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Comment by throwaway_yy2Di | Hacker News Reader

One day, there will be a Danish startup on "Who's hiring".

You might have to wait a while. Denmark has a very strong "nobody ever got fired contracting IBM" business culture. There are one or two consultancies in Copenhagen that I'm aware of that my friends work at and could recommend. Most startups there seem to be design outfits. I'm told incorporating there is hard but didn't seem so to me from the requirements I read - you just need a lot of money available at the outset just to employ anyone (that's a positive, imo).

Anyway, there's starting to be some changes there - IBM missed a big contract or two with large clients to smaller outfits. Between that shift and the quality grads coming out of DTU, there may be some tech opportunities there if anyone starts investing money that way.

I would _love_ to go work over there but I doubt I could meet the requirements and I'm not lucky enough to have an EU citizenship.

There's lots of cool start-up culture in Denmark. (Podio, Zendesk, Zyb, etc)

While the system isn't always too kind to start-ups (high tax etc) they still do exist.

I've been working as a developer in Denmark for 7 years now (currently Xamarin) and haven't had a problem finding interesting projects.

While the system isn't always too kind to start-ups (high tax etc)

Actually, apart from high personal income tax, Denmark is one of the most business-friendly countries in the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7391268

There are lots of Danish startups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7391809

I would _love_ to go work over there but I doubt I could meet the requirements and I'm not lucky enough to have an EU citizenship.

I think there are company-sponsored visas available. You should try contacting one of the Danish companies you're interested in working for. They're always hiring.

If you are looking for more established companies I would suggest LEGO [1] and Danfoss [2]. You can find many positions on their sites that could be interesting for HN crowd.

[1] http://jobs.lego.com/en-us/searchpage

[2] http://jobs.danfoss.com/jobs/

And Denmark is a Microsoft-land as far I know. So keep that in mind.

I think Microsoft does Dynamics NAV development in Denmark. NB NAV is their mid-range ERP application - nothing to do with Navigation!

And Denmark is a Microsoft-land as far I know.

For startups, no. There's as large an open source scene here as anywhere else. Ruby on Rails was started by a Dane (David Heinemeier Hansson), as was PHP, C++, and the V8 JavaScript engine used in Node.

IIRC, RedHat has a presence in Copenhagen. On the other hand, from what I understand, the government policy about open source is best summarized as "the less the better".

Not sure what you mean by that. The government is generally open to open source (http://digitaliser.dk/resource/2320552), but the two biggest providers of governmental web services don't really use open source. But why is that relevant if you want to seek employment in a Danish private company or start your own company in Denmark?

Well, it's just quite a different attitude from what you get in France, for instance, where, eg, the gendarmes use open source heavily. I'm not quite sure what you want to show with your report, by the way. That the governmental Danish IT department is considering open source as a way of saving cost? I did find this [1] though, which seems to back your position, but at the municipal level.

1: http://opensource.com/government/13/2/danish-municipalities-...

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