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Ask HN: Berlin - costs of living, python jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: Berlin - costs of living, python jobs?

#51

Post by robin_reala »

maryrosecook wrote: post #25
robin_reala wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why health insurance? Surely the OP is covered in the EU if they get an EHIC? Or does that not apply for a permanent move?

No, it does not. If you pay taxes here, you have to have health insurance. For a permanent employee, this is about 14% of your salary. All in, I pay about a third of my income in tax (which includes health insurance).

Is that a cross-Europe thing then? My fiancée is Swedish but living in the UK with me; as far as I know she doesn’t pay any extra tax or have extra health-insurance.

googles

Re: Ask HN: Berlin - costs of living, python jobs?

#52

Post by zalew »

deets wrote: post #31
fylox wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cubase user here cough Anyway I'd imagine that working for Ableton is fairly cool. Although I am not qualified enough for such a position I am curious what requirements they have. I check your link and they ask for at least 2 years of experience. Is that "all" ? As a CS drop out I can't even provide bachelor's degree. The point I am trying to make is: As far as I know here in Germany employees always ask for degrees.…

I'm the chap responsible for the Python developer hiring at Ableton. To sum it up: I don't give a rats ass for any degrees. I don't even have one myself. We send applicants a programming test. I get these tests, and I assess them without even skimming the CV. Because it would otherwise just skew my observations. If the test convinced me that you can code, you will have a job-interview, via phone or in person dependin…

Hi! It's nice about the degree, I'm also a dropout. One question: is fluent german necessary, or can a newcomer speak english and learn on the way? I'm quite good at learning languages, but I suppose I won't speak fluently in the next few months :)

Re: Ask HN: Berlin - costs of living, python jobs?

#53

Post by snikolov »

deets wrote: post #31
fylox wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cubase user here cough Anyway I'd imagine that working for Ableton is fairly cool. Although I am not qualified enough for such a position I am curious what requirements they have. I check your link and they ask for at least 2 years of experience. Is that "all" ? As a CS drop out I can't even provide bachelor's degree. The point I am trying to make is: As far as I know here in Germany employees always ask for degrees.…

I'm the chap responsible for the Python developer hiring at Ableton. To sum it up: I don't give a rats ass for any degrees. I don't even have one myself. We send applicants a programming test. I get these tests, and I assess them without even skimming the CV. Because it would otherwise just skew my observations. If the test convinced me that you can code, you will have a job-interview, via phone or in person dependin…

4th year EECS major here. I'm doing a 5 year bachelors/masters program. Do you typically take summer interns?

Re: Ask HN: Berlin - costs of living, python jobs?

#54

Post by cageface »

deets wrote: post #38
cageface wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ableton seems like it would be a great place to work. Enabling creative people appeals to me a lot more than putting yet another spin on social networking.

The Python jobs are web-related only though. While Python is used inside Live itself, it's not enough to justify a pure-Python coder position for that. But the web-team is large enough to also offer more back-end related work, which is the reason we advertise Python-developers instead of Web-developers only. I fear though that this is not really that much different from another spin on social networking in the end.

I fear though that this is not really that much different from another spin on social networking in the end.

I guess this is unavoidable in just about any web development job these days but at least the context is a little more intrinsically interesting at Ableton. At least to me.

Re: Ask HN: Berlin - costs of living, python jobs?

#55

Post by deets »

zalew wrote: post #52
deets wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the chap responsible for the Python developer hiring at Ableton. To sum it up: I don't give a rats ass for any degrees. I don't even have one myself. We send applicants a programming test. I get these tests, and I assess them without even skimming the CV. Because it would otherwise just skew my observations. If the test convinced me that you can code, you will have a job-interview, via phone or in person dependin…

Hi! It's nice about the degree, I'm also a dropout. One question: is fluent german necessary, or can a newcomer speak english and learn on the way? I'm quite good at learning languages, but I suppose I won't speak fluently in the next few months :)

We gather around 20 nations under one roof - english is the main language.

We also offer german-courses for employees. And english for the germans ;)

Re: Ask HN: Berlin - costs of living, python jobs?

