5 Reasons To Setup Your Dev Shop In Barcelona

Are you thinking about moving your dev shop to Europe? If so, I’ve listed 5 reasons as to why Barcelona should be high on your list. And no, they are not all ‘drinking Sangria in the sun’.

1. Barcelona is awesome

I’ll start by stating the obvious and I am by no means what someone might call biased. For any of you that currently live in Barcelona or who have traveled here, you will understand where I’m going with this. Apart from its rich culture, nearly year round good weather, cosmopolitan attitude, renowned architecture, great gastronomy, world class football team, impressive standard of living, healthy work-life balance, and you get my point. It’s a nice city to live in. Set up a dev shop here and your engineers will be happy as Larry thus multiplying output rates tenfold. They will not, I repeat not, be sipping on cañas in the sun all day long instead of working.

This is a picture of Barcelona. Pretty awesome right?

2. Access to skilled talent

Although the majority of the engineering masses flock to the most famous startup hubs for inflated paychecks and dreams of becoming the next Max Levchin, that’s not to say that there isn’t hot talent anywhere else. Barcelona is home to some of the leading technical schools in Europe as well as international business schools such as IESE and ESADE. The city is also home to one of the world’s foremost supercomputing centers, which attracts some of the greatest computing minds from around the world. Talent there is.

3. It’s cheaper!

If you’re thinking about setting up you a dev shop in Barcelona, economical motives is most likely high on your ‘why we should’ list. The cost of developers in Barcelona is significantly lower than that of markets such as London, SF or New York. A quick search on Glassdoor, will show you that in San Francisco the average yearly wage for a Senior Developer (keeping it simple) is $112, 619 whereas in Barcelona the same position works out at around $43,582. This is just one example but it’s a whopping difference if I do say so myself.

4. Growing and innovative ecosystem

Over the last few years Barcelona has seen some big and positive shifts in its ecosystem. Apart from being the home to the Mobile World Congress, one of the world’s leading mobile events, which attracts over 80K people year, the city has also been chosen by Cisco as the location to work on their connected society. Since then we have seen Barcelona become hotbed for IoT with the Internet of Things Forum being hosted here in 2013 and the Startupbootcamp IoT accelerator opening next week. On top of that the city has won numerous innovation awards over the last year and most recently inked a partnership with Adobe to build the world’s first branding lab for cities.. And that’s only scratching the ice.

The numerous technology and communication resources that Barcelona has on hand helps cement its position as an ICT base for business around the world.

5. Ideal time zone for working with varios markets

If you don’t know where Barcelona is then get out our map and find it. As you will see, you are slap bang in the middle. A perfect launchpad for entering into and working with new markets in Africa, Europe, Asia and even the US. Your development team will be perfectly poised to from a geographical perspective as well as being located in a time zone that would easily permit working on a daily basis with a large portion of the world. No night shifts for your dev team here.