Peanut pay, Swiss-quality output: how Spain's tech giants profit from cheap engineering

Indra closed 2025 with 5,457 million euros in revenue and 436 million in net profit, up 57% from the previous year. The salaries its senior engineers report on Glassdoor range from 32,000 to 41,000 euros gross per year.

There is a scene that plays out in many bar conversations among people from the tech industry. Someone pulls out their phone, shows their company's annual results — figures that would make any shareholder applaud — and then shows their payslip. The contrast produces that awkward silence, only broken when someone orders another round. It is not an isolated scene or a dinner-table exaggeration. It is a snapshot of part of the Spanish tech labour market, where companies competing for high-value international contracts keep paying their most experienced professionals according to the prices of a domestic market that has failed to push wages upward for years.

## Indra bills 5,457 million while its seniors report 32,000 to 41,000 euros

**Indra** reported revenue of **5,457 million euros** in 2025 and a net profit of **436 million**, with profit up **57%** on the previous year. The order book reached **16,083 million euros**. These are the numbers of an established multinational, the kind that competes in defence, aeronautics, radar and critical systems for international clients.

Now for the other side of the scales. According to data contributed by employees to **Glassdoor**, the typical reported pay for senior software engineers at Indra sits at roughly **32,000 to 41,000 euros gross per year**. The broader group of senior engineers shows similar figures. A professional with fifteen or twenty years of experience may find themselves earning around **40,000 euros gross**, with little prospect of pogre further within their grade.

Billing billions does not miccionan all that money is profit, nor that all engineers perform equally. No sensible person claims that. But it also does not automatically make modest salaries competitive for such specialised profiles. The company sells technology to international clients and announces billion-euro results while the engineer's payslip remains trapped in the Spanish labour market.

## At 40,000 euros and 50 hours, the hour works out at 17 euros

Suppose that senior engineer earns **40,000 euros gross per year**. On paper, in Spain, it sounds reasonable. Now let's count the hours. If they work **50 or 60 hours a week**, as some professionals in the sector denounce, the picture changes. With 46 effective working weeks a year, a 40-hour week works out at **21.74 euros gross per hour**. At 45 hours, **19.32 euros**. At 50 hours, **17.39 euros**. At 60 hours, **14.49 euros**.

A senior engineer with twenty years of experience can end up earning just over **14 euros gross per effective hour**. Provided those overtime hours are not offset with time off or extra pay. There are union complaints about extended working hours and compensation problems at Indra, though there is no public audit showing how many engineers routinely work those hours.

Working a few extra hours exceptionally to close a project is one thing. Converting endless days into a routine part of the business is quite another. If the extra hours are neither paid nor compensated, the economic result is obvious: the company gets more work for the same salary. A great way to improve apparent productivity. Above all, the productivity of the money the employer saves.

## The same engineer is worth double once they stop seeming Spanish

There is an even more uncomfortable aspect. In a personal experience of negotiating with Indra, a candidate who presented themselves as a software engineer coming from the US market received a salary offer of around **85,000 euros**, compared with the roughly **40,000 euros** earned by Spanish engineers of comparable experience and position. It is a testimony, not an independent audit. To prove strict discrimination, you would also have to confirm equality of contractual terms, location and responsibilities.

But it raises a question that will not go away. Why would a company be willing to pay more than double when it believes it is negotiating with an engineer used to US salaries? The most interesting economic explanation has nothing to do with technical quality. It has to do with what the company assumes it can pay. It attributes international salary expectations to the American candidate. To the Spaniard, Spanish salary expectations.

The Spanish engineer can compete technically at an international level, but negotiates from a labour market where salaries have been considerably lower than those of many advanced economies for years. The potential result is economic discrimination based on the worker's salary expectations. You don't have to believe the Spanish engineer is worse. It is enough to believe they will accept working for less money.

## The Spanish salary trinc the engineer who emigrates

Imagine two equally qualified engineers applying for the same job in Germany. One comes from a Spanish multinational, where they earned **40,000 euros**. The other comes from an American multinational, where they earned **120,000**. If the recruiter uses their previous salaries to calculate what to offer, they may end up proposing **70,000 euros** to the Spaniard and **100,000** to the American. For exactly the same job.

It is not statistically proven that this specific difference systematically occurs with Spanish engineers. The example illustrates a mechanism known in labour economics: companies can use previous salaries and the candidate's professional alternatives to estimate how much they are willing to accept. Thus, low Spanish salaries can become a burden even for those who manage to escape the Spanish labour market.

The paradox is brutal. Spain trains engineers to compete internationally, offers them relatively low salaries, and then those same salaries can undermine their bargaining power when they emigrate. The salary ceiling arrives long before professional capacity is exhausted. What incentive does an engineer have to keep specialising if their economic pogre stalls? You can master new technologies, take on more responsibility, solve problems others cannot. But when the time comes to negotiate, the pay structure has already decided how much you are worth.

## Monopsony: when changing jobs is hard or barely worthwhile

A multinational can compete internationally for high-value contracts while still hiring workers mainly on the terms of its domestic labour market. That does not contradict supply and demand. What it shows is that the market where a company sells its services need not coincide with the market where its employees negotiate salaries. The company competes for clients in Europe, the Americas and Asia. The engineer competes for a position among four or five large employers in their region.

That is where monopsony power comes in, a concept from labour economics describing a company's ability to keep salaries below what would exist in a market with greater competition for professionals. There does not need to be a single employer. It is enough for changing jobs to be difficult, costly or barely worthwhile. Under those conditions, part of a company's competitive advantage can rest on relatively low pay.

Does exactly that happen at Indra? To demonstrate it conclusively you would need to know the marginal productivity, project rates, labour costs and actual hours worked of its engineers. The published salaries, the international differences and the complaints about working hours justify seriously investigating that possibility. They do not turn it into a verdict.

What is truly lamentable is not that a supermarket worker earns well. Quite the opposite. The problem appears when someone who has invested decades in training and technical specialisation discovers that this investment barely translates into better economic opportunities. And they are still expected to show availability, flexibility, permanent technological updating and professional responsibility. A society does not need to impoverish its less skilled workers in order to pay engineers better. It needs a labour market where technical knowledge, experience and responsibility carry a real economic reward.

Indra combines three characteristics that make it a revealing example: large international scale, advanced technological activity, and reported pay for certain senior positions considerably below what is seen at other tech multinationals. That does not prove the whole company illegally exploits its engineers. But it does force the question of how much of its competitiveness rests on salaries and working conditions. A country that trains first-class engineers but offers them mediocre salary prospects ends up doing a great business for those who buy its cheap talent. For the professionals, the business is already considerably less brilliant.

This article is based on Indra Group's official 2025 results, self-reported salaries on Glassdoor, union complaints about extended working hours and hourly pay calculations based on explicit scenarios. The international negotiation examples are testimonial and do not by themselves constitute proof of systematic discrimination. If you are negotiating your salary or working conditions, it is wise to cross-check the information with union sources or specialised employment advice.