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Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

helsinkibusinesshub.fi

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Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#521

Post by ianai »

traek wrote: post #245
ianai wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t throw social security in there since that’s actually paid into from workers. Yes it’s a Ponzi scheme-government backed. That’s not the same thing as a money pit with no revenue incoming.

They're all paid into by workers, taxes are taxes.

In order to withdraw from SS you must be eligible - including have had contributed to it in the past. The money is even accounted for separately from other government funds. The funds are supposed to go and have historically gone from contributor to beneficiary. It’s also not had funding problems until those funds got mishandled by past governments (congresses/presidents) and tapped for other things.

First link from google: https://chomsky.info/20050601/

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#522

Post by Leherenn »

kolla wrote: post #440
deanc wrote: post #190

Overall 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…

As a Swede working with Finns constantly I find it hard to believe you can get by without knowing the language as most of the Finns I work with have pretty bad English, I work in IT consulting.

You don't need much to live in a place. I don't know about Finland specifically, but based on my experience when I didn't know the local language yet and that of friends.

"Hello, thank you, goodbye, yes, no, sorry, I don't speak Finnish, English?" is probably ok for everyday life, if you don't care about not fitting in. And even that might not be necessary, most of the time you know what might be asked. E.g. if your getting groceries then pretty much every answer is going to be no from you. Just a head sign and a smile will work fine. Or just go to the self-checkout.

For administrative stuff, Google Trad (or similar) is often good enough. Especially nowadays where most things are online. For critical stuff (hospital, ...), they'll find someone that speaks English.

Funnily enough, it's the stuff like getting an haircut, going to the garage and other non-critical but non-automated/common tasks which are the most difficult. You start to dread those situations because you cannot make by with just smiles and yes/no.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#523

Post by [deleted] »

david-gpu wrote: post #393
deanc wrote: post #190

Overall 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…

Moving to a new country and complaining that not all jobs and services are provided to you in your own foreign language comes across as entitled. Of course you need to learn the language of the nation that hosts you. You are an immigrant.

[deleted]

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#524

Post by ta988 »

ecmascript wrote: post #401
ta988 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Also it is a beautiful country, all those lakes, forests, northern lights, people that do not bother you with smalltalk...

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#525

Post by Laakeri »

mehukatti wrote: post #495
Laakeri wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, many people from Helsinki who are good enough to get a job at Amazon/Google/etc are actually moving abroad to work for them, so it doesn't make sense to move to Helsinki if you could get a job like that. Though there are some good cities in Europe with tech giants and their good pay, for example London and Zurich.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft all have offices in Helsinki and are hiring a lot for their cloud businesses. For example we here at AWS consistently have ~10-20 positions open in our new Helsinki downtown office.

Oh, that's nice, I didn't know that! How big is your office? What I know is that Google does not hire software engineers in Helsinki. They have a small office, but it is only for sales people.

Edit: Also by https://www.amazon.jobs/en/location/helsinki-finland it seems that Amazon is not hiring in Helsinki. (If you actually are, maybe you should update the page?)

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#526

Post by piva00 »

Err_Eek wrote: post #462
piva00 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take this as someone who moved to Sweden and have learned a bit of the language, I don't speak Finnish but have had contact with it through Finnish friends for 5+ years now. Finnish is hard just because it's too different from our Indo-European languages mental model. On the other hand, Finnish is easy to pick up if you are going to study it because the written form is very close to the spoken one (even though spoken…

> I agree that it's very obscure but I take that for Swedish with the silver lining that learning an obscure language will be, in the worst case, a good party trick. It takes years to become conversational in a language with dedicated practice -- that's an immense amount of effort to put into a party trick for a person with a full time job and other responsibilities.

That is exactly why I said that I take that as a silver lining, I do.

It's my own personal silver lining because I value having a surprising obscure detail about my personality to show to people. It's a thing I enjoy doing, just for the sake of fun, taking someone completely by surprise in a nice way, e.g.: I went to visit Brazil only once since I moved from there, during this trip I met a Swede who lived in Brazil for 20+ years, who runs a Swedish-Brazilian restaurant quite far from major cities and surprising him with a conversation in Swedish was a very cool experience, both for him and I.

I create a personal justification to why learning Swedish could be interesting beyond using it in the country, even more when I moved and had no idea if I was staying here for long, why would I bother to learn it if I didn't find other motivations to interest me?

Learning languages is really interesting, it even helps to restructure your thoughts. People find different drives to do things, that's mine.

And I have a job and other responsibilities.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#527

Post by sampo »

taejo wrote: post #461
plq wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the foundation you got with Finnish should be useful if ever you need to learn Turkish, Hungarian or Japanese. Natural languages are like programming languages in a sense -- Haskell doesn't get as much use as C++ but learning Haskell will make you better at C++.

A genetic relationship between Finno-Ugric and either the Japonic or Turkic language families, if it exists, is so weak that most scholars believe there is no evidence for it.

> A genetic relationship between Finno-Ugric and either the Japonic or Turkic language families, if it exists, is so weak that most scholars believe there is no evidence for it.

But from practical point of view, these languages share common features like: vowel harmony, phonetic writing, suffixal affixation, grammatical cases. These skills transfer easily over to the next language, once you learn them with one language.

(Not all languages mentioned share all the features.)

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#528

Post by perttir »

johnisgood wrote: post #450
deanc wrote: post #190

Overall 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…

> - public healthcare is great until you have something difficult to work with or non acute. Enjoy the months longs waiting times to see a dentist. Months? What? Why? We have universal health care but the dentist is just days away... if you have pain, usually 1-2 day, or immediate extraction. I live in Eastern Europe.

Yeah, if the problem is not acute, usually it's months and months of waiting, now even longer because of the covid.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#529

Post by ricardobeat »

cbmuser wrote: post #351
deanclatworthy wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has lived in this environment for this long, it doesn't work that way. This is not a language that shares any traits with English. It is hard to get going, and the vocabulary takes a considerable amount of time. You can't switch to Finnish at work, as you simply would not be able to get by, and you can't do it at home as it changes the dynamics of your relationship. This is not an excuse, it's reality.

I don’t buy that. Japanese is completely different, too, but I learned most of it while in Japan where I was forced to speak it. Finish kids don’t need ten years to learn the language either, do they?

Finnish kids have finnish-speaking parents, and spend their entire days immersed in the language, at home, daycare, or school.

Expats are most likely are in an English-speaking environment at work, where speaking Finnish at the level of a four-year-old is going to be a bit of a hindrance; no practice at home unless they have a Finnish partner, and no real options for social activities that will tolerate the learning curve, like children have.

And if it is anything like the Netherlands, any mistake you make will instantly and irreversibly switch the conversation back to English.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#530

Post by taken_username »

reynhaim wrote: post #410

One 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. J…

> 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.

This fact only is a reason to live in countries with proper social policies, and accept paying high taxes is not a bad thing

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