Ask HN: Should I move to Berlin?

20 days are minimum. 24 only applies when you're working 6 days/week.

Generally, I'd expect 30 days. That's still the norm.

24 screams "startup" or "we struggled to offer that salary, so we're compensating with less holiday".

> I am a single person, a typical guy, no girlfriend, no night life, spend most of my time on my laptop hacking around. And most of the time, all I need is food and bed. Considering all of that, in a salary of 5000 Euros per month, how much could I save per month after my food and rent expenditures?

I'm mostly the same, and live in a medium-sized city near Berlin (Dresden). For your reference, my monthly costs are around 1200 € per month, breaking down as follows (all numbers monthly):

- rent and utilities: 420€ (for a 50 sqm apartment)

- internet: 40€ (100 Mib/s, including landline)

- TV: 25€ (most of it is the mandatory fee for public broadcasting)

- cellphone: 10€ (1 GiB monthly allowance)

- voluntary insurances: 80€ (mostly disability insurance; not including health and unemployment insurance since those are deducted from the salary before I get the payout)

- public transit pass: 50€ (valid for all modes of public transport across the entire town; I don't own a car)

- food: 300€ (I could cut a good third of that if I pre-cooked my lunch at home instead of going to restaurants for lunch with my colleagues)

The rest is small stuff (homewares, drugstore items, medicine), entertainment expenses (cinema ticket, train ticket to a hiking spot, etc.), and a monthly donation of 100 € to my local hackerspace. If I had to, I could cut the donation and the expensive lunches and go down to ~1000€ per month immediately.

But that's Dresden, not Berlin. The rent is bound to be much higher in Berlin (at least per sqm; you might find something under 500€ if you really compromise on space, but actual Berliners can tell you more about this line item than I can). Also, public transit is more expensive in Berlin because of the larger tariff zones. AFAIK, a month pass for Berlin public transit would set you back around 100€. The other expenses should be nearly identical. My educated guess for cost of living in Berlin at my standard (which presumably is somewhere around yours) is 1500€ per month.

Maybe add another 100€ for evening classes in German language, which I would definitely recommend if you're staying longer than a few months.

For curiosity, I just run a Dubai vs Berlin cost-of-living comparison in Numbeo and I think housing is the factor that makes Berlin cheaper than Dubai (about 50% less).

In my opinion, Berlin is a much better place (even with that weather) than Dubai except if you are Java engineer with interest in banking apps like Murex/Calypso/etc. If that's your case, stay in Dubai or switch to Singapore in the next 2-4 years. After that period, you can fly to whenever you like in Europe working in the bank and place you want.

Numbeo is an important site to keep in mind. It really makes a difference in decision making what the goals are :) Berlin is an interesting, exciting city with lots of potential. I have a friend who lived in Dubai for 10 years and he now moves back to Hungary. Another friend left Dubai after a few months, he said that place is nuts.

If it's a startup, I'd think twice. There's no guarantee that you'll be happy at the new company, especially if it is not profitable.

Bureaucratic stuff can take time in Germany. Learning the language can challenging. The language schools have very different quality of teaching.

London has a much larger population of immigrants from the Middle East. So if your prospective employer in Berlin had a London office, or business ties to the UK, that would be a plus.