Programming Jobs Abroad For a US Citizen? 836
An anonymous reader writes "I am a American citizen with a masters in Computer Science from a 3rd tier college and 4 years of work experience under my belt. I would like to work somewhere abroad in Europe for a couple years before I get too settled in life but have no clue where to start. I only speak English but would love to learn a second language. What sort of opportunities are there for American citizens to work abroad? What countries offer the best opportunity to balance a challenging work environment with enough vacation to explore the rest of Europe in my free time? Any hassles I should know about?"
Interestingly enough ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:elect obama (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop bringing the fucking election into everything! Just stop it!
Re:tier? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was not aware US colleges had some sort of official tier.
There is no tier system. The submitter hasn't figured out that outside of academia, nobody really cares where you went to school only what you can actually do.
Re:elect obama (Score:3, Insightful)
If by "productive members of society" you mean "parasite MBAs," then please, by all means, they're welcome to get the hell out. Let them go wreck some other country's economy for a while.
I had a somewhat similar desire (Score:5, Insightful)
... except my primary concern was learning the language, and then finding work. Specifically, I wanted to live in Japan, so I ended up going to a language school full time there for a year and a half, and then after that finding work. If your primary concern is just living and working abroad, and language secondary, I would think that would be possible in many places in Europe. If language is important to you though, I would strongly recommend that you first study the language in the country you've chosen, and then find work. This is because 1. It's much easier to study when you don't have to work at the same time. 2. It will make you a more attractive hire. 3. Since you'll have put significant effort into learning the language (as opposed to just doing it in your free time while working), it will become a skill that will stay with you and that you can draw upon in the future.
So that didn't really answer the questions you were asking, but I thought it was something that was important to address....
Re:tier? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easy - if you've never heard of it, it's a third tier college.
Re:Stay the fuck where you are! (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect it's largely because of the World Wars that the US currently has such a bad odor in Europe. Europeans know very well what happens when a large, prosperous country with a strong military starts thinking it has a natural right to dominate the world.
Re:tier? (Score:2, Insightful)
In the real world, there are two tiers of university: name-brand, and everyone else.
Working abroad is an experience worth doing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well as a person who now lives and works abroad I can say it something that everyone should do.
It has many benefits. Least of which is cash.
First off and most importantly it opens your eyes to the greater culture of the planet. Being someone from the "new" world this is even more important. As North America suffers from a homoginised culture. Less so Canada.
Secondly the experience both for work and personal. Work wise your experience in different cultures working can only help you back at home. Secondly the experience you gain personally will enhance your life and alter your life priorities.
Now for the tough part the how too.
First off do your research in an area you wish to live. What is the cost of living etc. Secondly start to look at the job market in the region. Google will be your friend here.
For example: Rent in Sydney Aus in the city runs you about $400-$600au a week. That's about $350-$500us. Which for most american's is gigantic cash.
At this time several markets are suffering from a downturn in IT. So be careful. This is a particularily sensitive time for employment. Many regions of the world have laws that prefer citizens over foreign people. Others require lengthy and costly Visa and certification procedures. Also some countries foreign workers are not governed by labor laws no matter what they do. So you may not have the protections the locals do. So again this is a point of research.
If you are going to a non English speaking country. Make sure you have someone translate you CV/resume before you go. And then again when you get there. Make sure they understand the subject matter in the CV/resume. Otherwise you may end up looking like a professional gopher cage cleaner.
Some countries have issues with American's. So be careful. For example a job in Egypt for an American could have personal safety issues. ( I picked a country and random. )
Moving countries is hard work but well worth it. I have been doing it for almost 20 years. So don't be afraid. If your mind is set on it, you can do it.
I could ramble on for hours. But I'll leave it at this.
Re:Stay the fuck where you are! (Score:1, Insightful)
...they come in and save Europe from the Germans?
(Tongue only slightly in cheek, but drawing parallels between the United States and Germany under Wilhelm or Hitler is hilarious. If you want to spew that kind of bullshit, go look at their closer, nastier neighbor in Russia.)
Re:Stay the fuck where you are! (Score:1, Insightful)
Really? I traveled in Europe well before 9/11/2001 and never noticed that Europeans (western) had any love for the US then. They were just missing a good excuse to hate the US (I mean, lets face it, it was the US picking up most of the tab for the DISASTER the Europeans caused in AFRICA... but I digress). Before 9/11 Europeans just called us "fat and ugly", now they can call us "warmongerer's". Which is Ironic considering that the worse humanitarian disaster in the history of humanity was caused exclusively by Europeans (WWI and WWII).
