
Ask HN: Best companies to work for in Europe? - jxub
We all know about the big4&#x2F;unicorns in the US. But what about companies in Europe with interesting work, good pay, and sane work&#x2F;life balance? They don&#x27;t have to be one of the &quot;top&quot; tech companies, just good places to work. Thanks for the answers.
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scribu
I'll just comment on the "good pay" aspect:

The vast majority of European companies pay programmers significantly less
than US companies (even when controlling for cost of living).

So, your best bet, financially, would be to work for an American company,
while being outside of the USA. Most of the giants have several offices in
Europe.

~~~
charlesdm
Your best bet is to work remotely for a SV based company, receiving US
compensation. There are a few people I know who do this, and they easily gross
€10k+ per month.

Or you become a contractor on a day rate, but then you're not really
permanently working for the same company.

~~~
tw1010
Don't you need a visa to work remotely for a SV company from Europe?

~~~
pm90
Visa's are by definition documents providing authorization for (re)entry and
specific kinds of work. If you're not inside the country's geographical
boundaries, you are not in their jurisdiction and hence don't need a visa.

Now, taxes though... that's a different beast.

~~~
charlesdm
Easy: you invoice from wherever you're based. Exempt from tax in the US, taxed
in your home jurisdiction. Expenses tax deductible.

------
thiagoperes
In Amsterdam / Netherlands:

\- Booking.com

\- Uber

\- ING

\- TravelBird

\- Travix

\- Backbase

\- Catawiki

\- Marktplaats

\- KLM

\- Transavia

\- PVH

Or look for startups

Advantages of Netherlands, and things to look for at in a country:

\- #12 highest net disposable income after tax in the world [2]

\- #3 best inequality adjusted HDI in the world [1]

\- #1 best healthcare in Europe, costs a flat 100 EUR for everyone [3]

\- #1 highest English proficiency of non-native countries [4]

\- #1 most affordable place in EU to buy a house [6]

\- #4 lowest average of hours worked in OECD [5]

\- Vacation days can be taken one-by-one

\- Bike culture, cannabis culture, receptive towards immigrats

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequalit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality-
adjusted_HDI)

[2] [https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
living/country_price_rankings...](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
living/country_price_rankings?itemId=105)

[3] [https://healthpowerhouse.com/publications/euro-health-
consum...](https://healthpowerhouse.com/publications/euro-health-consumer-
index-2017/)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index)

[5] [https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/the-countries-
where-p...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/the-countries-where-people-
work-the-longest-hours)

[6] (page 25)
[https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/at/Documents/...](https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/at/Documents/real-
estate/property-index-6th-edition-2017.PDF)

~~~
mihaiborcan
I had less then pleasant experiences with Booking and Uber - not to mention
that Uber doesn't have the best reputation globally. I'm interested if you
speak from experience.

------
troels
You probably know, but Europe is a pretty diverse place. Salary in the north
is significantly higher than the south. Labour laws and cultural expectations
wrt work load etc. also differs quite a lot.

------
cabify_talent
Cabify in Madrid is definitely one two watch! Recently acquired unicorn status
and experiencing an exponential growth rate, last year alone the company grew
by 500%! ;-) Also imo, they pay well and offer great challenges to work on.

~~~
jxub
Do you offer remote work or internships in summer? I'm based in Valencia at
the moment, but I'd love to chat

------
forg0t_username
I work at Arm in the UK. They also have offices in France, Sweden, Norway, and
Hungary.

It's a great place to work:

* You're surrounded by smart people

* The work is interesting

* Short hours

* Flexible: if I want to work from home or run some errands during the day, I can drop an email "where is <insert name>" to let my team know. No need to ask anyone.

There are hardware and software roles, with everything in between: hardware
design and test, infrastructure, cluster, web applications, compilers, and a
lot of internal software tools.

------
herbst
If you worry about money just take a look at Switzerland. You may dont find SV
wages on every corner (especially not as starting wage) but you pay less
taxes, have more holidays, awesome social structure and the life quality is
just right.

There are some of the big names here (Google, Roche, IBM, ...). But there also
thousands of smaller companies that come with a great work/life balance by
default.

In fact legally its kind of hard to find a job with a bad work/life balance.

------
hakanito
In Scandinavia you have minimum of 25 days paid time off every year, by law.
So work life balance is sane by default unless you work the cray hours at
Banks or McKinsey et al. In tech you have some big players in different
countries. Spotify, Klarna, iZettle are some Swedish examples. Check out the
Rocket Internet portfolio companies, Zalando, Trivago, EF. Google and Facebook
are still top of the line even in Europe

~~~
troels
Just to clarify. You get ~15 national holidays. On top of that 6-7 weeks are
normal. (At least for Denmark)

~~~
Symbiote
Denmark has 11, which sounds good, except they don't move if they fall on
Saturday or Sunday. The are all on Monday-Friday this year though, which is
nice. (They're also mostly in the spring, when the weather is unreliable. Can
we get Easter permanently moved to August?)

For comparison, England has 8, but none are on weekends, they're all either
Monday or Friday. For a Monday-Friday worker, it can work out about the same.

