u/type_mismatch

"mental state in Berlin" Facebook group is great, this is a very supportive community with strict moderation. Highly recommend it.

Come check out "the book club without fixed books" and "book swap", both on the meetup app. Usually it's a bit more men than women (I'd say 60-40 or 70-30 depending on the day) and quite a few guys over 35.

And "young enough" means "under 35" in case of Canada! Def didn't expect that, I thought working holiday visas top out at 30.

I really recommend this one, it gives a unique view of Berlin in the 90s

https://co-berlin.org/en/program/exhibitions/dream-berlin-90s

Here's a somewhat unconventional recommendation for a tight budget. Get the cheapest suit at H&M or Zara and then have it tailored at your local Änderungsschneiderei. Spend some time online beforehand to learn which things cannot be adjusted by a tailor: for example, the shoulders have to fit just right. Alternatively, you can book an appointment at a more upscale tailor just to get a consultation for free - I remember Rooks & Rocks employee was eager to help and explain all possible options in terms of fit.

This is what I did years ago and I got a lot of compliments at a wedding I went to!

33M here who's seen it all. It's bad only if you end up in a specific bubble. This is where all the horror stories about "oh yet another unemployed polyamorous DJ with commitment issues" come from. Overall, it varies A LOT depending on the apps and circles you're in. Like, at my last job in my department I was the only non-German, not owning a house and not having kids. Their dating experience had been very different from mine :)

The book "Just keep buying" addresses exactly this question in great detail and offers a few suggestions beyond the simple dollar cost averaging.

That's the thing though: the landlord might say "you have this and that, I will subtract it from your deposit", and someone from the Mieterverein, especially a lawyer, can argue that this is normal wear and tear, which is allowed and the deposit cannot be reduced.

There are a lot of ways the landlord can screw a tenant who does not know their rights.

Noch eine Sache dazu: ich weiß nicht genau wie es rechtlich aussieht. Muss der Vermieter unbedingt ein SEPA Konto zur Verfügung stellen oder Barzahlung akzeptieren? Wer ist schuld wenn die Bank aus Sicherheitsgründen die Überweisung nach Russland blockiert?

Mein Bauchgefühl sagt, dass der Vermieter möchte, dass du sein Problem löst, weil er denkt, dass du zu viel zu verlieren hast (die Mietwohnung) und es vor Gericht zu lange bzw. zu teuer für dich wird.

Okay, wenn es wirklich kein Witz oder Trolling ist.

1. Die Überweisungen sind EXTREM unzuverlässig. Heute ist die Bank nicht auf der Sanktionsliste, morgen schon. Es bleiben immer weniger russische Banken, die von den Sanktionen nicht betroffen sind.

2. Fast seit Anfang des Krieges funktionieren Wise, Paysend usw. mit russischen Konten nicht mehr.

3. Es ist nahezu unmöglich, das Geld nach Russland zu überweisen. Auch Kriptobörsen blockieren russische Konten. Der Vermieter möchte, dass du dieses Problem für ihn irgendwie löst.

Kann bestätigen, die Gebühren bei Wise sind recht günstig. Hab's mehrmals selber benutzt, aber nicht für so große Summen.

Not a historian but a native Russian speaker who knows quite a lot about the USSR. Hopefully my answer will not violate the rules of the subreddit.

First of all, socialist countries were different and I cannot speak about all of them. Let's focus on, I'd dare say, the quintessential planned economy - the USSR of the Era of Stagnation. This was still a centrally planned economy and it was much more complex than the Soviet economy of the 1930s. Here, I present one of the primary sources in Russian and its summary in English: "ON THE PROCEDURE OF PAYMENT OF REMUNERATION FOR INVENTIONS AND RATIONALIZATION PROPOSALS" passed by the USSR Council of Ministers in 1974. http://www.libussr.ru/doc_ussr/usr_8235.htm

While you can put the whole thing into Deepl or Google.Translate and they will do a fairly good job, here is a brief summary of the document.

1. An employee who had an idea for a now method of production would have to show the proof of its efficiency. This document mentions this one, a set of official rules to determine the cost savings of the innovation.

2. Once the efficiency was proven, the employee (or a group of employees) were entitled to a compensation - from 20 to 200 rubles, but not more than 50 rubles per person. An average engineer's salary around that time was 150 rubles.

3. Paragraph 37 of the linked document is defining the compensation as a % of total cost savings from the innovation. Here, the maximum amount is capped at 5000 rubles - almost the price of a new (Soviet-made) car!

4. But who exactly was paying? Here, it all depended on the scale of the innovation. Small compensations were paid by the factory management, and here we can safely assume that you needed to have a good relationship with your management. On paper, factory employees were entitled to a lot, from free apartments to vacations at resorts on the Black Sea, but the number of these perks was limited and they were usually provided to the workers who had good relationships with management and/or were somehow "useful" - for example, could help to obtain deficit goods. This is a much bigger topic and I am leaning too much into anecdotal evidence. I am sure there are a lot of sources on the subject and would be glad if other people in the comments could provide them.

So, in short, for small-scale innovations, it was the factory management who was paying. For bigger scale innovations, it could be the ministry - the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Heavy Industry, etc. The details are thoroughly regulated by the document linked above.

One last tidbit: in 1988, the official Society of Inventors had 14,5 million registered members - comparable to the Communist Party itself, which had 18,8 million members at the time.

