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Comment by cfup | Hacker News Reader

Lisbon is attractive for companies but not so much for talents. The average salary in Lisbon is much lower, comparing to tech salaries in the US, UK, or Singapore.

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True... but cost of living is considerably lower.

When I lived there, my costs were basically a 900€ for a rental 120m2 apartment + 300€ for groceries and eating out. Since the start of the pandemic I moved to my own place and now pay 400€ in mortgage.

The biggest challenge I see is the VC sector in continental Europe. While in the US, I see seed rounds of 0.5-1.5 Millions, the last 2 seed deals I've seen in Lisbon were of mere 50K€. A trifle.

Moving from London to Lisbon was surprising. Rental costs were cheaper, but not as much as I expected.

The main problem I found was the housing stock is in pretty terrible shape. Flats have basically no insulation and often have bad problems with damp. No insulation means the flats are freezing in winter and you can hear the neighbors do everything.

While eating out is definitely significantly cheaper, many things are (much) more expensive than in London. Supermarkets, home internet, cell service (brutally expensive), utilities (I was paying 10x for utilities in winter compared to London, because of the complete lack of insulation - and Portugal has some of the highest electricity rates in Europe).

Overall I would not suggest moving to Lisbon if you are expecting an overall significantly lower cost of living than London. There are lots of other benefits though :).

I am Portuguese and line in London and I can tell you that you can find quote terrible housing in London too. When I am looking at does like Zoopla, Rightmove... I need to filter out 90% of the results. From lack of basic appliances, to almost no windows, miniscule studios, badly maintained Victoria era houses, lack of modern buildings... You just need to pay more to get what you want, don't expect good quality when you go for the low end of the market.

I agree thermal isolation is a bigger issue in Portugal though. Because really cold days are not that common, old constructions don't have proper isolation and rely on inneficient heating. In the UK however you have the opposite problem where almost no apartment is ready for warm days. A flat with air conditioning is a rarity. Last summer a friend of mine moved with his kids to a hotel for a week during the heat wave just because of this.

Yes I definitely agree with you - obviously terrible housing everywhere. London now has many built to rent firms though with purpose built brand new fairly high spec buildings, so it's easy to go to them rather than trawl through loads of Zoopla listings. Me and my friend who moved to Lisbon recently found it very different. I have up and got a fairly average apartment, my friends apartment is a lot nicer but he's paying more and did nearly 30 viewings. It still has problems with noise insulation and is extremely cold in winter despite being virtually brand new refurbished.

I do agree with you on air conditioning in the UK though, for sure.

> and you can hear the neighbors do everything.

I'm in a rental for this month, and I just woke up to this - noise of a baby playing with balls on the floor, above my bedroom.

I am surprised this is still a problem in the 21st century.

By the time you know this is the case in your flat, it's too late to do anything about it. Other than wait a year, then move into another flat which may have the same problem.

Market forces don't work for hidden features like this, so why would it ever change?

This is why people want to live in detached houses - after years of psychological torture from living in cheaply built or badly designed flats.

Coming from the UK and having had mold/damp in every place I've rented, I was surprised to see that were actually somewhere in the middle when comparing self-reported damp with other countries in Europe (pdf):

https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/97007/3...

Would you say that the places are close in overall monthly expenses then? I would surprised to read how that those utilities are that much more expensive. I've been to Lisbon in December and remember it being quite mild and warm. Does the damp cold set in later then? I would love to hear what the other benefits you enjoy about living there.

Yeah. The difference is you are going to be living in central Lisbon vs zone 2-3 London for roughly the same price. Obviously you are going to save a fortune going from prime central london to Lisbon, but that's the same anywhere.

The cold is really the buildings fault. It's hard to explain it you are used to northern European construction. It seems to be colder inside than out! It's quite a common and well talked about problem.

What is good: weather, people, interesting places to visit 30min-1hr away, food, etc. What you'd expect really.

> There are lots of other benefits though :)

Ok, go ahead with them?

Without being an expert of Portugal, I would venture: food, weather, and people’s attitudes to life.

Food is great. Weather is better than UK but perhaps not as much as you'd think especially in coastal areas and winter.

This CoL thing is a cool HR sales tactic, but breaks down quite fast when looking at saving rates and long term equity.

The thing is, by having a mortgage, you are effectively building equity in a good you can resell later (a house).

Cheap house means you can sell it for cheap and retire where it's cheap. Meanwhile, a property in a hot market where the mortgage is still the same fraction of your income can be resold for much more. Gives you freedom to retire where you want.

Even without buying, you can spend a higher % of your income on rent and still end up saving more in absolute numbers; and the absolute number is what eventually matters unless you're dead set on picking a place and never moving again.

Yup.

If your rent doubles from $1,000 to $2,000, but your salary doubled from $75,000 to $150,000, you incurred $12,000 more in expenses for $50,000 more in after tax income.

But you have to live in a specific place, and what you get for your $2000 is considered cramp squalor by the rest of the country.

Sure, but if you're making $50,000 more post-tax, you could always bump it up to a nicer place and still be ahead.

