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Another story about the move, this time to the Netherlands



Hello.
I want to share my experience of moving to the Netherlands.

Brief preface.

I have lived all my 25 years in Kiev, graduated from KPI. On the 3rd course I started to do web development - sawed sites on Joomlah - WordPress, drew designs and slowly learned the wisdom of PHP and JS. After 1.5 years, I got a job at the Kiev branch of Anzer IT Healthcare and, after a year of working there, for the first time I seriously thought about finding work abroad with a move. Then I saw it as a successful continuation of a career, even from school-institute times, I see, I ate my parents' instructions.
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So…

First approach

It was the beginning of 2013, I decided to start from Europe so that not far from home. Shoveled vacancies in:


and sending a summary of suitable options, waited for answers. I didn’t bother with Cover-lettera, everywhere I wrote the same “Please consider my CV ...”. As a result, he passed about a dozen interviews on Skype, in English, and performed several simple test tasks. Interviews were usually conducted in 2 stages - first HRs, then developers. As a result, I received 2 offers from Slovakia and one from the Czech Republic, but the conditions were worse than at the then work in Kiev. The proposed RFP was comparable to Kiev, but abroad there are additional costs for renting housing and all kinds of insurance. As a result, he refused and, on the advice of his parents, began to search in the Netherlands.

In May, he entered the Ukrainian company DAXX , which offered to test for a PHP Drupal developer job in a Dutch startup. Under the leadership of HR'ov, they slightly trimmed the resume and the customer agreed to the interview. With Drupal, the experience was small, but for the week that remained before the interview, I managed to more or less figure it out. The interview was conducted by the startup CEO and one of the developers. They asked about previous work experience, why I am looking for a job in another country (everybody likes to ask it), there were no tasks to write code. In the end, as usual, given the opportunity to ask their questions. I asked why Drupal was chosen as the basis, and not my favorite Yii (the startup was in the planning stage, i.e. nothing was written). They responded with a description of the advantages of CMS over the framework plus, referring to the fact that Drupal is very popular among them in Europe. We had a little discussion about what would still be better. An important argument in favor of Yii turned out to be faster. As a result, they decided to think and contact me again in a week. During this week they put on an article about the benefits of Yii and eventually agreed on Yii and me as a developer. I had a feeling that everything was somehow suspiciously good, I waited for the offer - the RFP was higher than Czech-Slovak companies, plus the standard of living in the Netherlands was higher, and working in a startup from scratch is cool. Decided to agree. He quit Anzer, the intermediary company took up the documents, I had to wait again.

Meanwhile, a telephone interview took place in booking.com for the Perl developer position. This vacancy is constantly open for them and knowledge of Perl is not necessary for it, the general experience of algorithms is more important, and optimization for high loads. First HR calls, asks general questions, talks about the company, assigns the following interview, which is conducted by 2 developers. They mostly ask questions about understanding algorithms. I did not pass this interview - answered half of the questions with a stretch.

After a week and a half, they called from Daks and asked to drive to the office. Well, I thought, some other signatures are needed or something on the documents. But the girl who was involved in my design, said that, unfortunately, the customer decided to abandon the project at all. I was a bit shocked. I was offered $ 500 or brought for 2 days to Amsterdam at the expense of the company as compensation. He said that he would think and left. My heart was relieved - I was free from work and I could rest all summer. After a couple of days I took $ 500 and decided that I was not destined to go abroad and left for the sea.

A month later, I was taken by the Front-end developer'om to a company not far from home, for an interesting project with a salary higher than expected, in short, for almost a year I worked and enjoyed life. Then the desire to seek happiness in another country awoke again.

Second approach

Again, successfully flunked interview in Booking.
In the vacancy section on stackoverflow, we found the front-end dev position in Leaseweb , to which I sent a resume. The first interview was conducted by HR and Front-end dev. They asked general questions, past experience, some technical questions. Then they sent a letter with a link to the test in codility. The test consisted of 3 tasks, on JS. The tasks were 2 simple and 1 medium difficulty. I typed, in my opinion, 198/300 and I was assigned another interview, this time with the system architect and technical director of the company. They asked questions about working with technologies that are used in the company, asked if they looked into the source code of their site (no, did not look at them). A couple of days later, the recruiter sent “thank you for your time ...”, but the interesting thing was at the end of the letter - the reason why I did not arrange them was that during the last interview, none of the interviewees saw my interest, although technical skills I come up with. I wrote in reply “I am surprised and confused ... Why didn’t they see? I asked a bunch of questions. ”

As a result, HR appointed another interview - with her and the architect from the previous interview. She mainly asked questions about relocation, which problems in my opinion I could face in this matter. Then I asked if I had any questions - I asked pieces 3 in response, such that can be discussed (in detail about the office and work schedule, for example). I also asked what kind of RFP I would like net, - I was not particularly prepared for this issue, because I called the most reasonable one, HR said it was a lot, and that the usual salary is my figure, but gross.

