Ask HN: How to relocate to Europe as a software developer

Croatia just started a program where you can stay for a year (instead of the usual 90 days) as a digital nomad.<p>&gt; A DIGITAL NOMAD IS a third-country national who is employed or performs work through communication technology for a company or his own company that is not registered in the Republic of Croatia and does not perform work or provide services to employers in the Republic of Croatia.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.croatia.hr&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;travel-info&#x2F;croatia-your-new-office" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.croatia.hr&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;travel-info&#x2F;croatia-your-new-of...</a><p>If you have a remote job or freelancing, this is a good first step.<p>AFAIK there are only four countries in the world where you can stay more than three months in a situation like this:<p>1. Barbados was the first to start such a digital nomad program <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;barbadoswelcomestamp.bb&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;barbadoswelcomestamp.bb&#x2F;</a> 2. Canada immigration authorities have openly declared remotely employed doesn&#x27;t count as work so you can stay for six months without a problem 3. There&#x27;s Svalbard. Yeah you can stay indefinitely and work... if you can afford it. Not to mention it &quot;rather resembles Mordor after it has frozen over&quot;. 4. And now Croatia.<p>Read more at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;travel.stackexchange.com&#x2F;q&#x2F;45092&#x2F;4188" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;travel.stackexchange.com&#x2F;q&#x2F;45092&#x2F;4188</a>

It&#x27;s pretty easy to move to (most) European countries really. It&#x27;s nothing like what you&#x27;re hearing from people trying to move to the US.<p>Most will just let you stay to work (visa&#x2F;residence permit) with relatively little bureaucracy. As long as you have a job they won&#x27;t bother you. There&#x27;s some other requirements (qualified professional, certain income), but as a software developer you won&#x27;t have any trouble. Your employer will probably help you.<p>If you want to get a passport usually you&#x27;ll need to have found work, lived in the country for a number of years, and pass various tests for your language ability and such.<p>You will then likely also have to <i>renounce your old citizenship</i>.<p>Specifying the country you wish to move to and where you&#x27;re coming from would allow people here to give more helpful advice.

I made this move from the US to the EU. If you interview and get into a job in the EU, they&#x27;re definitely willing to help relocate.<p>I would look into Dublin, Ireland, as your foot in. There are a ton of companies looking to expand their presence in Ireland for those sweet, sweet tax breaks.

Some of it will depend on your country of origin&#x2F;citizenship as this can either make it much easier or much harder to get a visa. Some countries have bilateral agreements to enable skilled workers to move between them. You should investigate that.<p>On the job side, you&#x27;d probably want to start looking for jobs that advertise relocation assistance. The exact rules and process for getting a work permit will depend on the EU country you&#x27;re applying to work in.<p>There are often specific permits for highly skilled workers, but with no degree and 2 years experience it might be hard to make that case until you&#x27;re more experienced, unless you have a specific area of expertise you can demonstrate.<p>Good luck!

Bucharest is great nowadays if you would like to relocate to Europe. Cheap living, salaries on par with Western Europe, access to good education if you want to pursue interests further, good private healtchare, transporation.<p>Some of the companies that are currently recruiting in the area: Amazon (FirecrackerVM is built there, many Rust jobs), Bitdefender (great cybersec defense company), UiPath (the European unicorn), Oracle, HP, Accenture, IONOS, Luxoft, Ericsson, Adobe, IBM Romania, SAP, Endava, Bolt, Dell Technologies, Fitbit, Deloitte, Thales, Cegeka, Huawei etc.<p>If game development is your thing: Electronics Arts, Ubisoft and many other indie game studios<p>If banks and telco is your thing: Orange, Vodafone, DIGI, T-Mobile, ING, BCR, BRD, Deutsche Bank, Transylvanian Bank, etc.

Germany is a very easy to entry point for you as a software developer. The market is huge and there is shortage of good candidates. Polish up your linkedin profile and start applying for positions in germany. Good luck!

At least for Germany it seems fairly straight forward. You simply need to qualify for a blue card. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;service.berlin.de&#x2F;dienstleistung&#x2F;324659&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;service.berlin.de&#x2F;dienstleistung&#x2F;324659&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a><p>The target salary you need to achieve is € 44k &#x2F; year.<p>As described in other comments, once you have found a job your employer will be able to help you take care of the admin topics of getting a visa.<p>There is no need to speak German and many Berlin based tech companies have English as the official office language (at least in the engineering teams)

Depends where you are from, and where in Europe you want to move to.<p>If you are from India&#x2F;Middle East&#x2F;Africa... Be prepared for a 10x effort if you are male. If you are a female, young, good looking, will make things much much easier thou, and can be an advantage.<p>I guess you want to relocate to western Europe and not eastern.<p>You need to find a country and then find the biggest it consultancy there. That is your best option. Big multinational it firms hire alot. The only hurdle I see is the lack of degree. That is a piece of paper that would expedite things.