Good to consider. But also worth understanding the role that paying a bank interest has in defusing the "rent money is dead money" myth. Many property markets around the world are in a bubble, again, and inversely have competitive rentals, especially after the pandemic. Owning a home, with a mortgage, incurs often far more impact from the interest to the bank than if one simply rented. Let alone maintenance, rates, etc, let alone the illiquidity. I'd rather not have a house in Lisbon as a non-national when the nation hits another crisis.

Not to challenge the great point you make about CoL, but there's so much cultural distortion around home ownership that it's almost a parody of fundamental economics.

> Many property markets around the world are in a bubble

it's only a bubble if it pops.

> there's so much cultural distortion around home ownership that it's almost a parody of fundamental economic

Again, it's only a distortion if it doesn't persist for so long to become a persistent ground truth.

A house is not a house is not a house because location, location, location. You can put the same exact dwelling structure in two different places and they can have two very different values because everything around the house matters too and if those things persist, they become as real as the house.

Ah so you expect housing prices to continue to grow above income forever? Maybe in the future a single house can cost more than the entire country's GDP or something like that right? House prices only go up!

It's not impossible. If you live off your income then you've already been excluded from purchasing a house. This is what happens when wealth inequality becomes very extreme.

In the wider view, where most of the population aren't FAANG engineers, it does make sense though, as most of the younger population can't afford a mortgage at all in a 'hot market', so the higher CoL is just lost.

There's also nothing stopping you investing your excess income in other areas outside property.

This is the hot insight people forget to discuss, when it comes to numbers.

HR hates it lul

Only really matters if your only concern is wealth. Some of us want to actually enjoy our lives; not just our retirements.

> Only really matters if your only concern is wealth

I don't get this knee-jerk reaction where, if you discuss money, then it immediately must be the only thing you care about. Why can't it just be one element of the equation, along with other usual stuff like weather, food, etc?

That’s exactly what I’m saying.

We should assume that most of the people that live in Portugal are not stupid or victims. They’re optimizing for something they prefer.

The GP is the one that reduced the choice of living in Portugal to wealth, not me.

A fundamental truth in our society is that wealth buys you options. Options give you more ways to enjoy life.

You only need options if you don't know what you want!

I think what you want changes with age, circumstance and experiences. It's short sighted to be rigid in your thinking or "knowing what you want" as any change can destabilize you.

The only constant is change, if you can adapt to anything, you're way better prepared than someone who know what they want today and can only have that.

You’re missing my point entirely. I know having wealth is better than not having wealth. Please read my original reply.

Choosing to optimize for wealth is fine; but foisting that choice on everyone over everything else is silly.

It's not a binary choice, you don't have to just care about wealth and optimize for it while ignoring everything else.

I read your original reply and other replies and I think you're the one conflating the point. Many people prioritize wealth but still enjoy life...like myself. I don't regret anything and am very happy day to day.

Ugh ok. and you shouldn’t judge those that choose less wealth for some other optimization? You’re the one that called me short sighted and rigid. Perhaps people who don’t optimize for wealth simply don’t care?

I’m not sure how much further I can discuss this? If you’re happy optimizing for wealth, good for you. I’m not sure how that makes anyone short sighted and rigid? Short sighted and rigid for not choosing your optimization? Doesn’t that make you short sighted and rigid? Whatever, do your thing- but please don’t think the people of x country are stupid or whatever because they don’t choose what you do. Come on.

For every extra dollar you make you can save 50 more cent and spend 50 more cent..

Mortgages are a sales tactic

You can make a mathematical transformation to compare Renting with Owning.

O - R + R vs R + X

Own - Rent our your place + Rent somewhere else vs Renting and investing your principal some other way. So reducing you get:

O - R vs X

So owning and renting out a house vs all other investment opportunities, such as Bitcoin. Literally if you rented your house in the last two months and invested the principal into altcoins, you could then own 5 houses!

I do wonder if the VC sector in Europe (or at least Western Europe and the Nordics) will heat up a lot, I keep seeing more US VCs looking at deals there because the valuations aren't insane and I'd guess they'd push up the prices. That said, not sure it'll trickle down to employees, I noticed when working in tech in Berlin that companies seemed much less generous with equity to employees (and lower salaries)

European companies are run like shit. Europeans don't understand what good customer service is. This I've come to realise is what is holding Europe back. Let me illustrate.

I signed my wife up with Swapfiets. You rent a bike by the month with them. Basically you fill in a form online, enter your payments card details and they deliver a bike. You then get billed on a monthly subscription until you cancel. All good. Great service until.... we missed a payment because I forgot to move money onto the card in time. No worries I'll just move it across and let them try again.... except... no they don't try again they send emails instead. They sent 4 emails however due to some factors we never paid the bill manually (working full-time at home with a baby and a toddler during a pandemic some less important stuff can slip) so they sent it to the debt collection agency. A few days prior to them sending it to the debt collectors the next months payment became due and was successfully collected. Now if I owe a company x amount of money and then the next month y amount I expect my balance to be x + y and once I pay an amount I expect it to be deducted from the balance and the overdue payment date to be reset. In this case I would expect my due balance to be y. Not with swapfiets, my due balance was x. I raised this with them and they basically told me the system doesn't work like that (no acknowledgement that it should work like that and this is a mistake on their part), they send email reminders and basically fuck you. This sums up European attitudes and companies perfectly. To recap they made the following mistakes:

1: Their UX is broken in that every other subscription I use will try to take payment again before sending a reminder.