The next day she said that they were ready to offer me. It should be noted that there are many small amenities in the offer:


Preparation and relocation

Preparation of documents is simple, from the fact that it took me to do in Kiev:

The rest was done by company employees from the Netherlands.

Separately talk about rental housing. They offer to fill in a form with the desired parameters (apartment or room, in which city, what price range, etc.). There are 2 nuances: first, they offered rooms from 700 Euros / month, apartments from 800 - a little expensive, and secondly, all the housing they offer is rented for at least 6 months. Since I was not sure which city (or region I would like to live in Amsterdam) and if I don’t want to come back in a month, I decided to refuse this service and began to look for housing for a month myself.

I searched on airbnb - a very convenient service, especially the display of all the available options on a single map, you can immediately figure out where it will get closer to work. By the way, 9292.nl helps in the search for transport in the country. Trains and buses sometimes linger, but rarely, with the cancellation of the flight, the train collided only once in 4 weeks that I was here.

I found a room in Utrecht, as a result, the road takes 3 minutes to the bus, 15 minutes by bus to the railway station, 17 minutes by train and 15 minutes on foot to the office. If you ride a bike, that time to the train + train - work = 15 minutes. An ordinary adult can be transported on high-speed trains (7.30 - 9.00 and 16.30 - 18.00), but a separate ticket is required (6 Euros per day). Folding can be transported in the folded state for free, because it takes up no more space than regular baggage.

A couple of days after the arrival, an employee of the company engaged in documents arrived and took him to the city hall for registration, the hospital for fluorography, the bank to open an account and the immigration service for a residence card that replaces the visa.

On the first working day there was a lot of new things, the office was very pleased - clean, light, spacious. It is an open space with docking stations as workplaces, each employee is given a laptop, which you can take with you. The work is built on a scramble, the schedule is not very hard - you can come from 8 to 10, leave after 17.30. And at 18.00 the office, as a rule, is already empty.

The company can meet people from almost every corner of the world.

A little bit about the country itself

The nature is wonderful, a huge number of parks, around Utrecht are fields with stripes of forest in which hares and reservoirs with ducks run. At first the air seemed unusually clean, but after a couple of weeks I got used to it, it would be interesting to breathe in our Kiev now.
The house is low, mostly 3 floors, flowers grow near each door. Streets are not clean because you can hardly name them. bags of garbage are folded on the sidewalks in front of the houses, where scavengers pick them up, plus not all dogs are brought to the parks ... Once I even saw a group of guys celebrating little need in a canal near the main street.

Link to Gdrive with photos.

Prices for basic products (cape, fish, cheese, bakery, cereals) are 2-3 times higher than in Kiev. On some, such as canned vegetables, milk, juices are approximately equal to Kiev.

The fare is very expensive. You can buy tickets that are valid for a certain time, or for a certain zone - it is uneconomical, because everyone uses Chipcard, with which you pay only for the distance that you have traveled. It should be 7.50, replenished in special machines with a bank card or at cash desks in cash. It works like this: when entering / exiting the station, you need to attach a card to the device near the turnstile and the system automatically writes the required amount from the account. If you forget to attach at the exit, the maximum possible amount is deducted - for the bus and the metro it is 4 euros, for the train 20. For example, a trip from Utrecht from Amsterdam costs about 6 euros. On trains very often checkers. In buses for control cameras hang near each door.

Bicyclists here expanse - the tracks almost everywhere, and they have priority over the rest of the transport. A used bicycle costs from 40 euros with a 1 month warranty, new ones were not watched. Also, bike lanes are designed for mopeds, which are sometimes inconvenient. Parking for cars is mostly paid, from 2 euro / hour, so, I think, free parking near the office is another good thing. Gasoline costs around 1.6 euros per liter.

People are friendly, if you warm up with someone on the street and meet your eyes, they are more likely to greet and smile with you. 95% speak English. I have never noticed rudeness or open expression of discontent.

Now the test month is coming to an end, but, they say, for 4 years, none of the foreigners left the company after it. It is also interesting how much net salary will be, since neither HRs nor the company that makes the documents could give an exact answer to this question. It is worth noting from the unpleasant that the pension in the amount of 1.5% is also deducted from the RFP. You must also have medical insurance, the cost of which starts from 70 euros / month and this amount is not compensated by the company.

Surely I didn’t tell a lot, so I’ll be happy to answer questions in comments or drugs.

P.S. Leaseweb continues to recruit new employees

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/285644/

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