There are a number of ways to move to Europe, or any other country for that matter. Your exact options depend dramatically on your specific situation. Things like which passport(s) do you hold, specific skillset, etc.<p>In general, my advice to folks looking to move to another country is &quot;simply&quot; to get a job in that country with a company that will sponsor your visa.<p>Now, one thing that I noticed over the years (and the reason for the double quotes around &quot;simply&quot;) is that getting a job overseas is often times not trivial.<p>Many companies will be reluctant to even consider your application. Maybe they are afraid that you will get home-sick and leave after 6 months, maybe they do not want to deal with visa paperwork, maybe they see your hire as too expensive, maybe they are afraid of language issues... whatever the reason might be.<p>Whenever I changed continent, I have had most luck applying to companies with a large, mostly international workforce. These companies routinely hire people from all over the world and are used to the associated bureaucracy. They usually have immigration lawyers, which helps. In some cases, they might even have agreements with their host country that will make your visa paperwork much easier and much faster. In some cases there will be no need for a visa at all. Examples include universities and research institutions, large multinationals, NGOs etc.<p>You say that you do not have a degree. This might matter more in Europe than in other parts of the world but it will not make it impossible for you to find a job. I assume that you already checked out the monthly &quot;Who&#x27;s Hiring&quot; threads and identified companies sponsoring visas. That would already be a good start.<p>Hope this was somewhat useful :-)

try jobs in netherlands&#x2F;amsterdam. they don&#x27;t require dutch, most people here (&gt;90%?) speak very good english. just find a job that does visa sponsorship (a lot do). good luck.

I moved from India to Sweden last year and I was surprised with the relatively easy process.<p>I would suggest to apply at companies which hire international developers. It&#x27;s easy to filter them on AngelList and Hacker News&#x27; whoishiring thread.

I haven&#x27;t seen this talked about in the comments so thought I would mention it: depending on where you&#x27;re from and where you&#x27;re planning to go, you could try a Working Holiday Visa.<p>Not all countries are part of this program and the ones that do all have their own requirements (usually there is an age limit of &lt; 30 years but this can vary). So have a look if the country you&#x27;re from supports the program and if so which countries you could go to. The big advantage if you can get it is you get a one year visa without the need of having a job or anything before going. You can then just fly over to the country, find a place to stay and search for a job while there.<p>As others have said I would recommend Ireland. I spent 3 years working in Dublin after I graduated and it was the best time of my life! Irish people are very welcoming and you will find a job fairly easily (although your first one could be a tech support &#x2F; very junior role). Biggest issue of Dublin is the housing market is a disaster at the moment so don&#x27;t expect to get your own 2 bedrooms apartment. Although that&#x27;s mostly a Dublin issue, but that&#x27;s where you would get the most jobs in the country.<p>There are other countries too where you could find english speaking jobs (Netherlands, Germany...) but you would still probably need some basics in the local language for day-to-day life. Ireland doesn&#x27;t have that issue obviously.

We&#x27;re a fintech company based in Germany and we&#x27;ve helped a few employees move to Germany from outside EU. If their annual salary is greater than €44k the process is fairly easy. If I recall, we&#x27;ve applied first for their Germany work permit (takes 1-3 weeks in our experience) and then soon after arriving they apply for a Blue Card which allows them to work&#x2F;travel across the EU.<p>You should get in touch with some of the local recruiters, we&#x27;ve found some great candidates that way.

Not sure if this is helpful, but I&#x27;ll give you my story.<p>I graduated from my CS undergrad degree in the USA in May of 2020. One of the job offers I had was from a relatively new tech company in Norway, and the offer was for an on-site position in Oslo. They had a booth at a recruiting event at my University (in Texas, if that matters) but I applied online like everyone else. After a couple of interview rounds, the last of which was in-person in Norway (seems surreal given the state of the world now), I received a job offer from them which I ultimately ended up not taking.<p>At the time of the offer I had two previous technical internships (neither of which were at well-known companies), a solid (&gt;3.5) GPA, and a couple interesting side projects on my resume (e.g. compiler, android app game, NLP course projects). The technical interview portions were all pretty easy compared to what larger US-based tech companies will throw at you, but keep in mind that this was for an entry-level position. No Norwegian language skills were required for the postion.<p>I was offered the job as a US citizen, and though I had German citizenship (but no passport) at the time, I don&#x27;t think that factored into me getting the offer. They had other international employees at the office, including one from Brazil, so I figured having citizenship in an EU-member country didn&#x27;t matter that much. As you may know, Norway isn&#x27;t in the EU itself but they do have a lot of economic&#x2F;labor agreements with the EU.<p>Anyways, the (yearly) salary was something on the order of 590,000 kr or around 63,000 USD at the time, though the value of the Norwegian Krone has increased a good bit since I got the offer near the beginning of the corona economic downturn. As I understand that&#x27;s about the expected salary for that sort of position in Oslo, so take from that what you will.<p>I had my own reasons for taking an offer in the US over one in Europe, but hopefully some of this info was helpful.