Its just plain bat shit silly that the world doesnt hate Europe as much as they hate the US. Lets face it, 90% of the worlds problems today is caused by the actions of EU nations circa 1600-1900. (mostly before the creation of the US, and before the US became a real world player)
Working Holiday Visa (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to work in Europe, speaking English with an opportunity to learn another language, your options are the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden & Norway & Nokia (oops, I mean Finland)
All of these countries have high tech sectors that their own populations can't sustain & import foreign workers (from all over the place) who use English as a working lingua fraca.
All the countries I listed above allow working Holiday visas for 1-2 years for many western countries (not sure about the US, sorry) for workers under the age of 31.
If you can't get such a visa, consider the same countries, but apply for jobs online, making it clear that you need a visa / sponsorship / whatever.
Good luck!
Re:tier? (Score:5, Insightful)
outside of academia, nobody really cares where you went to school only what you can actually do.
If you really believe that, you are desperately naive.
Keep in mind that we're talking about the European job market.
If it's not Ivy League or MIT, we've never heard about it.
When you've picked a country you want to work in, don't forget to read up on the local education standards.
A few years back things started changing here, we've got bachelors and masters here too now, but they might be slightly different to the American model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_process [wikipedia.org]
Just so you know how your degree compares to the locals'.
Re:Working Holiday Visa (Score:1, Insightful)
As a danish citizen I can only confirm what the GP said. English is the corporate language in many large corporations in denmark and we will ofcourse teach you enough danish to pick up girls, order beers, and so forth :-)
Re:English at work countries... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stay the fuck where you are! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:tier? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, Europe used to love America.
I grew up in the 90s. People over here had "America" stickers on their skateboards, wore baseball caps from US teams, had 49ers jackets, listened to Michael Jackson and every kid wanted to grow up to be like Chuck Norris. People actually bought US cars, and most sports gear was from US brands.
A lot of people spent their holidays in the US, and many planned to move there after finishing school. Having friends in the US automatically made you the cool kid.
Second, Europe doesn't hate America now; certainly not as much as the Americans seem to hate the French.
We obviously don't love the United States as much as we used to, but most Europeans are perfectly capable of distinguishing between a government and the people. We realize that a lot of Americans are unhappy with what their government is doing. We realize that you suffer more from your government's actions than we do (it doesn't exactly hurt us if your government takes away your freedoms). Our American Style Pizza is still called American Style Pizza and was never renamed to Freedom Pizza or something like this.
You are very welcome over here. There's no animosity.
As for the article's original question, programmers are always sought after in Europe. I know a few Americans how have moved over here (ironically, the opposite of what I thought would happen even a decade ago), and they seem to be happy with their choice (although sadly, they could not come with us when we went on holidays in Cuba - what the hell is up with that???).
Re:Stay the fuck where you are! (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical European who has no idea how the US government works. George Bush is only one part. Learn the facts then come back to a US based website to debate.
Typical American, validates every preconceptions Europeans have of you with three poorly written sentences :-)
Seriously though, there's really no question that not re-electing Bush would have stopped some of the madness.
Re:Stay the fuck where you are! (Score:5, Insightful)
Before 9/11 Europeans just called us "fat and ugly", now they can call us "warmongerer's". Which is Ironic considering that the worse humanitarian disaster in the history of humanity was caused exclusively by Europeans (WWI and WWII).
While there is truth in that, I also think that is quite a statement coming from an Anonymous Coward from the only country on earth who ever used the atomic bomb. Twice. On civilian targets. WWII was dirty beyond imagination from both sides - and that includes the USA.
Re:Here are a few job boards for Canada and UK. (Score:3, Insightful)
I will strongly recommend both Sweden and Denmark. They both have very strong economies currently and very low unemployment. Denmark alone is missing thousands of IT professional to fill vacant positions. As for a choice between Denmark and Sweden; Denmark pays around 25% higher salaries but is 25% more expensive to live in, so evens out unless you are looking to save up. IT salaries for non-educated developers starts at 5000$/month, for a computer scientist they start around 7000$/month.
Re:You're wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
A common mistake is to refer to Europe as one place - it's not. Yes, some parts of Europe where very American friendly, some still are but there are also parts that have never liked Americans much.
As for reasons it varies from person to person and place to place, attitudes to US foriegn policy, reactions to 'cultural imperialism', anti-capitalist sentiment, bad experiences with Americans in the past.
In the end it's much like any other kind of prejudice and discrimination : it happens, you will meet people like that. It's your task to show them the opinions they hold are wrong.
Re:You're wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
We obviously don't love the United States as much as we used to, but most Europeans are perfectly capable of distinguishing between a government and the people. We realize that a lot of Americans are unhappy with what their government is doing.
