Grass is always greener? Poland experience.

Housing - the build quality is horrendous, with many corners cut.
Everything else 1/3 or 1/4...like what?
Food is good if you know where to look, the same as in most countries, loads of processed meats in Poland. Its really common to buy a piece of meat on a tuesday and by Wednesday it stinks.

Food isnt a 1/3 cost at all.

As for the gigabit thing you keep mentioning at $40/month, whats all that about? Nobody has a 1 gig connection, nobody who lives near a city anyway.

cant agree with you at all about housing build quality. its far superior in Poland then to USA and Canada and the UK for that matter. "everything else"? well.. life.. ie. tickets to a movie, parking, taxis, public transport, housekeepers, gardeners, carpenters to build shelves, etc.

if your meat stinks after one day , it is not processed. In the USA your sandwich meats will last for months unrefrigerated they are so plastic. Food is definitely 1/3 the cost. You just have not experienced it. Average lunch in Vancouver at a very average sandwich shop will be 48 ZLT.

Why do I keep on going on about Gigabit internet access? Probably because it is the single biggest GOLDEN COW staring every Polski in the face. Its like a farmer 600 years ago staring at a traktor that runs on solar energy saying "I have a cow and a wagon, what do i need this for?"

I've never experienced stinking meat few days later. Maybe you should consider buying it somewhere else.
Economy is expected to grow much slower in next years. One reason is that simple and the most effective improvements by moving production here are finishing and simply growing bigger economy with same speed requires more foreign investments.

I think the biggest complaint of people living here are the salaries which don't allow most of population to save for their flat/house.

Of course this situation looks different from perspective of immigrant who comes here with average for the west savings. Also programmers working here and earning online have quite a good live. Considerably better than the rest of population. 98% of people earns here less than 20 000 euro gross per year and for programmer it's not impossible to become one of this 2% (but not easy)

In the end Poland is not the best place in Europe for someone who wants to earn online in IT and spend locally. There are countries with lower taxes and better weather for that (eg. Giblartar). Hungary with its Budapest has also many relatively cheap programmers but considerably lower rents and housing prices than Warsaw (although taxes here are quite high). You're writing that lot of stuff here is 3 x cheaper than in Canada, but maybe it's not fair compare countries on this one moment in history when Canadian dollar is historically the strongest. Prices of goods comparing to much richer Germany are "only" 20% - 50% lower. Although your point of view has sense if you want to use this time to spend/invest here most of your savings.

Why are you all the time writing about this 1Gbit internet connection. Where do you see advantages of 1Gbit over 20Mbits? In normal use it's the same, and for professional use upload is same important while in this offer it is only 20Mbits:

metrointernet.pl/klient-indywidualny/internet/openport-bezkonkurencyjny/

When it comes about education of your children Poland is not as good as Canada, but better than USA and many other western countries: And as somebody wrote public schools take pupils from its area so if you want better education for your children then you should buy a house next to good school. (Average results of final exams are available) Problem are low quality universities, but your bilingual children, provider father has cash can go study abroad. Also In Warsaw it's hard to get into public kindergarten.

Health system is lacking a lot, so without extra insurance getting seriously sick (especially Cancer) may cause you to regret your immigration decision. But statistically until not old you have nothing to worry about.

Nobody has mentioned the worst part of polish country which are courts. In every ranking Poland is way worse in this aspect than any other. In Poland you really must be desperate to go to court. They're very slow...

Monitor, thanks for your great feedback and comments. thats good information.


I can saturate a 20Mbit downstream 24 hours a day. And in the USA and Canada you have a xfer cap of about 400GB to 600GB per month. Its pretty easy when you have ~ 20 workstations and servers doing things like receiving multiple HD video streams from broadcast locations of show(podcast) guests being managed by a TriCaster and then rebroadcast back up as 3 different bit rate streams to a reflector is one example. This is in addition to clients uploading massive video files to my local fileserver located on my end of the connection for processing and transcoding, all while other servers are sending out render jobs to a server farm and then receiving back the rendered data. Meanwhile you have other people doing normal things. Web, Netflix, RDP, HD skype, etc. This kind of bandwidth is not available in the USA or Canada unless you live in one of Google's projects centers. Do "most" people need it, of course not. But anyone wanting to seriously build a business on the internet or that will facilitate them working remotely for companies paying in $$ via the internet your bandwidth makes more possible the more you have.

signal

Thx for explanation. I agree that in this specific use symmetric 1Gbit/20Mbit has in did sense :) But of course it's not typical usage :).

Cheap programmers and cheap labor is not the only criteria to decide what's the place for an IT business. What's the startup community in Gibraltar like? RIght, non existing, How is in Budapest? What's the amount of students going out of universities in those countries compared to the Krakow - Katowice area ? How many VCs are on those places? Krakow had just 3 new ones (one from google, one from Deutsch Telekom) open in the last year. There is plenty of cash available to start new tech based companies, only requirement: A good Idea and the will to risk and work hard. This is not available just for programmers, anybody can be part of it as long as their mindset is ready for the change. Get an idea, find a team, execute, fail, repeat again !

It's not by improvisation that many respectable companies are coming to poland. Just to mention a few IBM, Google, Motorola, ABB all they have research centers in Krakow. The only problem I see is that are becoming a commodity and salaries will keep going up making it hard for small companies to compete with larger ones, this is already starting to happen.

lorito

Budapest is capital, 2 x bigger city than Krakow, so of course has more IT guys. Look for example here: tiny.cc/buda123
Don't know about Gibraltar.

Monitor


I don't think is just about city size or amount of IT guys, for sure it counts but not a decisive factor. If that was the case then New York would be the tech capital of USA. I'm pretty sure there are great opportunities on Budapest as well, but my point in this thread is to tell the OP that indeed there are great opportunities if you know where to look and your are willing to work hard.

USA overall - probably, Canada i have no idea, UK no way. Ive witnessed some shocking build quality in Poland. Come on many things can be overlooked with a little back hander to the right people, including shabby build quality.


agreed and agreed, but it shouldn't really be for sale if its going off within 24 hours, this is all about cutting corners and a dodgy supply chain. It simply wouldn't happen in the UK and if it did it wouldnt happen again from the same supplier. Ive bought meat many times in Poland and its smelt within 24 hours, even from large retail outlets such as Auchen.


and you assume you know this becasue........? I lived in Poland for almost 6 years, the food prices in the UK in comparison to Poland are not that different and im talking pound for pound and zloty to zloty, its a little more expensive. No way a 1/3 absolutely no way. If youre referring to restaurants, there is a significant difference but still no 1/3.


maybe so, but they already have national multi million zloty monopoly's, not the easiest market to break into.