The Exchange Rate of Experience

My first interviews in Barcelona went well. Good conversations, technical questions I knew by heart, the occasional “we loved your profile” at the end. Then the offers came in.

All of them were 25 to 40% below what a profile like mine was being paid. All of them were for mid-level roles, or senior roles at the very bottom of the band. None of them let me pick up where I had left off. I had fifteen years of building software behind me, and the feeling was that those years didn’t count for much, because they weren’t years in Europe. They weren’t years in Spain.

Nobody said it that way. Nobody had to.

An exchange rate

I come from a country where everybody knows what the dollar is worth that day. You grow up knowing that the value of things depends on which currency they’re in and who sets the conversion.

What I didn’t know is that experience has an exchange rate too.

A study by Sanromá, Ramos, and Simón on immigrant wages in Spain measures it quite precisely. Experience gained in Spain pays off much more, in salary, than experience gained in the country of origin. With one exception: immigrants who come from developed countries. In other words, it isn’t that foreign experience is worth less in general. It’s worth less depending on where it comes from.

Eurostat data tells the same story from another angle. In 2021, 34.5% of Spanish workers with a university degree held jobs that didn’t require one. Among citizens of other European Union countries, it was 46.2%. Among those from outside the EU, 57%, one of the highest rates in Europe.

I have an Italian passport. I’m in the middle group. The passport saved me paperwork, permits, waiting. It didn’t save me from the exchange rate.

The lower door

The strange part is that the door was never closed.

The largest experiment on this in Europe, the GEMM project, sent thousands of fictitious résumés to real job openings, changing only the applicants’ origin. It found hiring discrimination in every European country it studied. But in Spain, it was narrower than in Germany or the Netherlands: it only showed up for certain combinations of origin and appearance.

That matches what I lived. They called me. They interviewed me. They offered me jobs. The discount wasn’t in getting in. It was in which door they let me in through.

A study published in Nature last year, with data on 13.5 million people across nine countries, puts it in numbers. Immigrants earn on average 18% less than natives. In Spain, 29.3%, the largest gap of any country in the study. And the most revealing part is where it comes from: three quarters of the difference doesn’t come from being paid less for the same job, but from not reaching the better jobs. The better companies, the better roles. The upper door.

Who vouches for you

At the company I ended up joining, I got lucky. My manager was Dutch and quickly understood what I could do. In less than two months, they started trusting me with decisions above my role. Three or four months in, I was Tech Lead of the Barcelona team.

I think about that sequence a lot. I didn’t change in those months. I didn’t learn fifteen years of new things. My experience was the same one I had brought to those interviews where I was offered a lower starting point. What changed was that someone on the inside, someone with credibility in that place, vouched for me.

The philosopher Miranda Fricker has a name for this: testimonial injustice. It happens when what someone says is given less credit because of who they are, not because of what they say. A résumé is a testimony. “I did this, for this many years, in these places.” And that testimony gets read at a discount that depends on the accent, the last name, the country listed next to each company.

In that scheme, credibility isn’t earned through results alone. Someone who already has it has to lend it to you.

What leaves no receipt

Over time, something harder to name showed up.

When it was time to reward someone, to hand out a growth opportunity, a raise, a visible project, and there were two or more options, I felt the choice would go to whoever looked more like the person deciding, before it went to me. Even when the results said otherwise.

I can’t prove that each of those decisions was about that. And that’s exactly the hard part: bias that lives in discretionary decisions leaves no receipt. Nobody writes “we picked the other person because they’re from here”. People say “a better fit”, “more context”, “knows the market better”.

But there is data pointing in that direction. A 2023 study of more than 200,000 workers in Spain found that, in base salary, the gap between non-European migrants and Spanish or European workers is small and explained by each worker’s characteristics. In salary supplements, which is where bonuses, extras, and everything handed out at someone’s discretion live, the gap rises to more than fifteen points. And part of it can’t be explained by anything measurable.

The salary written into the collective agreement is fairly even. What gets decided in a meeting, not so much.

What I saw in others

It didn’t happen only to me, and mine was one of the milder versions.

I saw Venezuelan colleagues with two master’s degrees and careers I thought were excellent working in roles below people with far less experience, but with something they didn’t have: looking like the person deciding. I saw the same with Dominican colleagues. And with other Argentinians.

I don’t think there’s bad intent in most of those cases. I think it’s something more common and harder to see: we trust people who resemble us more. Same accent, same references, same path. Social psychology calls it affinity bias, and it isn’t a Spanish or a European thing. It surely happens in Argentina too, with whoever arrives from somewhere else. It happens anywhere some people decide and others arrive. What changes is which side you’re on.

And I’m aware that my place is a comfortable one by comparison. I speak the language. I have an EU passport. My appearance doesn’t raise questions in an interview. If I got an unfavorable exchange rate, a lot of people get a much worse one.

In the contract, or in the way they look at you

Before moving, I spent years working remotely for US companies. There was a discount there too, and it was huge. But I knew it from the start. I came in as the cheapest resource on the team, and that was the deal. I didn’t complain or expect anything else, because the rules were out in the open.

What threw me in Spain was that the discount wasn’t written down anywhere. There was no table saying “Latin American experience, multiply by 0.7”. It showed up in the offer, in the raise that didn’t come, in who got picked when there were two options.

In the US, the discount was in the contract. Here, it’s in the way they look at you.

And I don’t know which is worse. The explicit kind, at least, you can accept or turn down. The implicit kind leaves you wondering if you’re imagining it.

The double absence

The sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad wrote about what he called the double absence of the immigrant: no longer fully present in the place they left, and never fully present in the place they arrived.

Something similar happens with experience. In Argentina, my working years belong to someone who left. In Spain, they belong to someone who came from outside. The fifteen years exist, they’re on the résumé, but they never quite belong anywhere.

This isn’t only a personal matter. The Spanish state measured it itself: a 2024 report by OBERAXE, the observatory of Spain’s Ministry of Inclusion, estimated that labor and educational discrimination against the foreign population costs the country 17 billion euros a year, 1.3% of GDP. It isn’t an NGO saying this. It’s a ministry. One of the forms it identifies is exactly this one: trained people working below what they know.

It isn’t only unfair. It’s a waste.

Who sets the price

At first I thought the question was how much the experience of someone who worked in Argentina, remotely for the US, in places that aren’t Europe, is worth.

Now I think the question is a different one: who has the authority to say how much it’s worth.

Because my experience was the same in every one of those underpaid interviews and at the company where, three months later, they gave me a team. What changed wasn’t what I knew. It was who was willing to read it at the right exchange rate.

I still do the same work I did before crossing the ocean. What changed is who sets the price.