Average monthly salary in Poland is around 1000 PLN (few hundred bucks).

To Amathyst,

Thanks for ur valuable advice , I still have 45 days left .............I will start learning basic Polsih Language ................

Is that absolutely necessary? Those Poles, I'm telling you - awful types.
Not like the Britsh - gentlemen and ladies, always smiling, kind-hearted
and welcoming Indian immigrants. The wages there are much higher than
in Poland and lovely British ladies dream about exotic Indian men like you,
Karu.

Besides, they have quality football league and you can play cricket and watch
it on TV (both things virtually impossible in Poland.)


It is very likely that you will. Despite all the efforts of media, European Union
and widely recognized moral authorities, Poles remain zoological racists.


You're a terrible woman, Amathyst - it's the guy's hapiness and future life at stake
and YOU KNOW that it will be so much better for him in the UK, you just want to
annoy me :-/


Seriously... man - you DON'T want to do that. The language is a nightmare even for
native Poles, but for foreigners it's an absolute c**t of a language to learn (to use
a poetic expression.)

Holy sh1t it sounds like the Brady Bunch over there, is it true that starangers walk up to you on the street and offer you their wife or life savings if they think you look sad?

He'll be fine, Indians are good a picking up languages - "would you like a drink Magda" would be his best starting point.


Untrue, he'll wont be able to get a visa for the UK under the new immigration laws, so best he goes to Poland - wonderful place it is :D


Alas this is also untrue, a bunch of drunken fab badly dressed thugs :( with hearts of stone :( I wouldnt wish any inteligent hard working Indian to come to this country, best he does his Masters in Poland and then calls for his extended famliy when he is finished.


But what about all those lovely Polish girls who are dating lovely Indian guys? I think you must be wrong - every nation has its idiots of course, but I dont think Poland has any more than other countries.


Not only that, Polish fathers are over joyed when their daughters bring nice African and Indian boys home for dinner...It brings a tear to my eye when I think of the joy that these people bring to Polish families.

Only 45 days to go, what a wonderful new life in Poland :D

Lets get back to the wage issue. In Krakow I was earning 2000-2500 a month teaching, but I hated it. So I moved into bar work, which I have always enjoyed. Now, wages earned all depend on what kind of life you want to lead. I now (working 2 jobs, about 6 days a week) earn about 1800 a month, however, if you find yourself a cheap room in a flat then you can easily get by quite comfortably on that. I go out 3-4 times a week and do my shopping in Alma (because I can walk there in no time) and still have money to buy little luxuries and have some for emergencies if needed. I am also heading home for a weekend party at the start of next month.

Basically, the wages are low, but if you are willing to work hard and shop sensibly then you can get by fine. I know of people that, after paying rent and stuff, have about 300zl to last them the month and they get by fine, just have to be sensible.

Sensible is an under-statement that sounds like blatent poverty to me.. The funny thing is over here in Ireland im am constantly told by irish people that the Poles are living like kings now because they robbed money from the west and that they are the only country not in recession bla bla bla. They are so far removed from the actual economic situation for the average Pole in Poland.

Robbed money? LOL. The Irish economy was built up by hard graft from Poles. When the bubble burst, they had their scapegoat. They can't have it both ways.

300PLN is not living in poverty if it's disposable. You can eat fish and rolls for quite cheap here.

The thing is Milky, they hear their work colleagues talking about the new apartment they purchased or the land they purchased for the house they're building, what do you expect them to think? How do you expect them to know the realities of your "average" working family in Poland?


Did they bollox! It wasnt it was built on multi national companies setting up business there - when the tax breaks ended they all flocked off to pastures new..Poland being one of the destinations!

The Poles contributed a lot to the building sector there, Am. Multinational corporations obviously played a bigger part, companies like Dell, for example.

Still, there is no question that the Poles raised the standard.

Good example is Dell having moved everything to Lodz. Why? Because Polish workers are so much brilliant as Irish? Not really.

Dell is a computer giant and the Poles are right up there with the best in this field. Mark my words, they will produce the computing pioneers of tomorrow.

Thats the way alot of people think here,Seanus this is not my opinion,I 100% think this is nonsense. The Irish have been emigrating constantly especially since the British caused mass genocidal Famine in 1845 onward so the Irish are hypocrtites when they cry about the so-called unwanted immigrants.

T


I agree the Poles were a speck of sand in the whole Celtic Tiger crap.

I meant - Why Dell moved its production? Only because of financial reasons. Not because of the facty that Polish workers suddenly are so more experienced as Polish ones.

Another example. Philips Lighting. Once moved its production from Belgium to Poland. A few years ago the production in Poland was closed and moved to the Far East.

Why? I could buy a week's worth of fresh vegetables in the market closest to my office for 20zl. New potatoes at the minute can be had for as little as 0.70zl a kilo - and if you eat seasonally, most vegetables come in/around the 1-2zl mark per kilo.

