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Comment by kepponen | Hacker News Reader

Current Oulu resident here, working in the IT sector as well. Less than ten years ago, atmosphere was quite pessimistic when Nokia was laying off lot of people, which also heavily affected also multiple sub-contractor companies. However, everything has gone lot better than anyone expected and currently there are more IT sector employees in Oulu than in the golden ages of Nokia.

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In general, do you need to speak Finnish to work in Oulu?

Pretty much yes. While you can find tech companies that hire exclusively English speakers A LOT of companies require fluent Finnish, even when the internal language is Finnish.

Finland is still in many ways a very conservative society.

well there goes a dream, Finnish is also ridiculously hard to learn, coming from English.

If you're a developer/coder/sysadmin you can find companies that will hire you speaking only English. This is very common, though much more so in Helsinki.

In everyday life speaking Finnish will be beneficial, for obvious reasons. I've been here a few years now, having moved from Scotland. Using English I've been able to get my brain scanned, buy a couple of flats, deal with daycare (I became a parent after moving here), and most bureaucracy.

Finnish is indeed hard to learn, but even getting the basics down will make your life easier and better.

Almost everyone in Finland speaks either good or fluent English. Movies and TV shows aren't dubbed apart from some animated content, usually for kids. Domestic media can only create so much content for a population of 5 million, so the population is constantly subjected to English language media.

There's also regions along the coast where a sizable portion, or even the majority of people, are Swedish speaking[1] (and bilingual to various degrees). Swedish is an official language, and if you want to be a pain in the ass to the 95% of the population that doesn't speak Swedish apart from the mandatory school courses, you are entitled by law to get service in Swedish.

Working only in English is obviously harder, but if you want to live here, don't let that stop you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish-speaking_Finn

I don't think that's true, at least for Helsinki. Plenty of companies here who hire non-Finnish speakers. I think there's half a dozen Indians in the office where I'm working at right now. Not an issue. I think country-side can be conservative, yes, but Finland is quite progressive in many respects. In immigration there are some heated opinions but I think that's true for many countries.

Let’s be real 30 seconds, while it’s possible to live in a foreign country without speaking the language, it’s inconvenient to do basic daily activity (ordering at a restaurant, opening a bank account, posting a letter, etc.) when knowing jack-shit about the local language. It’s also extremely hard to form a social circle.

I speak from experience. I’ve lived in a central Europe country where I cannot speak anything and it was annoying outside work; I felt like an idiot most of the time. Now I’m living in a country I can speak the language and I can interact with people, do complex things alone (moving home), and it’s way more nice to live like that.

> while it’s possible to live in a foreign country without speaking the language, it’s inconvenient to do basic daily activity

I think there are a few exceptions in Europe, e.g The Netherlands.

Helsinki, Finland is another such exception.

this depends on your personality, and how you make friends. i lived a year in latvia, and i had no trouble despite speaking neither latvian, nor russian. i made friends through the local linux community and other communities i was part of. i also have no problems in china. yes, some things are more difficult. eg. calling a plumber needs the help of a friend who speaks the local language. but for every day stuff, i was actually surprised how easy it is.

There's a fair bit of truth in that, but even people who "speak no Finnish" soon learn the names of foods, how to ask for coffee/beer, and their numbers.

There's just a big jump from simple things that will get you by to actual fluency.

Bummer - especially for folks with ability to work in finland but who only speak english. Good to know though. Fluent finish is not easy!

We're building a tech recruitment platform at Toughbyte and I'm based in Finland, where we've filled around a hundred developer positions so far.

In my experience Finnish is not required for jobs at 95%+ of product companies, only consultancies and even there there are exceptions.

You can check out our current positions in Finland here: https://www.toughbyte.com/developers#positions - perhaps there's something you might be interested in and if not, you can can also leave your email via the Get in touch button and we'll get back to you the moment there is.

If you are working in IT other technology sector, you don't have to speak Finnish, but it is definetely beneficial to have some skills in local language. In normal life there might be situations where Finnish is necessary even though most Finns speak English quite well, at least younger generations.

I am an Oulu resident.

It is very, VERY common in both IT and education sectors to hire people who speak no Finnish.

I've personally hired half-a-dozen English-speakers who do not speak any Finnish.

Our company (mobile gaming) consists of ~10% non-Finnish speakers, all of whom are very happy here. Almost ALL Finns (incl. our cleaning lady) speak good English.

My previous company (hardware) had roughly ~10% of non-Finnish speakers as well.

Both universities here have hundreds of non-Finnish speakers. The game education program in Oulu University of Applied Sciences (Oulu GameLAB) is being run by (a super smart) Romanian who does not speak a word of Finnish.

The local Nokia office has hundreds of people from abroad.

There's an active Chinese community of couple of hundred people, most of whom do not speak Finnish.

I think the current Nokia phones are one of the best on the market. Clean Android distribution, solid hardware. Maybe not as successful as before, but certainly competitive at least.

Current "Nokia" phones are made by different company, HMD Global.

Maybe, they are still pretty good.

I believe this new company is mostly made up of Nokia's mobile phone division that was bought back from Microsoft. They're still based in Finland as well, but I'm not sure how the various businesses are arranged.

what would you credit for this better than expected outcome?

Not living Oulu but living Finland. Oulu is pretty remote even in Finland's standards so people don't move out so easily. That created a situation where startups had suddenly lots of highly skilled engineers to hire cheaply and that created a boom in the town.

There are various reasons in my opinion. People, who were laid off from Nokia, were highly educated and many of them were well-respected in their fields so it is quite easy to lure some new companies to Oulu (Mediatek, Nordic Semiconductor etc.) In addition, people were also used to make business internationally so it was lot easier to start new companies with that kind of experience.

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