Education studies and I am very happy with that decision, my current job presents me with different interesting challenges everyday.
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Gabriel: I think that the lack of programming professionals in our Islands is caused by different factors. On one hand, I feel that traditional education is not outputting enough new coders, but on the other hand, maybe it’s the people in general that still haven't thought about becoming a coder. It’s a professional path that wasn’t presented to me when I was studying, I didn’t see it as a possibility for me to be honest. Then, there’s this cliché of the lonely programmer who builds a web by himself: it’s a very concrete case. Normally, a web is built by a group of people, because the ideas interchange really helps the creative and programming processes; and it helps avoid bugs and similar issues. This is a more social job that it might seem at first glance.
[...Technical conversation...]
- Gabriel: There’re many programming jobs on the Island (Majorca), but most of them are Database and Web Development jobs; so if a professional wants to work in something more specific or innovative, as Artificial Intelligence or something similar that is not really developed yet on our island, they might want to look outside.
(28:35 - 29:10)
- Gabriel: Modern technology has been criticized: for example, some say that youngsters are looking at their phones all day, without noticing their surroundings. But I think that our current capacity to connect to the Internet and find data whenever we want is something that nobody has had before in all our history; and I believe that we are not really aware of it. As a society, we still have to find out the real possibilities of tech to make us improve as human beings.