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Comment by lacampbell | Hacker News Reader

Are the all the Pros and Cons here coming from the perspective of living and working in Russia? I thought eg salaries there were very low.

- IT: it is just my opinion, but I would say that average IT specialist in NZ doesn't know much. I see a lot of IT people here who, for example, don't know how to use Git. Who never heard about Rust. Who never heard about LISP. Who have 8 years of Java experience, but don't know basic Java stuff. And so on. Honestly, this is quite disappointing

As a New Zealander, I found this quite jarring when I got out into industry as well. I just assumed it was because I was an outlier though. I thought it's probably fairly unusual for programmers in general to spend a lot of time on hacker news or technical IRC channels or trying out different programming languages. Again, where is this different? I'd love to go.

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> I thought eg salaries there were very low.

It depends. I'm talking more about salary/rent ratio. In Russia I was spending about 30% of my salary for rent (and apartment was big and new and nice). Here I spend about 40%. And apartment is tiny and bad (in comparison). Then, here I pay much more for broadband ($95, and it is much slower), more for a phone. And fuel is muuuch more expensive here.

> Again, where is this different? I'd love to go.

Back in Russia, in all companies I've worked at (not top-tier companies) the team was great: they knew a lot of stuff, we were discussing JVM internals during lunch breaks, talked about new things in IT etc. I miss that.

I'm assuming that what you save in NZ is higher than what you save in Russia though - after feeding, clothing, housing and entertaining yourself.

That's really interesting. The only thing I really know that came out of Russia is Nginx, I didn't know that in general Russia had such a tech scene. Wonder if that's because English language proficiency isn't high.

The only thing I really know that came out of Russia is Nginx

Russian techies are among the best in the world, and the stuff they work on would surprise you. Companies like Luxoft write in-flight software for Boeing. Outsourcing to Russia and Eastern Europe is massive. If you have a seriously tough problem, get a Russian to fix it. Source: My late wife was Russian, and a software developer. Have worked almost exclusively with Russian developers for the past years. They do amazing stuff, with a fantastic attitude.

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