Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do Helsinki winters compare to Seattle winters?
Much colder and nights are also much longer it often come as a shock to people not used to it.
The good thing about that is that summer days are longer :)
Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
401–410 of 632 posts
Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are getting a lot of critical responses, and I hate to dog pile, but: >Amazon/Google/etc happily pay ten times that salary In the thread, they say Helsinki juniors start out at ~$3k/mo after taxes. In the Bay Area, let's say you are a junior at a FAANG and are getting $150k/year. This works out to $8k/mo after taxes. So the difference between a FAANG and Helsinki is more like 3x. Maybe, 4X if you account for bonu…
Keep in mind though that after a couple of years at a FAANG company, your pay scales much quicker than it would elsewhere. That junior earning $150k/yr total comp is closer to $300k in a few short years. At that point you're getting awfully close to the OP's 10x claim (Before taxes) but of course you don't subsidized healthcare, a useable pension, decent government services, clean/safe streets, etc... After living in…
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Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
As extra for the language. Even in tech you should just accept that you NEED to start learning Finnish. You don't have to be proficient speaker, but for normal office chat you need to be good enough to interrupt and step in with English if you want to participate. I've seen many foreigners quit because they felt like they were intentionally left out of casual conversations, but you really have to understand that spea…
Problem is that it's a super difficult language where you can't draw any help from any other languages you might now. Plus it's obscure and if you move out of Finland you'll likely never use it again. I can see why people don't want to invest huge amounts of time learning it unless they plan to stay for the rest of their lives.
If however you are interested in reprogramming your language center then Finnish is intriguing, because of its foreign nature.
Spoken and written/theoretical Finnish are quite different. In practice you choose from a small subset of possible suffix combinations and this choice is informed by a lot more than you would first think based on how the theory is presented.
Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
#404Overall my experience in Helsinki has been hugely positive. I’ve been here now over a decade and have settled with work and family life. Work life balance is great, there’s a beautiful outdoors to enjoy all year, and the people are warm and kind, if not difficult to start with. All that said, there’s a lot of bullshit and hot air here in this thread: - public healthcare is great until you have something difficult to…
Can you pay for private dentists, or similar, if you need more immediate service? And is the wait similar for major things like cancer, brain tutor, or heart surgery?
Finnish public healthcare does what any other public healthcare does: they will prioritize because there's infinite demand for services and limited resources, and they can't quicksort their customers by purchasing power.
So, if your condition won't get worse in a few weeks/months, you wait, and get the free healthcare when they have time (within some legal limits). They'll be too busy working on the more acute cases while you're waiting.
You can certainly pay for your own dentist visits. I do - not because the waiting lines (I could just book my annual check at the same time each year and get the visit roughly annually) - but because I trust my dentist, and I want the same person to do my teeth each time. Most people do, I think, because public dentistry services weren't included for adults for decades until 2000's or so. So, you would get public dentists till you're 18 and then pay for your private dentist after that. That actually worked pretty well in its time but now that everyone is allowed public dentist visits there are queues.
You can pay to see a medical doctor as well. There's a large number of private medical clinics that will take you in the very same day. Some people use their own money to buy that service but most commonly people use these via their employer's healthcare benefit or via private insurance. For example, if you have kids you can buy them a private insurance for 150-200€ per kid per year and should they acutely need a doctor you can just take them to any private clinic instead of waiting in the emergency reception in a public healthcare center or hospital. But if it's something really acute you'd be taken in anyway, so many people will just use the public service.
Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am less concerned with the taxes, and more concerned that Amazon/Google/etc happily pay ten times that salary. It's literally an order of magnitude difference, and contracting hourly rates seems like a similar story. I would happily pay 3-5x the taxes for a similar salary to emigrate, but if you offer me 1/10 the pay? That's tough. It makes me feel like there isn't a big market for my services across the pond. It's…
You are getting a lot of critical responses, and I hate to dog pile, but: >Amazon/Google/etc happily pay ten times that salary In the thread, they say Helsinki juniors start out at ~$3k/mo after taxes. In the Bay Area, let's say you are a junior at a FAANG and are getting $150k/year. This works out to $8k/mo after taxes. So the difference between a FAANG and Helsinki is more like 3x. Maybe, 4X if you account for bonu…
This is a good exercise to make a rough comparison like ths.
However, actually a junior would make something like ~3k€ before taxes in Helsinki, not after taxes. The taxes are (very) progressive, at that income level it's something like 27% in Finland.
Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
#406> The campaign is targeted for top talent in the US west coast, so primely the participants are chosen from the US.
oh well...
Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
#407‘ We’re not after your money but all about lasting relationships. ‘ Sounds legit
Might not be. The Nordic states seem rich enough already. Norway, for example, has a fund that makes all its citizens millionaires, so you do get richer if you join them. Can’t speak for Finland, but because it’s a welfare state you are going to get more than you give, at least until you start making serious money. I think they realise that immigration helps counter stagnation, especially if their population is aging…
Norway is rich. They have oil. Their government is actually pretty decent with money also.
Sweden is an older country and has been historically pretty wealthy also.
Finland on the other hand... Well, we mostly have have trees and lakes. Our monetary policy consists of taking it up the behind from bigger countries, having sky high rates of taxes on everything, and finally, selling the few natural resources actually worth something to other foreign companies.
Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am less concerned with the taxes, and more concerned that Amazon/Google/etc happily pay ten times that salary. It's literally an order of magnitude difference, and contracting hourly rates seems like a similar story. I would happily pay 3-5x the taxes for a similar salary to emigrate, but if you offer me 1/10 the pay? That's tough. It makes me feel like there isn't a big market for my services across the pond. It's…
You are getting a lot of critical responses, and I hate to dog pile, but: >Amazon/Google/etc happily pay ten times that salary In the thread, they say Helsinki juniors start out at ~$3k/mo after taxes. In the Bay Area, let's say you are a junior at a FAANG and are getting $150k/year. This works out to $8k/mo after taxes. So the difference between a FAANG and Helsinki is more like 3x. Maybe, 4X if you account for bonu…
>There is this weird trend I noticed on HN. Whenever the subject of money comes up, people start casually quoting Bay Area numbers like they are representative of the industry as a whole. I don't think they are.
Americans (and capitalist supporters -usually people without a real capital-) are fixated with raw amounts of money. It's very different from European culture, where we usually consider many other factors as quality of life first.
Also they tend to consider us as poor. I've been told several times in conversations "nobody can afford iPhones in Europe" and other nonsense like that. Hey at least I never had to worry about getting medical treatment. I can perfectly afford a stupid iPhone if I want but there are much more important factors in life than "how many gadget can you afford to buy?"
Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
#409This is honestly a great way for tech entrepreneurs to experience Nordic living. The fact is Finland has one of the most startup friendly environments around: — top schools (Aalto U. produces incredibly talented engineers) — startup friendly ecosystem (cheap rents, cheap internet) — Finnish work culture (direct, no nonsense, hard working but balanced) — fantastic food and beverage scene in downtown Helsinki My wife i…
I moved from SF to the Nordics on a startup visa and feel obligated to temper expectations whenever I see these. - There are good schools and people, but don't expect the density of top people to be anything close to SF. Finding friends to talk shop with requires active engagement. - Every European country is trying to promote itself as startup friendly, and what you are seeing from a distance is being heavily curate…
Where in the Nordics did you move to?
> - There are good schools and people, but don't expect the density of top people to be anything close to SF. Finding friends to talk shop with requires active engagement.
This is true in terms of density, but if you do put in a bit of effort, you can find lots of hardcore skilled people to talk shop with. Depends on your speciality but lots of good devs in Helsinki, across web/mobile dev, embedded, game dev, machine learning (check out papers coming out of Nvidia Helsinki office), audio and graphics dev (great demoscene legacy), also more exotic fields like quantum physics or SAR satellite tech.. In fact you can find experts in most fields to hang out with
> - Every European country is trying to promote itself as startup friendly, and what you are seeing from a distance is being heavily curated by government funded marketing efforts. I recently declined to take part in an marketing video because I cannot in good faith suggest people leave SF/US unless it is for ideological reasons. Expect your company L's valuation to be 1/10th of what the would be back in the US. Expect to make up the private investment shortfall with hugely distracting public funding, both in terms of wasted time applying/reporting and tangental product development. Labour laws will require you to have a _at_least_ extra 3 months of runway on hand so that you can give the mandatory notice periods.
There is some truth to this (though I would say early stage valuations are perhaps half, not 10%), but there is nothing fundamental stopping you from building a global company in the Nordics, there are many examples of this - Skype, Spotify, Supercell etc. Also I think there is more and more VC money available, also from US VCs, to Nordic companies - they are seeing the high quality of startups and attracted by the non-inflated valuations. If anything, I would say that as an employer, reasonable engineering salaries and somewhat less competition for talent is in your favour vs SF.
Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
#410One thing I would like to address when it comes to higher taxes and lower pay than what you might get in the US is that to some degree, it's making the society a better place for the 90% who are not enjoying top salaries.
Consider the situation of me and my wife, we got monetary aid for attending the free high quality universities. This had nothing to do with the wealth of our families, it's available for everyone. Just like all the education before that.
We had our first child and bought a house in our 20s, easily done since one can get into work life without any debt. Oh, and we both had a year off work to spend with the said child. Expecting a second and planning to do the very same with her.
We reside ~30 minutes from the city center that's accessible via affordable public transportation and even walking / cycling roads where cars are not allowed. The air is clean and these roads go through small forests and parks.
When it comes to income, we're well off nowadays, probably in the 5% of top earning households (in our early 30s). But despite that, due to sensible city planning and good social policies, we have a lot of friends from different income brackets living next to us, having pretty similar quality of life as we do, who also bought their own apartments in their 20s and had kids. Our children go to the same kindergarten, will end up in the same schools, and they will do so with other kids from all walks of life. That's a real treasure in my opinion. Compared to the rest of the world, they are also quite safe in here. Some US cities look like warzones (statistically speaking) compared to our roughest neighbourhoods.
I have an idea what the SV top earner life without kids looks like, it's pretty sweet I can admit that. Would I trade my life to have that? Never, if it means that my friends without jobs have to live on the street without healthcare. Life is just so much better when everyone has a decent standard of living.