How old are you and which country are you currently in? There are a few ways to do it; I made the move in 2012 on a Working Holiday Visa. You had to be under a certain age and be a citizen of a country that has this visa scheme agreement with the EU. The visa allows you to work in the EU country for a year. I saved up about 6 months of expenses, moved, then looked for work here. It was much easier to interview on-location and being able to start immediately than trying to get someone to hire and relocate me remotely. I ended up at a large company which, after my allowed year, helped me get a proper work and residence permit and stay in the country.

As Italian, I suggest to migrate in Netherlands. It&#x27;s a country with a huge IT sector, few bureaucracy compared to others, high salaries and low taxes (for Europe). Everyone speaks english correctly and there is very few racism in the society.

I moved to Berlin few months ago to work in a fintech company and the process was super quick and easy. It only took 2,3 weeks to finalise everything.<p>Now, I applied for a blue card, but since you don&#x27;t have a degree its best to apply for work permit.<p>The waiting time for this whole process largely depends on the waiting time in your home country for the embassy appointment. I recall in my situation - people had to wait up to a year for a work permit appointment, while for a blue card the waiting time it was only a few days!<p>In both situations blue card or work permit, you have to have an employer, since you will need documentation from their side.

1. Find a job with an employer who will sponsor your visa. 2. Buy a plane ticket.

Forgot to add, I am from Kazakhstan

Do you count the UK or just EU countries? London still has top class developer jobs going, but I assume it&#x27;s much harder to get in nowadays.

Any advice on being a software engineer and moving to a Scandinavian country, Germany, or Austria specifically? I know German and would feel comfortable learning a Scandinavian language after studying Swedish for a while. My ideal would be to work remotely and live in the countryside, but if another situation is more realistic then that&#x27;s fine too.

You might be confused but there is a high possibility that such communities have a job section as well as useful content for those who have already moved. We suggest looking through a few websites where you will definitely find vacancies for candidates from all over the world:<p>ExpatCareers.com Expat.com Expatica.com Iamexpat.nl

If you can transfer within the company, this is the easiest route by a country mile. Your company will help with the transfer, organise some of the logistics and official matters. It is still not easy sailing, but some sort of support network is available. It is how I moved from Australia to Germany.

I have the same sentiments as you, op. I am interested in migrating as well. To have a new beginning and try my best to live my life to the fullest. I have learned a lot from this thread; thank you for creating this post-op.

i feel like 90% of remote dev jobs in europe used to be from amsterdam -- this is prob 10 years ago (or more!).<p>it was so over the top it looked like a scam.<p>but i don&#x27;t think it was a scam.<p>i&#x27;m not sure what it was, or is.<p>like, there are no devs in amsterdam?<p>anyways.

Andorra is kinda easy.

Obviously right now is probably ill advised as various countries in Europe are dealing with the pandemic differently and vaccination might become a factor at some point down the road.<p>Find out which European country you want to live in, it&#x27;s a wide ensemble of laws, culture and practices and simply &quot;moving to Europe&quot; will vary a lot depending on which country you move to.<p>Language is probably on top of the list, I know in some countries just speaking English will be ok and companies won&#x27;t care, but you will want to do some research on that (i.e. I lived in Germany for a short time and I&#x27;m glad I knew enough German to get around).<p>As far as software development goes, there isn&#x27;t a shortage of companies hiring, you might even be lucky enough to find a company that is willing to sponsor your. Check your own countries rules re earning money in another country, they might want to tax you.<p>Overall I&#x27;d say you need to research:<p>- Which country do you want to go to<p>- What are their immigration requirements (not all of Europe has the same immigration rules, despite what anti EU idiots think)<p>- Daily language use<p>- How much does it cost to rent a place<p>- How much does it cost to live there (food prices vary a lot)<p>- Right now this is a terrible idea, but go to the country and stay in the city you think you want to live in and test it out, this isn&#x27;t a substitution for actually living there, but is a start to find out if you hate it or not<p>In ref to buying a passport, yes this is an option, some countries still do it, usually quite expensive.

Apply on LinkedIn, get a job. Make sure you have a photo. We don&#x27;t do the whole &#x27;no photo on cv&#x27; thing here.<p>If you want a boost, check out the Finland IT program. They pretty much want a bunch of developers and IT people to move there, and it&#x27;s an official govt. program. If you want, you can get citizenship in a couple years and become an EU citizen

It&#x27;s absurdly easy, just look for a job that qualifies for Green Card (almost any developer job is).<p>Caveat: since you are assumingly planning to immigrate from a poor country, you should remember that immigration will most certainly lower your living standard for a while or maybe forever, and certainly and forever lower your social standing.

It would be nice to narrow your search to a specific country because some EU countries are not welcoming foreigners of specific nationalities. And some others countries are saturated of foreigners (specifically from one or two countries) and there are mixins. But it changes from city to city too.<p>So even if you get a job in EU, better to check what is your budget. You don&#x27;t want to live in a neighborhood full of immigrants with their specific &quot;traditions&quot;.

I assume the easiest method is to obtain a EU passport.<p>So the followup is how to get an EU passport?<p>If I recall correctly (read it a few years ago), some EU countries, you could buy your way into a passport. Not sure if it is still true. And I remember the larger (richer?) EU countries were not happy with the countries doing that.