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Programming Jobs Abroad For a US Citizen?
An anonymous reader writes "I am a American citizen with a masters in Computer Science from a 3rd tier college and 4 years of work experience under my belt. I would like to work somewhere abroad in Europe for a couple years before I get too settled in life but have no clue where to start. I only speak English but would love to learn a second language. What sort of opportunities are there for American citizens to work abroad? What countries offer the best opportunity to balance a challenging work environment with enough vacation to explore the rest of Europe in my free time? Any hassles I should know about?"
I live in Canada, but I'm being sponsored to work in the US, so I will more than likely be working on the US side in the next month or 2.
However, if you wish to work in Canada or the UK, you can try these job boards.
http://www.jobshark.ca/caeng/index.cfm
http://www.jobserve.com/
Now as for balancing pleasure with business, gee, I could always make a joke about working in a country where the "siesta" is mandatory :P but the truth is, I don't know. All I know is that in Canada, you could always challenge yourself to learn French. For me, being bilingual it obviously works well. But the truth is, if you had to learn a new language, I would suspect the following languages would be beneficial: spanish, mandarin, japanese, russian, german.
Actually most countries, even the strictest on immigration, have work visa programs specifically for skilled positions that are difficult to fill locally. In Switzerland, for example (a notoriously tough place to get the right to stay permanently), you can get a Permis-B to work for 18 months with very little hassle at all, with the sponsorship of your employer, as long as you have skills. MS in Computer Science from a US University makes this a perfectly simple matter of paperwork and about $3000 in legal expenses (that the company will pay).
Ah, no. Most professional societies rank departments according to various productivity indicators, including papers published, journal quality for those papers, PhDs/Masters granted, external funding and a few others here and there. Using these rankings, tiers are established. Law schools, med schools, CS departments, Math departments, chem, physics and on and on. And it is indeed official in the sense the it is agreed upon by the professional society of a given discipline and hence agreed upon by the folks in the profession.
US News and World report started the bullshit a long time ago. There used to be 4 of them, now they skip the second one or something. Someone else in the replies here linked the full details.
Basically:
If you've heard of the school (in an acedemic sense, not fucking sports), it's probably first tier.
If you haven't heard of it, it's probably third tier (second gets skipped, wtf?).
If you've heard of it from a TV ad or spam e-mail, it's probably fourth tier.
There is no official clear-cut guidline other than their annual rankings. It's overhyped bullshit that it likely making US News a ton of money.
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Continuing the outside-Europe-theme, Australia and New Zealand could be worth considering. New Zealand has the lowest unemployment in the OECD and is there's plenty of demand for IT people. In Australia the demand is even greater. Tax is roughly on a par with the UK (maybe slightly better in Australia, slightly worse in NZ).
You could also try asking US firms - particularly in the finance sector big US financials will tend to have EMEA (London, Paris, Frankfurt, etc) and APAC (Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland - plus Tokyo, Singapore, etc) offices, with significant regional IT needs. Speak to someone locally about work globally, and you'll have good contacts when/if you return to the US.
This is where the serious fun begins.
Anyway, whichever country you choose, I wish you a great time!
:-).
ps. for anyone that goes to Holland for a longer time, you might want to read The Undutchables to prevent any culture shock
This may not be a bad idea actually. Salaries in India can actually be pretty high, up to 2/3rds of what US workers are making. India is not the bargain it once was for outsourcing. If you can find a good job there in a specific area of technical expertise or in a leadership role for a US organization you can do well. And in India, my understanding is that tech workers speak English on the job as it is considered the language of business.
It's also a pretty foreigner-friendly environment so the transition when moving is very easy to handle.
It's easy to practice Dutch. Just ride your bicycle into the countryside and get lost. I guarantee that the person of whom you ask directions will not speak English. Or French. Or German. Not only that, although they will understand your Dutch, you won't be able to understand the response because it will be in some non-standard dialect. :)
Come to India... Urban India speaks English with varying levels of competence. and being a white person will draw excellent salaries as well (I'm serious). Though it will not be in the 100K range. But then cost of living is much cheaper in most parts...
I guess I can shed some light on the situation in Switzerland.
There are four spoken languages here: German, Italian, French and Romanic. Typically, reasonably large companies in Switzerland have offices in at least two language areas, typically German and French or German and Italian. While the Swiss have their own version of German (which Germans don't understand when they first hear it), they will usually use the official version when talking to non-Swiss. So you can easily learn German, French and Italian in Switzerland.
All working-age Swiss speak English. There are some older people who may never have learned English, but you can easily get by even if you only know English.
I have a few American friends who live and work in Switzerland (Google has an office here, so there's tons of American Google programmers over here :-), and they seem to love it, so I guess I would recommend Switzerland. Also, we're always hiring good programmers :-)
When looking for programming jobs, I would start out in Zurich; there's a lot of software companies in Zurich.
I think admin.ch should have information on how to apply for jobs and such.
:D
I wish I hadn't posted so I could mod this up :)
I think the Dutch are very excited to speak English, but you'll only get that at work. The moment you go to the store, the lady behind the deli counter won't speak a nit of English - possibly purely stubborn, I am sure they know English, they just don't want to think in it (let's be honest, meat and cheese in other languages is not something you'd commit to memory even if you worked in it). The other problem is that Dutch companies (unlike German or French companies) won't pay you to go learn Dutch. They're happy with your English. A lot of German companies will sign you up to a conversation-level German language course, before they put you in for anything else like a CCNA or MCSE whatever.
You pick it up eventually, and can get around, to the point that you are at the same risk of getting some kind of throat cancer practising your words.. I've heard actually the best way is to have a kid, and send them to school. They come back speaking Dutch, and you HAVE to learn it..
I think there is a definite toss-up though between learning a marginal, single-country language (Finnish, Swedish) for that country, and learning a more generic and "mainstream" one (French, German, etc.). You can get around France, Switzerland, Belgium and most of the Netherlands with French. Same with German, and you can add Austria to it too. If the intent is to travel around Europe, knowing Norwegian is not going to get you very far outside of Norway..
Bush went to Yale.
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa
I don't think there's any uniformity whatsoever regarding toilets around Europe, so YMMV.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Mod parent up. The good research schools may be loaded with brilliant professors but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching, or that they even care about teaching.
I agree that WWII was general not a model case of avoiding noncombatant casualties, but I will point out a few facts:
1. When the USAAC and RAF firebombed Dresden, they caused more casualties than in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
2. The Japanese used WMDs (as currently defined as Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical weapons) first; estimates of casualties from their attacks on Chinese cities using plague are in the 50k to 100k range.
3. The U.S. previously avoided using WMD on Iwo Jima, which it was not necessary to cancel (the Navy's plans to gas it and bypass were vetoed by the President).
4. Invading Japan would've made Iraq (and Iran) look like a picnic; estimated U.S. casualties to establish an initial beachhead on the Home Islands were in excess of a quarter million; Japanese civilian and military casualty figures were estimated at several times higher. The persistent effects of nuclear weapons were not well understood for decades after - the U.S. was still doing "training exercises" with troops in close proximity to nuclear weapons into the 1960s.
So yes, the U.S. is only nation to use nuclear weapons in combat, but the use in WWII is still "permissible" under current U.S. and international (including French) WMD policy (which considers all NBC weapons to be equal, as we "official" don't have any of those).
Just my $0.02.
P.S.: Yes, I'm going to vote for Obama.