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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

Well, make it happen. University is one option:

http://www.studyinnorway.no/Tuition-Scholarships

I say this not to be glib, but as someone who yearned to move abroad and found out that it wasn't as hard as I thought.

This. Brazilian here, lived in Californa for a year, and could have stayed longer with relative ease at the time. There's really NOTHING stopping you from living somewhere else if you really wanted.

Well, apart from paperwork, study of the country/state/city you want to go to. If that's too boring and you want the "no questions asked, come work here" treatment, I guess there is something stopping you after all.

"However, you should take into consideration that living expenses in Norway are higher than in many other countries."

I don't have a job right now, no savings, 29 years old, and paperwork bore me. There are dozens of those "programs", and I don't want to spend one entire week sorting it out to discover I can't afford to just live over there.

I want to go there no question asked, to work, not to study.

Wait, you're French? As in, you're an EU citizen??? Go there. Find a hackerspace. Meet people. Show off your skills. You should be OK. If not, you can go back to France. I would have killed to have your ability to just go anywhere in the EU a few years ago; even now I'm ecstatic just being able to work in Ireland.

Sometimes life involves tasks that are very slightly unpleasant, like paperwork. You might find that learning a tolerance for this minimal degree of inconvenience will yield benefits down the road.

> go there

I don't have money to throw away at a round trip to Norway, not to mention a place to stay for 1 week or two. What do you mean "show off your skills" ? I'm not an entertainer... I have no skills in PR and selling myself.

> hackerspace

Is a hackerspace going to get me a job ?

> Sometimes life involves tasks that are very slightly unpleasant, like paperwork.

The task of getting a job in norway is going to be paved with a lot of obstacles. I'm ready to move out, go there and do interviews, but if nobody can promise me to hire me before I actually have a place to stay, I won't move there to not find a job and come back with debt.

How do I really promote my project of seeking work in norway all by myself, while I live in france ? I already speak english, so that's a plus...

note: I have no job experience.

Well, your current approach is "give up". I suggest a different tack. It would be easy to say you're just trolling but I suspect you're possibly just depressed. Going to a hackerspace and meeting people in the industry and showing you have a genuine interest in the field quite often WILL get you a job, actually, or even better it will give you something to work on and make your own business, if you care about it. I wish I had your citizenship; I'd love to start my own business (brewery, probably) but my current visa forbids it.

Nobody is going to promise you a job in Norway. You have to go make it effing happen. I don't mean to be vulgar, but to express that if you want it badly, if it damn near hurts not to have it, you'll make it happen. At this point you don't seem to know what you want. Even if you have no job experience, you could at least have project experience. Show off what you've done with Arduino, or open source, or painting, or skateboarding, or radio, or whatever. (This is a tech focused forum but hey, skills and drive come in many shapes)

Really, you want to go live and work legally on a different nation, but you don't want to spend some days on paperwork, you just want someone to call you and say 'you're brilliant! Come over we got everything sorted out!' I hope you really are brilliant. Hmmm... since this is HN and I've seen this before, let me ask: did you win the Putnam?

> you just want someone to call you and say 'you're brilliant! Come over we got everything sorted out!'

Where did you read I said that ? getting hired doesn't mean I'm a genius. I means they need me and are ready to hire me and maybe help me move there. stop with the misconceptions, I'm not narcissistic. I'm just saying I don't have savings, so I can't put myself in debt and risk going there and not getting a job.

As you can imagine, "we want to let anyone from anywhere who can't be bothered to do a bit of paperwork come here and work, no questions asked" is not a policy that resonates with voters.

should I care about voters ? I don't want to go there for a vacation, if there are job offers which are not filled, maybe they might want to get people from other countries.

Yes, because voters determine immigration policy by endorsing those politicians with whom they agree.

Try Stockholm, it has a huge tech sector and you can go there to work as an EU citizen, no questions asked. You can't afford to live in stockholm either without a job of course, but programmers get jobs quite easily if they speak English, and salaries are decent.

Actually, I think it's just as easy to get into Norway as an EU citizen because Norway is in the EEC. It's confusing, I know, but the freedom of movement thing is applicable here as well.

I'd think so too, but not sure about exact terms and amounts of paperwork. Oslo has higher rents and prices but also higher wages and lower taxes. I think he size of the tech/programming job market is probably quite a bit larger in Stockholm though. So if the advice is for developers only, I'd recommend Stockholm over Oslo. For many other jobs it would be the other way around.

How much is 'decent'? And how much is rent?

As everywhere salaries vary wildly (as they should), but an uneducated "scriptkid" without experience probably makes EUR2500/mo, a 5yr exp collage educated developer makes EUR3500-5500 and top devs of course make much more than that in some industries. It all depends. "Rent" is pretty much unheard of since getting an apartment to rent in central stockholm is impossible due to rent control, so if you move to stockholm to work in tech you most likely sublet someone's apartment at EUR750-2000/mo depending on size and location. A single bedroom apt in central Stockholm is ~1000.

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