This is true, but after electing bush, twice, it has become very, very difficult to argue that there is a difference between the american people and the american government. If mccain gets elected this time around, the american people deserves his presidency for all I care.
Re:English at work countries... (Score:1, Insightful)
I traveled through the United States the past 2 months and had the same thought in reverse...
Water in the bowl, WTF!?
So it seems to be a thing of perspective
Re:Working Holiday Visa (Score:1, Insightful)
You'll lose lots of details if you can't speak the language. You could do well in Scandinavia (Denmark) in English but you need to understand culture no matter where you are - and danish culture is quite different from american culture - or german for that matter.
Re:tier? (Score:5, Insightful)
outside of academia, nobody really cares where you went to school only what you can actually do."
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read." -- G.Marx
I've hired about 100 programmers in my career. There were a few rare gems among the self-educated, but you had to apply a bit of focus to the educated, too. The ones who brought samples of their work and were willing to enthuse over it in the interview were the ones I kept. Sometimes their code was a little off, but I found it fairly easy to get someone to change direction when they were actually covering ground. The theorists I bought a coffee and sent them politely on their way. Which school they went to was utterly irrelevant, except that I did get a larger proportion of twits from the more expensive schools (some good folk too, but the better-school twits were ferociously attitudinal)
I'm not sure if it was Joe Spolsky or Sergy Brin who said it -- hire people who are smart and get things done. Brains plus energy, gotta have both.
Re:tier? (Score:4, Insightful)
One of my most talented (and well paid) co-workers had a degree in Saxophone from a conservatory.
Strange you should mention that. The very best programmers -- the genius coders -- I had working for me, with rare exception, had a background in classical music and played one or more instruments. I'm not sure that's causative, but there was a clear trend.
Re:elect obama (Score:3, Insightful)
7 years ago, I was a college student. I had no investments.
your house is worth almost 2x as much as it was in 2000
Didn't have a house then, either. I bought my house during the time before the bubble burst, where house prices were skyrocketing because banks were giving sub-prime loans to people who had no hope of being able to pay the loan off without foreclosing. As I'm sure you know, the increase in demand caused a huge run-up in housing prices
recent economic troubles (and consequently blame the bush administration) but I haven't seen either a link between Bush policies
The Republicans are largely anti-regulation, and while they could have regulated the sub-prime mortgage industry during the period where they controlled most of the federal government, they chose not to. They were responsible for the lack of regulatory oversight of the trading of sub-prime mortgage-backed securities. Had there been proper government regulation in place, we would have at least mitigated, if not entirely avoided the sub-prime mortgage crisis that has been a driving force for our economic downturn.
Re:tier? (Score:5, Insightful)
So it is just automatically assumed universities with good research programs also teach undergrads well? I would think there is very little connection between the two.
Hardly (Score:3, Insightful)
Almost any other place in the world have higher taxes than the US
Only if you use Bush/Neocon/GOP math. That is, if you only consider taxes a negative and do not weigh the value of what is received in return, then the US looks like a good deal.
If you develop a major illness, you will not necessarily think that it is such a good deal.
(If you would prefer not to have millions of people killed in your name, you may also not consider it such a good deal, but that's a separate conversation.)
Re:You're wrong (Score:1, Insightful)
I'll let you in on a secret. American's don't really dislike the French. France is sort of like the gay guy doing a decorator show that some straight redneck's watching. I mean he's watching the show, so there's no problem. Then his buddy comes in and says "hey why are you watching that guy" and they both have to do some quick gay-bashing to assure themselves of their sexuality.
Re:South africa (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks - the stats I were looking at lumped all/most of Europe together on 6.9%.
Incidentally, a more recent figure is 3.8% for NZ - and Denmark, the Netherlands and (South?) Korea [1] all beat NZ (and presumably Iceland too). I believe NZ has been more affected by the current economic crisis that many other OECD countries, as it's very reliant on trade and tourism. Not sure how this affects IT (as I'm not currently job-hunting) but I'd guess that businesses may be scaling back recruitment.
[1] North Korea isn't an OECD member, and I'd imagine that the unemployment rate in North Korea is in negative figures and everyone is gloriously happy in their jobs ;-)
Re:English at work countries... (Score:3, Insightful)
a) people don't eat curry in the EU
The UK is in the EU and we eat lots of curry there. Wherever you happen to be there might not be lots of curry eaten but don't generalize to regions of the EU you know nothing about - our diversity is one of our strengths.
We do have water in the toilets. The function of the water is to seal the pipe to prevent odours coming in from the sewers and not to fill the entire toilet bowl as seems to be the fashion in the US.