[pjmlp]

As Portuguese doing consultancy in Germany, the market is way better than in other European countries.

As for the software quality, it is everywhere the same when the main business is not selling software packages.

Companies just care that their use cases are covered, no matter how it looks under the hood.

[pmontra]

This. Italy here, working with Slack, GitHub, etc. But my customers don't always care about the technical details. Companies with an IT staff usually do, the others don't because they don't know anything about those problems, except some scare about cookies and GDPR.

I could write software on paper and deploy by magic, it would be ok for them. And why not, they make money selling other stuff. Then a customer I haven't been working for a very long time calls me asking if I got a copy of their production VM, even many years ago would be ok (obviously I didn't) because they got hit by ransomware years after having stopped to do backups, maybe because it was too inconvenient.

[est31]

Of course Germany is a better market than say portugal. But that doesn't mean that I'll try to check the globally competitive offers first, to which Germany doesn't seem to belong.

[_puk]

How is Portugal on the cost of living vs wage scale?

I was under the impression that the likes of Lisbon are great if you earn above average wage, and the surf is awesome.

Tech in Lisbon not comparable to Germany?

[pjmlp]

Fellow countrymen might jump in to set me straight, as I have been away for too long, so I lack proper information.

Lisbon is a great city, but expect to live in the suburbs due to the high cost of renting and enjoy about one hour commute time and salaries are still below what we used to enjoy during the first .com wave (1995 - 2002).

Yes, tech is comparable, but not everyone can live in Lisbon.

There are smaller tech hubs across Porto, Aveiro, Braga and Coimbra due to their universities, but pay is even less than in Lisbon, although you get to enjoy better quality life and might afford to live on the city center.

But expect to do lots of overtime without any kind of reward beyond a "thank you", while in Germany those kind of situations are regulated, and in when it happens you have the support to complain about them. If you want to actually take that route that is another matter.

Naturally there are a few unicorns that are great places to work and do reward the extra mile, but they are the exception, not the rule.