2: Their app is not coded according to industry standard billing processes.

3: They refuse to acknowledge any accountability on their side and basically tell me to do one.

This is European startups in a nutshell. We suck at customer service and it shows.

So basically all of the salary with almost nothing left, given that average companies in Portugal pay between 1000 and 1500 for the best jobs.

Which is why Lisbon is so appealing to digital nomads. Your salary will likely by much higher than that.

As Portuguese and veteran of the first .com wave, I highly doubt it.

Then you will end up getting a small flat in Sintra, Vila-Franca, Seixal, Cacias, or whatever up to 30 - 60 km from Lisbon and enjoy 1 h commute every single day, both ways.

That's the average

But you can actually get paid more than that in IT positions, no problem (after-tax salary)

I left Portugal during the start of the crisis in 2003, was earning 2000 after taxes, which was a dream job back then.

Nowadays the only people I am aware are still getting as much, are senior of my age and older, friends that are self employed, or those that only get half of the salary in official ways (yes undeclared payments are still daily business).

So yeah, while being away for 18 years might not make me have a daily picture, it is not as I don't come regularly back home.

Ah interesting, I had never suspected you were more directly connected to the country.

But I'm not disagreeing with you, the salary ceiling is low, I was just noting that it wasn't as low as 1k/1.5k (yeah, 2k/2.5k is more like it, the taxes don't help neither)

True... but cost of living is considerably lower.

While companies continue to base offers they make on your current salary (if you're silly enough to disclose it), accepting a lower salary on the basis of a lower cost of living is going to lower all your future salaries.

While in the US, I see seed rounds of 0.5-1.5 Millions, the last 2 seed deals I've seen in Lisbon were of mere 50K€

Seed rounds don't exist in the US any more. The first raise is effectively a Series A, because startups are expected to bootstrap to revenue now.

I would be curious to hear what type of housing you can find in 400€ range. Do you live in Lisbon proper?

Seems that you can buy flats/apartments for quite cheap. It seems to start in the five digits for the less attractive things, but nicer apartments can be gotten for few hundred grand... Also depends on the duration of the mortgage of course.

Which websites are the best to search? Anything in English?

if you save 3000gbp in London, you'll save 500eur in Lisbon.

Compare that, and living costs don't matter that much.

In 10 years the difference is huge

At the end of it you also would have 10 years of having lived in London vs 10 years of having lived in Lisbon, for some the financial tradeoff may be worthwhile.

I'm really interested in finding full-stack dev talent in Portugal, but not sure where to look. I've tried LinkedIn, Indeed, etc. but /shrug. Any ideas?

We need to make a few hires, but sourcing talent is either more time consuming or more expensive (head hunters) than it feels like it should be.

LinkedIn should work. There's also LandingJobs, a Portuguese hiring website specifically for devs.

Don't use job postings in linkedin. Just search and approach people yourself. I think for 600 a month you can promote your account to recruiter lite. You can approach as many people you like. Be aware of the fact that sourcing is almost a fulltime job. Compare that to a 15% fee most recruiters can be negotiated to.

super expensive!

I am not sure how to help but from my own experience most of the Portuguese devs I know got tired of working low-salaries on mostly near-shore outsourcing teams and moved to London, Berlin, Geneve, Zurich, Amsterdam (more or less in that order).

You could try reaching out to devs in those cities, I am sure many would be more than willing to move back home for the right price.

Actually I don't mind at all if they move to Berlin. In fact I'm thinking to set up an office there because that's where a lot of talent in the EU ends up anyways (as you know).

P.S. I don't think them moving to London is such a big risk anymore))

I’ve had some great success finding affordable, senior Rails developers in Portugal on Upwork

itjobs.pt

Not one job has a salary on it. Why do they think people work? What a waste of everyone's time.

unfortunately that's pretty much the norm in job ads in portugal, you never really know until you get to the interview :(

Fantastic, thank you! I've registered and will post there for sure.

Depends on your priorities. One of the friendliest countries in the EU, great food, rich history. If you like a slower pace of living it seems like a good choice.

Yes, but the COL is dramatically lower (and lower than other major city centers in Europe), its comparatively low crime, and the quality of life for the price is quite competitive.

I'd move out there in a heartbeat...although it does help that I have some passable Portuguese comprehension :)

Agree, if I ever become fully remote and leave the UK I'd definitely consider Portugal, the quality of food, beauty of the cities & countryside, people are all great, costs are ultimately incredibly low for living in a European capital, and the public transport is pretty good if you're not walkable to wherever you're going already.

Only if your talent is purely looking at comp and nothing else.

What does early retirement look like in Lisbon? Do they pay you to not work after you decide you are done?

Only if you meet the conditions of years working in general, or age, and it is somehow dependent on the sector.

Naturally public sector has the most attractive numbers for years working/minimum age.

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