In an era where remote work is very possible, which competent software engineer would want to work for the government of Albania?

That assumes that the government of Albania _wants_ to hire competent software engineers

From podcasts and articles I listened or read I always got a pretty good impression of the work the USDS is doing: https://www.usds.gov/.

> why does this kind of behaviour keeps happening in Albania

Because the developers building the systems get paid like $900/month.

> and what can it be done to prevent it?

Pay $2500+/month.

Well according to the information leaked about the wages their devs are paid around 1.5-2k euro salary a month. So i don't belive that is the case. What i believe in small countries is the phenomenon of nepotism. Small people can get paid quite good just sitting on a chair and doing nothing and still getting paid EU standards.

I don't think that is the case. Lower pay doesn't have to mean low quality software. Albanian software houses suffer from poor engineering decisions. I've seen source code of outsourced software meant for Italian government agencies where sensitive user data is "encrypted" as base64. When the engineering department deems base64 as appropriate encryption and nobody raises an eyebrow inside the company, safe to say it is a sign of incompetence.

<OT> I am so American I didn't even know Albania was a real country till I just looked it up.* :(

I only know it from Dilbert where it and Estonia figure in various ways.

   * What do you call someone who knows:
   - Two languages? Bilingual
   - One Language? American

Isn't it Elbonia in Dilbert?

Yeah, Elbonia was meant to represent a generic poor (at the time in the early 1990s) eastern European country that corporate America might be interested in outsourcing work to for cost savings.

Other than the name sounding like Estonia and Albania, Dilbert's Elbonia has no relation to, inspiration from, or resemblance to those countries, or really any other specific country. It is doubtful the author knew much about those or any other nearby countries, and was uninterested in learning -- it was just a plot device to explore the current at the time topic of outsourcing. By using a fictional name the author hoped to avoid any displeasure from anyone insulted by the depiction. Contrast with Borat a decade later, which chose to pick a specific country for their cartoonish depiction.

You might be even more surprised how much they love Americans. Albania has big main roads named after US presidents, the national parliament is on one of them.

Bill and George are also very popular names for children.

While US presidents often attract protests in Europe, it's the complete opposite in Albania and people turn up in hordes cheering for them, there's also highly favourable visas for US citizens, you can arrive and legally work for 12 months without question.

They have a lot of love and aren't quick to forget US support in the 90's when Yugoslavia broke up, a somewhat strange situation being a muslim majority country these days, yet the sentiment still remains just as strong.

It's an interesting place. The language (Shqip) is Indo-European, but not closely related to any existing lamguage. The population is mainly Moslem, but isolated from other Moslem-majority countries. They were allied with Communist China rather than the USSR. Today it's modernising fast, like most of Eastern Europe. I rode through there in 2017 on my way to FFYROM. They have some motorways now. Financial infrastructure supported contactless payments, and using an Apple Watch to pay for petrol did not raise any eyebrows. On the other hand the farms I passed were gathering hay in to ricks by with pitchforks rather than using balers, do some aspects are fair way behind.

To be fair, as long as cheap grain exports are available (although lately that's been in question), a weird situation has become possible where developing countries have been able to leapfrog past agricultural modernization, abandon the agricultural sector entirely, and focus on industrialization instead.

It turns out though this has a mixed effect...

In good times, this works for the same reason you and I going to a job to get cash to then pay for groceries works a lot better than you and I also trying to grow our own food.

In bad times, if the country does not have the means to keep paying for and securing imports, famine, hunger, death, and violent upheaval happen.

Is a second language mandatory in English speaking countries? If not, what do they learn instead?

Not sure quite what the rules are in other countries and other states, but to properly graduate high school in Florida with all the right credits to go to university, you need to take a foreign language. This would typically be Spanish. But depending on the school, other options may be available (at my school, French and, for a little while, Japanese).

But I think the big problem in the English-speaking world is not the lack of mandatory languages, or the almost intentional ignorance that I feel like many people perceive [from Americans, at least]. Rather, it’s just not all that necessary, pragmatically speaking.

I am Arab, I grew up in the U.S., I went to university in Russia, and my roommates were from China. I feel like all four groups have similar reasons for their difficulties with other languages.

While, of course, learning any language is useful, and there’s always something interesting that you would miss out on otherwise, there is such an absurd amount of stuff available in English. And so many people you can communicate with purely through English. For better or for worse, it’s not quite like being from Iceland or Estonia, where the total number of people you can communicate with in your native tongue is fewer than the population of Chicago.

When I think about my friends who are shockingly good at English, the people who not only understand the rules well but also the culture and could pass as a native speaker, at least over text, they are people who had a serious motivation to learn—like my friends from Lithuania who grew up on English-only games, like RuneScape, as kids and needed to have some ability to speak if they wanted to play.

If anything, I’m less surprised that English speakers tend to be so not-fluent than I am that Chinese speakers are as “fluent” as they are.

My experience has been that most grammar schools/high schools/universities have a language requirement (I.e. you have to take a couple classes) which in practice means people learn a language to a basic or maybe intermediate level, but since the necessity of using that language is limited, there’s very little need/motivation to practice and advance your studies.

I’m not sure about what takes its place, sports?

Where I lived in California, you had to take one year of a foreign language to graduate from high school.

If you were university-bound you usually had to take two or three, depending on where you were headed. It's nowhere near enough to speak fluently.

Second language isn't mandatory .But they teach Italian/French/English (depending on the school) in the 3rd grade which is quite fast for some kids (Albania speaking).

In Albania almost everyone speaks a bit of Italian. There is a strong connection among the two countries and they can receive Italian TV and radios broadcasting.