Ask HN: Should I go to Sweden for work?

There might be benefits other than the wage that make up for it.

I am not sure about Russian healthcare and so forth but free healthcare, education, childcare (cheap at least) and such might make up for it.

I think your nativity makes you miss a few problems simply because they never cross your path. For example:

> Language skills... nothing to say here. Every Swede can speak and write English. You won't have problems here.

This is true insofar as that I've been studying Interaction Design in Sweden for one and a half years now (one half year to go) and I have not needed to learn Swedish. However, I've been informed that to get employed in Sweden it's quite vital that you know Swedish. There's plenty of jobs where you don't even really need to know Swedish, but they demand it anyway to give the local people a bigger chance.

To give an example: I know of other students who couldn't get a job delivering newspapers because they didn't speak Swedish because, and I quote "suppose a stranger on the street asks you for directions, how are you going to help them?" which is obviousy part of the job description of newspaper delivery boy.

Can't say how that translates for jobs like UX, although I hear similar stuff from graduates: knowing Swedish is almost necessary if you want to get employed.

I'm quite surprised about your fears at night - I live in Malmö (which has a reputation) and have never felt threatened or in danger at all.

That sounds about average for Stockholm I believe.

The salary will obviously be lower than freelancing rates since there are less taxes and costs to consider. You will have to make a spreadsheet or something to see what would end up being most profitable.

Housing is rather expensive in Stockholm at the moment, and rentals are hard to come by unless you want to pay ~10k SEK for a small one bedroom flat.

>Front-end contracting is typically full-time contracts on-location for between 6 and 12 months. It typically pays 100+ USD an hour, meaning a monthly income of 16K USD or so given a standard 40 hour workweek.

A lot of those 16K will go away in taxes and social costs though. I am not sure what most freelancers use for estimates but somewhere between 50-75% should probably be deducted before getting a comparable number to a salary.

I did my masters degree in Stockholm and one thing I think is very important to know is that it is very difficult to find a job without speaking proper Swedish, so if you go to Sweden and at some point decide to change jobs, it might be difficult if you didn't learn Swedish yet. I was in a CS masters program with about 30 other international students and none of us even got a IT related side job (not even at the international companies like IBM, ...) although Kista as part of Stockholm likes to be called "the IT capital of europe ...".

Besides that, I really wouldn't worry about crime etc. Swedes definitely have a different perception to crime and danger in general compared to the rest of the world I'd say, simply because Sweden is so peaceful.

I lived in Husby, which is considered "ghetto" by Swedes and the riots this year happened pretty much in front of my door. I didn't even notice anything and was never scared to walk home at night, but every Swede I talked to reacted pretty shocked when I told them where I lived. So I really wouldn't worry about that, especially if you got along in Moscow.