There's plenty of people in the UK living on 20 pounds a week.

exactly.. They had to pay anual salary of 37 grand in Limrick and in Poland 7 grand..Alsa the majority of work was unskilled even a momkey could do it.


they are in poverty as well so, but its alot more common in Poland, so common that they don't even realise how bad it is. If you are on your own with that money ok but with a few mouths to feed well thats pretty bad.

I have a brother on the dole here and when he pays his rent and bills at the end of the month ,he still has about 700 euros to spend on food and beer.

To Amathyst :

U have ability to answer to a hundreds of people who are speaking against you ...............Great work .....keep going........

The thing is a lot of these people just don't want to know, so they can remain focused on what their ignorance perceives as wrong.. They could easily find out but their too clued into the lives of Posh and Becks etc and which celeb got the latest tit job.

sort of like these people
metacafe.com/watch/834847/are_americans_really_that_stupid

Where will they be producing these pioneers? The universities aren't really producing good engineers...

Says who? Relative to whom? I don't believe that!

alright, quality of graduates from top Polish universities vs. top German, French, Swiss, Japanese, American, Chinese, take your pick...

The undergraduates here seems to be especially poor. It seems that they just learn how to do their assignments and are never challenged to actually think on their own.

Considering the amount of university graduates here, the R&D isn't too hot.

Poland is a destination for companies interested in cheap labor and huge tax credits. Not because of promising talent...

Do you hire them, convex?

I have a couple of people doing IT work for me, but it's not even close to top end. It is still extremely difficult to find someone competent on the operational side of things. It's damn near impossible to find anyone decent at development which requires any sort of innovation.

Well, come on, it's not Scotland we are talking about ;) The Scots have some of the best!

I did fail to mention Scotland in my list there...

Well, that's ok. We do alright for ourselves. The salaries tend to be much higher than here but there is job satisfaction too.

Well, I don't want to interrupt your insightful discussion here ;-) but Dell is not good example of anything because they mostly assembly computers from pieces made in Asia...


Sorry man but you doesn't sound like a big fish in that field ;-)
I was under impression that your "operational area" is close to Wroclaw, so you should be aware that there is couple of quite interesting IT ventures here, including Nokia-Siemens R&D with more than 1000 engineers or Opera R&D in Wroclaw, this is their latest success:

youtube.com/watch?v=OpTCS3g-cBY&feature=player_embedded

There is plentiful of other IT companies here. Thing is, that you will not find almost any meaningful operation regarding electronic in Poland, because those kind of investment are usually enormously costly, and are in the most part located in Asia...

I'm not a big fish in that field, most of my guys are doing consulting work with large companies. They're not doing development, it's primarily infrastructure design on the technical side and policy/strategy work. Despite having CCIEs working with customers, it's still just infrastructure design work.

And it's incredibly difficult to find good people here in my field. You can look at things like advanced certification count by country, Poland has a very low count as a percentage of the overall population even compared to other CEE countries.


See, this is exactly what I mean, it's basic software development, cheaper to do in Poland than in Norway. Other than the very small research technology department at Siemens, it's all run of the mill stuff.

Any place in Wroclaw doing anything really innovative?

I'm not saying it's all doom and gloom, but lets be serious here...

Yet you sounded previously like it was all doom and gloom :-)


I cann't agree that new and complicated mobile application for relatively new electronic device is basic. It is not like making NP problem solvable but definitely it is not basic :-)

Well, in general I agree that Poland is relatively weak in terms of patents and it lacks both big industry and govermental support in scientific research. But on the other hand I can't agree that there is low human resources pool here. The main problem though is that many of the best go west in search for better salaries and better opportunites...

As for advanced certification, well it cost a lot of money and is rarely needed in tenders. So basic policy of most of companies is to pay for a training and exam of a few choosen ones in case of tender requirement.

There are plenty of bodies willing and able to learn, but the infrastructure to provide that learning isn't in place. One directly influences the other. Until that environment is in place, you won't have a very good pool of resources to pull from.


Again, it touches on the problem above. In CZ and HU for instance, you have about 4x as many CCIEs as a percentage of the population than in Poland. Poland is still seen by the majority of FDI to be a location that provides cheap labor. It seems like a disproportionate amount of FDI in Poland goes to creating low level manufacturing jobs compared to other CE countries. I'm curious as to why that is. The universities are a huge problem, emphasizing quantity over quality. Something is seriously wrong with the system when basic jobs require a university degree.

And sorry if I came off as slagging off Opera. I know it's not basic, but it's not revolutionary. It's more along the lines of getting the existing concept working properly. That said, it's a solid product, and there's a lot of hard work that goes into it at that little building off rynek :)

And yet polish company Assecco was fifth biggest European Software Vendor in 2008... and is probably the biggest IT company in CEE... Unfortunate true is that country such as Poland cann't count on foreign investors. It is rather such companies as Assecco who should grow their own R&D.

I don't know about HU but CZ was a productive powerhouse in this part of Europe for a long time, so I'm not surprised that they gradually regain what they've lost because of communism, I bet that aproximity to Bavaria helps a lot...