How dire is Singapore’s engineering ecosystem?

Post by hhandoko » Fri, Feb 12, 2016, 4:04 AM UTC

jernfrost wrote: post #9

I have entertained the thought of working in Singapore. It appeals living somewhere with bette climate, cheap to go out eating, big city etc. I live in Oslo, Norway and have a certain fascination for Singapore, it coincidentally having almost the same GDP and population as Norway, but a completely different society. I am not sure if anyone here could comment on some of concerns with working in Singapore. 1) What is w…

I just moved to Singapore from Australia, I suppose it really depends on the company. I was fortunate enough that the company adopts a `Western` work culture.

I work 9-6 with 1 hour of lunch. Very rarely people stay back more than 6:30 PM. Being a startup, it's flat hierarchy, but for the majority of the companies here they are based on deep hierarchy (which can be very frustrating to get things moving).

In regards with healthcare, the company pays for my cover but I had to pay out-of-pocket to cover my family members / dependents.

You'll be fine here without a car. The transport infrastructure is good, taxi is comparatively cheap, and Uber is quite established here.

Also it's very expensive here to buy and maintain a car:

- There's an ownership certificate(?) that you need to purchase via blind auction in order to own a car (runs in the $10,000s so I've heard)

- Cars are taxed pretty heavily here, so expect to pay 2-3x for what you pay in Europe

- Cars registration gets more expensive the older your car is

Post by nopzor » Sat, Feb 13, 2016, 10:00 PM UTC

hhandoko wrote: post #20

markplindsay wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Singapore is great, and I've always been interested in living there, but the pay for software developers is too low. The cost of living is about the same for (non-PR, non-Malaysian) foreigners as it is in NYC. From my casual/infrequent research, salaries seem to be about half of what a developer in NYC would make. The income tax rate is lower, but that doesn't help much when you're still paying NYC prices…

Just to add, you might not benefit from the lower income tax in Singapore when migrating from the US due to the Double Tax Agreements between Singapore and US (i.e. you'd have to pay for the tax difference between the Singapore and US tax).

No US tax at all, on the first USD 100K-ish of income earned while living in Singapore. At least that was the case a few years ago.

Re: How dire is Singapore’s engineering ecosystem?

Re: How dire is Singapore’s engineering ecosystem?