As for myself, personally, I was already abroad when the ship sank so all I have to do is not return. Come to Sweden my fellow expatriots! lots of tech!
- How easy have you found finding tech jobs in Sweden, do you have any advice for good places to look? - How does the pay compare to other countries/cities you've worked in? - Do you speak Swedish at work/is it possible to get by without being fluent in Swedish?
Luckily the tech scene is very spread out, Lulea, Gothenburg and Lund all have a variety of tech.
I initially meant that rhetorically, but now I'm actually interested to know. Maybe there are good non-govt jobs and low prices in smaller capital cities like Ottawa (<0.8M) and Canberra (<0.4M)? Educate me!
There are a few good places just north of Malmo, in Lund (which is an exceptionally nice place to live), but there are also good places for IT in Lulea (where google and facebook operate), and Gothenburg. It's very spread out.
The only one I don't recommend it stockholm, the wages are higher but you pay more outgoing in rent by a wide margin, and "first hand" apartments are basically impossible to get there.
> - How does the pay compare to other countries/cities you've worked in?
I used to live/work in Helsinki and London, now I work in Malmo. I'm working in a sector with historically low wages and I earn about 30% less than I did in London. But that is almost perfectly in line with cost of living. Other sectors pay much better. I would be better off here than London if I chose something other than video games as an industry.
Helsinki was very comparable to London in terms of salary/cost of living.
> - Do you speak Swedish at work/is it possible to get by without being fluent in Swedish?
I don't speak Swedish at all, the only issue is my banking which is all done in Swedish.
The biggest downside would probably be that Frankfurt is at the top of nothing. We have very good theatres, very good restaurants, nice outdoor activities, but compared to other cities, you don't come here for any specific thing, you come here for the sum of things that make it a very attractive city to live in. The airport is reachable very fast from the city center, i was able to traverse between a Frankfurt Office and a London Office in about 1:20 door to door, so its geographical location makes it also very attractive when visiting or working somewhere else on the continent. As local novelties DECIX is located here and many large Data Centers have popped up all over the area, so if you are interested in Infrastructure there's a lot of jobs and know how in the city.
You also have the somewhat unfair situation of smaller towns right next to Frankfurt offering lower corporate taxes (part of which is levied by the cities) while taking advantage of Frankfurt's infrastructure (which is also paid with the corporate taxes paid in Frankfurt). This attracts a lot of businesses, of course, and on paper detracts from Frankfurt's size when all that separates them is one Autobahn.