Which got me thinking, are there overlooked tech cities with good pay, affordable living etc. in Europe?
tldr: Cheap, good tech cities to live in Europe?
Tech scene: * We have Red Hat, Net Suite/Oracle, GoodData, Seznam (local search portal, still somehow competing with google), and few smaller startups and local it shops. * I did work at Red Hat for 6 years here, and the office was nice :-) * You would find expats in larger corporations, you can get by speaking mostly english in larger corps (i.e. I had a manager who relocated from New Castle to Brno)
Salary:
From what I heard, based on your role, seniority and skill in salary negotiation, you get between 1000 and 4000 eur/month pre-taxes. So far I don't know many friends that would make more, but I have met few people that do consulting/own small game companies, that make N-times more. Cost of employment (social security, medical insurance, taxes) are around 40%, and as an employee you don't have many ways to lower that. Some companies allow to have you work as a contractor. Beware that being a contractor that is effectively an employee is illegal ;)
Cost of living: * it is a student city. If you are content with single room in a shared flat,that would cost you ~200Eur/month, a two/three bedroom flat, depending on location, 500-700Eur/month.
* lunch during lunchtime costs you around 4Eur. Dining around 5-10. Loaf of bread costs ~1Eur.
* There is decent public transport, year-pass for the whole city costs between 100 and 200 Eur.
* I use Eur for the sake of comparability, Czechs still have their own Crown as currency.
Entertainment:
I don't really go out much these days, but Brno has good beer, and cheap if you like lagers (0.5l around 1E). There is several tearooms with high quality tea, some serve sheesha as well. Coffe snobs can find their coffe. There is board-gaming scene. There is climbing scene with several clibming/bouldering clubs. Rest I don't really know, but most of the things you'd imagine some subgroup of those ~100k students might want in the city, you can find here :)
I've never lived there, but I've worked with Serbian developers that say that Serbia is fantastically cheap, and has a number of tech jobs available due to outsourcing to the country.
I used to live in Edinburgh and that is also an excellent city with a much better cost of living than London and still pretty good companies and salaries (including the financial sector). Doesn't have such great weather unfortunately.
Life is cheaper here, but not that much cheaper.
Europe in general is just bad for tech salaries as opposed to the US/Canada though.
I can provide intel on Bucharest, Timisoara, Belgrade, Zagreb and Osijek.
Intel had R&D people in Barcelona some time ago (some parts of the Itanium were designed there).
Also in Spain, Telefonica had a R&D office in Valladolid where they developed their Video and CDN. There is some support staff there, too.
In Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca (Romania) there is a lot if tech outsourcing jobs for the EU market. Think maintainance and development.
In France there us a town called Sophia Antipolis where Lucent (now Alcatel) and HP did software development for telco products (call managers, etc). The did support from there as well.
Most tech scene in Romania is outsourcing and there is some R&D for major players.
Romanians are by and large friendliest Eastern Europeans.
Timisoara is a nice second tier city. Many low cost flights across Europe and Middle East. Many places are also reachable overland (I'm closer to Timisoara than I'm to Zagreb, my country's capital). Food is brilliant. So are the coffee and the wine. Dating scene is also great. Music scene is amazing as well. If you go entrepreneurial, or just wanna outsource, the talent pool is exceptional.