| I live here. Have for 5 years, and my latest startup will keep me here for a good number more... success permitting! Singapore has excellent food, weather and is incredibly safe & clean. You can eat $4 noodles or $400 dollar steak. Booze is too expensive. Public transport is cheap, comfortable and mostly efficient (until a couple of recent train breakdowns). It's also a great base for traveling Asia. From a startup perspective, a huge amount of emphasis (read: money) is currently being applied to regional entrepreneurs to base themselves in Singapore's low-tax, straightforward business environment. Engineers have been slightly underpaid historically, but things are beginning to improve. Coupled with the low tax rate though... the main problem is expensive rental accommodation. The government certainly is guilty of heavy-handed-ness in a variety of situations but in general it appears to be from a sense of egocentric paternalism ('we know best what is good for you') rather than cynical exploitation. They currently have some issues in terms of redistributing the wealth fairly to locals. The perception is that competition for jobs amongst the lower middle class is hampered by economic migration from poorer countries in the region. Happy to talk more... but I've gone on enough already. |
From your reply, I understand that you are running a startup in Singapore? I am particularly interested in why you find Singapore good in that regard. Apart from the low taxes, my experience of Singapore would indicate to me that it is a very difficult place for a technology startup for the following reasons (if you could refute these I would be most interested).
1. The large and ongoing diaspora of educated, intelligent engineers who find the constant censorship and nonsensical propaganda distasteful and leave for free-er pastures. Making it difficult to hire and keep technical people locally.
2. The abysmal state of internet services. I found internet to be slow, unavailable, expensive, monitored and censored.
3. Despite the low taxes, the cost of living is very high. The Lee family (through Temasek and the Government) control the supply and demand for housing and use that leverage to apply a 'rental tax' on guest workers which is a way of distributing wealth from the middle class 'migrant' workers to the local population (who receive preferential terms for loans and purchase price of Government housing. There is typically a 300 bps spread between the loan and the rental yield). Food and transport is also expensive.
4. Related to 1 & 2, the general antithetic feeling towards free speech.
5. The city is boring as hell. It has some good museums, and a couple of interesting nightspots, but generally not much goes on. Anyone doing anything interesting risks fining, caning, jailing or all three. For technical people this is a big downside.
Apart from those, there are some things I do agree with you on. 1. The city is very safe (except for Dengue fever), and very clean, something that appeals to technical people.
2. The weather is excellent if you like 28 deg Celsius @ 85% humidity 300 days of the year. (I don't, but SGP does have A/C almost everywhere.)
3. It IS a great base for travelling in SE Asia. For North Asia, I think HK is better.
And some, not so much. 1. The public transport is not particularly reliable, except in Govt. statistics. The buses are often late, are very slow and badly organised. The trains are fine as long as you don't have to change lines, then they seem to be deliberately mis-timed. I was in Singapore when the train breakdowns occurred. On the green line they did not have enough power to run the line, so they started turning the A/C off.
2. The food ranges from mediocre (and expensive) to food poisoning. How you find the food will depend on which country you arrived from. For me, it was uninspiring.
Every place has good points and bad. On balance, I personally felt that the bad outweighed the good, but there were other contributing factors to that decision. I am still curious as to why you think it is a good city for a startup. Regards, o2sd