#56

Post by deets »

snikolov wrote: post #53
deets wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the chap responsible for the Python developer hiring at Ableton. To sum it up: I don't give a rats ass for any degrees. I don't even have one myself. We send applicants a programming test. I get these tests, and I assess them without even skimming the CV. Because it would otherwise just skew my observations. If the test convinced me that you can code, you will have a job-interview, via phone or in person dependin…

4th year EECS major here. I'm doing a 5 year bachelors/masters program. Do you typically take summer interns?

No. It makes no sense to us. Regardless of how good one is, the amount of time & effort until he or she is productive is a waste IMHO. And working with SCRUM makes it even harder, as there are no idling side-projects one can place a student on and then look at occasionally. All devlopers need to be real team members.

Re: Ask HN: Berlin - costs of living, python jobs?

#57

Post by zalew »

deets wrote: post #55
zalew wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! It's nice about the degree, I'm also a dropout. One question: is fluent german necessary, or can a newcomer speak english and learn on the way? I'm quite good at learning languages, but I suppose I won't speak fluently in the next few months :)

We gather around 20 nations under one roof - english is the main language. We also offer german-courses for employees. And english for the germans ;)

nice! sounds really promissing :)

Re: Ask HN: Berlin - costs of living, python jobs?

#58

Post by acb »

poet wrote: post #42
kablamo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singapore. English speaking. Modern clean safe beautiful city. Mostly banking and finance here. Something like 2% unemployment, 15% economic growth this year. Lots of Westerners (and Indians, Chinese, Malay, Phillipinos, Indonesians, etc hugely diverse). Little India, Chinatown. Very easy to get a work visa. Low taxes. Tropical island. Can be as cheap as $50 to fly to Bali and a weekend of surfing. All of Southeast A…

Singapore is also a police state, if you care about such things. Some choice quotes from the US Department of State: Singapore has a mandatory death penalty for many narcotics offenses. Singapore police have the authority to compel both residents and non-residents to submit to random drug analysis. There are no jury trials in Singapore. Judges hear cases and decide sentencing. http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw…

I think their preferred term is "managed democracy".

Re: Ask HN: Berlin - costs of living, python jobs?

#59

Post by rb2k_ »

radiothom wrote: post #41
maryrosecook wrote: post #22

Ableton, the company I work for, are based in Berlin and are looking for Python devs: http://www.ableton.com/jobs It's a really nice place to work, and the pay is OK for Berlin. Great summary of cost of living and tech scene from maxklein. You can live very cheaply here, if you work at it. Some bars serve a half-litre of beer for 1€, some reasonable apartments can be got for 120€ a month if you can live with coal-fir…

Yep, SoundCloud is great (so is Ableton!). While we are ruby-based at SoundCloud, we are definitely expanding and open to various backgrounds! So definitely visit the jobs page if you're interested: soundcloud.com/jobs. Agree with Mary - Berlin is a fantastic place to live and very affordable in many areas. Great city with a growing start-up scene!

This is something that is completely confusing to me. Berlin seems to have a lot of interesting Jobs with "fun" languages (ruby, python, even some scala, ...).

Down in the south (Stuttgart), it's all C or Java and most projects seem to be boring on the first look :-/

Re: Ask HN: Berlin - costs of living, python jobs?

#60

Post by piotrSikora »

Uchikoma wrote: post #20
Uchikoma wrote: post #11

I can only write from my perspective, 110qm are around 950 EUR including heating, but this is a more expensive part of town (not the most expensive though). Fairly cheap compared to other large cities in Germany. There are many tech jobs, most companies are hiring. As a developer you might make 35-60k EUR a year, depending on the company and your skills. Transport is currently 72 EUR a month. Meals are around 5 EUR f…

I might add: Freelancer is 500 EUR to 1000 EUR (and above) a day depending on your skills (obviously ;-)

I have to ask... Doing what exactly can get you constantly 500-1000 EUR per day? I know a lot of good programmers that earn that much per month, so this daily estimate (especially for a freelancer) seems way too high to me.
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