Working hard from the couch at the office

I moved to Portugal - Part 2

If you haven't yet checked out the first part of this, please make sure you do at part 1

As I said in the last post, we had a few bumps regarding the first weeks, documentation and so on a so forth. It wasn't all bad things to be honest, for instance, my Residency Authorization was delivered at my apartment only one week after going to SEF. Additionaly, I probably have all the first documents such as NIF, NISS, Residency Authorization, opened activity at Finanças way sooner than most people that come to the country, that's all thanks to the consultancy agency that brought me here Aubay

The city

View from Castelo de São Jorge

Lisbon is a beautiful city!

It's very weird when you walk down streets that have close to a Millenium of existence. It's ancient! You can tell by the houses (even though, most of downtown was destroyed in an Earthquake-Tsunami-Fire back in 1755 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake) and by the monuments (such as castles).

I was always drawn to North America's architecture, with its wide avenues, a mixture between Neoclassical and Gothic revival, and the tree-lined streets (probably because of movies and the whole north-American propaganda), and I also had a glimpse of baroque architecture from Brazilian historic cities. But nothing compares to Lisbon. It's very clumsy, but bucolic, plebeian but royal, all at the same time.

Also, Lisbon is not only old things as people imagine. There are huge developments, especially in the Parque das Nações region, with modern buildings, malls, stadiums, and so on and so forth. Altice Arena @Parque das Nações

Vasco da Gama mall @Parque das Nações

The Job

Well, let's move to the main reason why I came to Lisbon: my job.

As you may have noticed, I'm a software developer(😱), and the reason why I moved abroad was to, among other things, increase my work experience in the international software development industry.

@Munich - Franz Josef Strauss International Airport

The industry

The software development industry in Portugal is very heated right now. Well, actually, it's everywhere, I guess, but there are a few conditions which make Portugal, at least different from other countries:

• Nice weather and very welcoming people
• Lots of tech companies
• High demand and not so many developers available
• Lower cost of living

But don't be mistaken, there are a few difficulties that you need to know before considering moving:

• Lower-income
• Bureaucracy
• You NEED to know English (should be expected if you're on the field)
• Very conservative and this may affect people that only wants to work remotely and also more progressive people.

My impression is that lots of companies from other countries come to Portugal in search of a cheaper workforce - since the cost of living here is lower than most European and North American countries. So, we have lots of African and Brazilian developers moving to Portugal lately, due to the same reason. Other countries' companies look for a cheaper workforce, and Portugal goes after other countries to find an even cheaper workforce.

In terms of technologies and development practices, Portugal is probably in tune with most places. There are lots of open positions for Javascript, Node, React, Angular, Python and also for Java, C++, C#, and so on and so

Since the income here generally is very low, the difference between what a junior and a senior earns, doesn't vary that much. For that same reason, it's highly taken into account the years of experience you have. It's very unusual to see people in the same range of seniority being paid differently. So, forget about huge salary improvements in salary revisions.

One thing that makes it a little hard to understand is that Portugal is probably one of the most aggressive countries when it comes to hiring. From experience, hiring processes in Portugal take half the time it would for places such as Canada and the United States. The problem with that is, from what I've been seeing, there are lots of hiring but way less experience. This is good for juniors, but it makes companies have to find other means of evaluating differences between developers. Since it's hard to quantify knowledge, they usually measure people by years of experience and not by their skills (which more often than not, doesn't mean the same thing).

Another thing that Portugal eventually suffers from is something that Brazil also does: It does not make much sense for an English-speaking developer to remain working for Portuguese companies. You are usually working with people from other countries, solving the same problems, implementing the same solutions, and earning sometimes 1/3 of what they do.

Companies that bring people to Portugal, often rely on fines to make sure that the developer stays here at least for 1 year, but even paying the fine, with a salary from Germany for instance, wouldn't be that hard.

So what we usually see is people coming here and staying for 3, or 4 months and leaving, either to move to other countries or to work remotely from Portugal "living as kings" as we commonly say.

Conclusion?

Well, this could escalate for lines and lines of me talking nonsense things about Portugal and the software development industry but let's stop here.

I hope you have enjoyed being part of my journey.

See you at the next one