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Comment by amm | Hacker News Reader

Vienna, Austria.

It has been ranked the most liveable city in the world for some years in a row.

Cost of living is low compared to the European average; you can rent a medium-sized apartment for 600-700€/month.

Everyone speaks English. Co-workers from Spain never bothered with German, because they can get anything done in English.

Viennas public transport system is cheap (30€/month) and excellent. You can get anywhere in the city in a reasonable amount of time. Generally, all public infrastructure is in great shape.

The tech-scene is so-so. It's certainly not London or Berlin, but there are some startups if that's your thing. There are plenty of enterprise IT jobs in banking, insurance or government.

Education and healthcare are free and nature is close. It's a 1 1/2 hour drive and you're skiing in the Alps; 2 hours and you're in the Salzkammergut swimming in mountain lakes.

All in all, it's a great city to raise a family.

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As a Pole who moved to Vienna from the UK, I disagree very strongly.

1. Most (as in, over 50%) young adults smoke cigarettes in Vienna. You will inhale the smoke basically everywhere, in particular inside most bars or clubs, but also on the streets. On a windless day, the entire city reeks with smoke.

2. The public transport may be cheap, but the quality is poor. Not very punctual and the trams/buses/trains generally lack conditioning which in the summer turns them into 40+ degrees sweaty, stinking meat containers. To remedy this, they were handing out deodorants at the stations (seriously).

3. You won't be getting a long-term apartment without paying ca. 7 months worth of rent upfront (3 mo fees / 3 mo deposit / 1 mo first rent).

4. Any kind of self-employment is prohibitively expensive unless you charge of the order of €100/h. As a result, if you want to hire, say, a low-end personal trainer, expect to pay of the order of €100/h.

5. The typical level of customer service is really bad and could be described as "the customer is always wrong". It reminds me of Poland pre-2000s.

I have no idea why it is considered the most liveable city. I see very few advantages over, say, Warsaw/Wroclaw/Krakow/Bratislava/Budapest except perhaps the general level of safety on the streets.

Vienna would be a lot nicer if they didn't still allow smoking in bars and restaurants.

"Just don't go to the smoking places."

A very large percentage of the adult population in Vienna still smokes tobaccco. When I was there in 2017 it felt like there were no non-smoking places.

This. Vegetarians can have a hard time when going to restaurants too. As a non-smoking vegetarian, I wasn't having a great time going out.

Wow, when I saw Vienna mentioned the smoking was the very first thing that came to my mind. Funny to see others have shared the same experience. A real shame as it's such a beautiful place otherwise.

As a Italian who came to Vienna to study and started to work his 4th year (besides university) I can confirm those points.

The city is also quite clean, as there are a lot (but still reasonable) amount of trash bins.

Also you have a lot of parks, public "beaches" on the Danube and it's side channels (those which aren't used by ships) and the big Danube island in the middle, where you can escape from the city into nature quickly.

There are also a lot of nice woods and hiking trails around Vienna. I'm also owning a mountainbike, because I can cycle to a forest/nature reserve, with a lot of really cool (down hill) trails, at the city's border in half an hour from my workplace.

I'm from a small town from the alps, and will move back there because I'm not a city person and just love my hometown - but Vienna is the one (bigger) city I could imagine living in, if I had to (considering cities >1 million people and offering at least a metro and university).

> Education and healthcare are free

It comes naturally with a price, i.e., you probably have a bit more tax then in US I'd guess, but the benefits are really great, and even if I wouldn't need it now (no health problems, no real social/money) I don't have a problem paying those taxes. Also, at the end of the month I have >2/3 of my salary left over for leisure/saving/investing/... so I really cannot complain.

I am curious which small town (at least the province) are you from.

Currently in the US, but contemplating moving to Munich to be close to family in Trento. Would never live in a small town in the Alps again. :)

Would love to return to Italy, but the tech sector is dismal from what I see. No connections though, all hearsay.

How international the workforce is there? and How hard would it be for a -non religious- middle eastern family to work/live there? from my experience in Germany it seemed with the exception of Berlin and Cologne people won't view you as an equal in the workplace until you work very hard to prove otherwise.

> It has been ranked the most liveable city in the world for some years in a row.

Melbourne would beg to differ; there were headlines when we lost the first place position a few months ago after quite a few years at the top.

Not proposing Melbourne as an alternative though, while it's a nice place to live it's far from cheap.

It is comparatively cheap compared to SF, London, NYC and Sydney though...

Everything is relative. Personally I find it a very affordable place to live for a number of reasons:

1. I don't need a car (~$10kAUD+ a year) because transport is sufficient. 2. Queen Vic and South Melbourne markets are very accessible which make buying fresh ingredients for home cooking very affordable. 3. Entertainment is cheap, tons of cheap live music acts, art exhibitions, markets, etc. 4. Public transport is cheap (~$20/month, more if you don't live in CBD though) 5. AUD is declining against USD, by mid-2019 it's likely to be around 0.65 USD so if you make USD it's great. 6. Rent is relatively affordable. ~$1600AUD/month get you a 1 bed place in the CBD.

Those are just the money factors. As I said, it's not "cheap" but it's "relatively affordable" meaning that you can buy an awesome life here with a bit more money than traditionally cheap places but achieve a better $/Quality of Life metric.

I'd largely agree with your assessment; it's not cheap, but the cost of living to income ratio is good and therefore it's relatively affordable.

It sounded like the OP was not intending on earning a lot though, and so somewhere that was outright cheap was probably better for them.

€700 is certainly cheap compared to just about any US city but what are the tech salaries like? Even in small US markets a senior developer or architect can get the equivalent of €87-110k. If the highest paid devs are topping out at €65-70k that's an important point.

My sister lives there (though she doesn't work in tech) and massively prefers it to Budapest. Her main issues are that the summers are hotter than she find pleasant and that politics is moving in quite a right-wing/anti-immigrant direction (the latter was also one of the reasons she moved from Budapest).

> politics is moving in quite a right-wing/anti-immigrant direction

Seems to be a global phenomenon. Is there a place where this isn't happening?

Canada and New Zealand, possibly.

Unfortunately Australia isn't in that list. :(

Our politics don't represent us as a nation, if you are from somewhere else come spend some time in our coastal cities and you will be accepted as one of us.

Only the indigenous are Australian by heritage, the rest of us are immigrants too even if some people would object to that classification through their ignorance.

Being an immigrant doesn't make you less of an Australian, we are a country of immigrants and I hope one day our politics reflect that.

I object to being called an immigrant. I don't have any known relatives outside of Australia and I consider myself only Australian.

Everybody in the world ancestors came from somewhere else at some point in time (even the indigenous Australians). Does 10 generations of ancestors living in one country make you less of a citizen than 200?

As someone who travels a lot, I really couldn't see anything I liked in Vienna. Not sure what people see in this city.

Unless you say what you were looking for then your comment is just "I don't like it", which is not helpful.

I look for food, people, bars, atmosphere.

How is the visa situation if given a remote US-based job?

I heard that Vienna has a pretty racist population.

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