------
barrkel
Fintech. If you like data - manipulation, transformation, joining, matching,
analysis, display etc. - it's interesting enough. The closer you are to the
money, the more money you'll probably make, but the culture will be more
conservative too.

We're hiring, btw - [https://du.co/careers/](https://du.co/careers/)

------
bitL
Google Zurich (~250k CHF), Glassdoor 4.6

Facebook London (~100k GBP), Glassdoor 4.7

JetBrains Munich (~80k EUR), Glassdoor 4.8

------
sancha_
The big car manufacturers in Germany are great to work for. Albeit most of
them are not in big cities if that is where you want to live.

~~~
netsharc
Huh? BMW is in Munich, Mercedes is in Stuttgart, Ford is near Cologne, all
count as big cities in Germany. They're definitely not sleepy villages.

Ok, Audi is in small-ish Ingolstadt, VW is in Wolfsburg...(but they also have
a factory in Dresden).

~~~
bkcreate
But that's just the HQ you might get sent to a smaller factory town
(Rostock/Bremen/etc.)

------
teebot
Showpad is one of the fastest growing SaaS company in Europe. It's located in
the really nice city of Gent in Belgium. Great culture, people and top tech.
[https://www.showpad.com/careers](https://www.showpad.com/careers) I might be
slightly biased but you should consider it :)

------
s3nnyy
Swiss startups and SMEs are gaining importance in tech, I would say. So have a
look at Switzerland and/or ping me. I am a founder of a tech recruitment
agency in Zurich and we look for tech talent all over Europe who want to join
Swiss companies. If you look for a tech job e-mail me at iwan@coderfit.com.)

------
mickeyben
I'm completely biased but Drivy
([https://angel.co/drivy](https://angel.co/drivy)) is an amazing place to work
for. Located in central Paris with interesting problems, good pay (relatively
to Paris not to SV) and no absurd work hours.

Ping me if you want to know more.

------
vmuhonen
I've been working at Mobiquity here in Amsterdam for a couple of months now
and it feels really nice place. Can't say many bad things about A'dam either.
Like others mentioned, the pay isn't on the level you get from the big US
companies, but I do like the quality of life here.

------
d--b
Big cos in France don't pay very well (although time-wise, you can fairly
easily get 4-day work weeks and / or 9-week vacations).

If you're looking to make more money, finance is an option, though they will
make you work harder (not crazy though) or consulting.

American companies do employ people in Europe too.

------
aychedee
We do good pay and sane work life balance at Touch Surgery -
[https://www.touchsurgery.com/jobs](https://www.touchsurgery.com/jobs) \- And
the UK is still in Europe. For now

------
egze
Hamburg / Germany: XING

Work language is English. Technologies used heavily: Ruby on Rails, React,
iOS, Android, Perl (legacy stuff) and more. You will have a nice work/life
balance and will work with smart people.

------
greyman
You need to take into account the country, not just company... I worked for a
German company, which paid 2K eur in Slovakia (average salary for a dev), but
4K for the same position in Austria.

~~~
expertentipp
I don't know why companies take for granted that employee in PL/CZ/SK/RO
should earn 50% less while being treated worse and having more work to do.
Interestingly employees in these countries prefer to undermine and treat like
shit each other for 10% payrise (infamous middle-management/POs/PMs/Scrum
lunatics over here), instead of doing something about the overall situation.

~~~
AlexAmee
Yea totally !

But I had a very interesting situation once. I asked one of my clients if it's
ok for him, if I move to Croatia for some time, he tried to convince me that
it's his right to pay less since I don't need as much as in Austria.

So I assume that he basically thought: "you don't need that money since
everything else is cheaper and you earn more than the average person in
Croatia"

I mean if you think about it, the average salary in Romania is like 450 Euro's
? Now imagine a dev living in Romania with 4k Euro's each month, working for a
company in Germany.

I'm not saying that they are right, all I'm saying is that I understand their
thinking process ( even if it's totally BS )

They next issues: probably taxes, there is a reason why we got hourly rates
like 90/hour, our taxes are killer, if you have good rates, you can be sure
that you will lose 50% on taxes, while in other countries it's not like that.

Compared to Romania ( low flat rate 16% tax ), this is insane[0].

Long story short, they try to figure out the cost of living and based on that,
that's what you get.

[0] [https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/work/taxes/income-
taxe...](https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/work/taxes/income-taxes-
abroad/romania/index_en.htm)

~~~
expertentipp
Low tax rate in developing countries gives you non-existing public services
and infrastructure in shambles. Compensating these two can after all costs you
more than in countries with higher salaries, especially in emergency
situations. Just look up how healthcare in Romania looks like. Croatia, except
having brilliant landscapes, is no paradise to live in either when it comes to
serious things.

~~~
AlexAmee
Sure in emergency situations and that's a bad thing no doubt about that but
that's not the general assumption.

------
tome
> We all know about the big4/unicorns in the US

Which of the big 5 didn't make it in to your big 4?

~~~
jxub
Ups sorry, I've left Microsoft out it seems ;)