The official numbers listed in the Wikipedia article look impressive: in 1988, in the Soviet Union, there were 83 700 officially registered innovations, which was more than in the US or Japan. How big and how feasible were all these innovations and how many of them provided cost savings only on paper? What was the reason why they didn't transfer to tangible innovations in the economy and the USSR could not compete with the free market? This requires a much thorough research and is well above my paygrade. I hope other people can provide more sources on this.

No.2 was the biggest giveaway fr

A part of my family comes from this region, I was able to trace it back to 1900 but not earlier. I would say it is possible they spoke proper Yiddish because they used it everyday and learned it at Yeshiva - if there was one. And then, it gets tricky - it could have been that they used a mix of Russian, Yiddish and Ukrainian in their daily lives but would not be able to speak and write 100% "proper" Ukrainian or Russian. It also highly depends on what language was used at schools they went to - was it Russian, the language of the empire, or was it Ukrainian? I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if they spoke a bit of Polish, too.

It's my time to shine! Here's a short list of my favorites.

• Quieter cafes that are open until later, like Anna Blume in Prenzlauer Berg

• Motel One and other hotel lobbies, very nice, quiet, the employees don't seem to care if you don't order anything.

• We still have a solid month of good weather, so any lawn at your favorite park would do

• Dussmann at Friedrichstraße has a few cozy corners, nice views included

• Cafe at Bode Museum

PM here. I can speak for Germany. It is doable, I did it as a non-EU but it was not my first job in Germany. You will obviously need hard skills and your English should be top notch. On top of this, you need to edit your CV the right way. I've seen so many non-EU PMs who worked at big companies in their countries and just mentioned the company name and some details about the project. Over the years, they got used to the fact that everyone knows their company. In the EU, these companies are unknown, so you need to edit the CV according to the target audience and explain the things that seem "obvious" to you.

If you are fluent in German, finding a job is so much easier because you are competing against a much smaller pool of candidates.

(I am a product manager, ex QA automation, back-end dev, even did some devops work, 15 years of experience overall if we count college) I think there are a few directions that should not be confused.

• The hype cycles do not affect the whole industry. I would say there are more new frameworks / paradigms in the frontend world than in the backend. As already noted in the comments, Java is still popular and it isn't going anywhere
• Hype brings either completely new paradigms that might be challenging to learn or somewhat new paradigms based on already existing things. For example, for our current project we chose Kotlin at the very beginning. Less than half of the team had Kotlin experience, the others were willing to give it a try. It took them just a few months and now they are unanimous: they are not getting back to Java, ever.
• If you stick with "old" tech and mature software, chances are that you will not be doing much engaging stuff but rather maintaining existing codebases, swearing at untested and non-testable code, and any major refactoring will be blocked by the management because of a lack of resources and high technical risks. Choose wisely.
• (Probably the most controversial point of all) Try starting with consulting work. This way, you will get exposure to many technologies and paradigms. IN consulting, it is often expected that you are not fully familiar with the tech on your next project but you learn on the go. Note that consultants are most often working in big corporate and when things go sour, so take the things you'll experience with a grain of salt. Still, if you are in consulting for a limited time, know your boundaries and know what you are in for, it can be quite useful to decide your future career direction.

And may the Frau Netto always be kind to your "Hallöchen"!

If you get fired, you have a relatively short amount of time to find a new job, otherwise you have to leave the country. Firing people during Probezeit is easy - that's why it's so long in Germany.

Secondly, you can't be a freelancer on a blue card, you can't take a sabbatical, etc.

If you want to be a full-time employee and not a freelancer, if you choose companies wisely and the market is healthy, then you're right, there are no disadvantages whatsoever.

I assume you moved to Germany with a Blue Card? If so, stick it out for 21 months, reach b1 level in German, get permanent residence, and the world is your oyster: you can go to a Tier 1 company or become a freelancer (aka independent contractor) where you can get Tier 1 money with much easier engineering challenges.

Because from the phrasing here it looks like "check if the Ausbildung is legit". https://service.berlin.de/dienstleistung/328338/

I don't believe they ran a priority check for a hotel worker and decided there are none in Germany/EU.

The embassy might be a different story but Ausländerbehörde Berlin didn't seem especially strict on this one.

Ausbildung for a hotel worker.

And there is a labor market test to get the visa = you will only get the visa if no German or EU citizen wants to do the Ausbildung

Not the case for a while, confirmed by personal experience of people I guided through the process. Germany desperately needs workers of all levels and relaxes visa requirements wherever possible.

I guess it's my time to shine. Here's the list of things I do alone, I'm not into clubbing and drinking at all.

• Restaurants, including obscure/expensive ones.
• Movies, especially at small independent venues.
• Dussmann, the biggest Berlin bookstore, is open until midnight and nobody bats an eye if you sit there and read
• Photography: modern smartphones with Google camera app are crazy good for night pictures. Architecture, neon signs, random reflections, the choices are endless. You can get into film photography or serious digital photography too but it's a money sink, I warn you
• Making a photobook, and I mean choosing a print shop, paper, layout, etc. There is something special in seeing your photos on paper.
• Driving: get a car via a carsharing app, choose a playlist and go for a ride. There's something meditating in it. WeShare has a fleet of electric cars so you can even do it in a somewhat environmentally friendly way.
• Meetups: there are meetups for fellow introverts, too, from writing courses to silent reading club to casual sports where you don't have to engage in a small talk if you don't feel like it.
• There are surprisingly many places that serve good mocktails that aren't 90% sugar and you can actually enjoy the nuances of taste. More classy/pricey establishments will have them even if they aren't on the menu, just ask.
• To make your walks through familiar spots a bit less boring, get an app to add info to openstreetmaps. Is the U-Bahn station wheelchair accessible? Is there a parking space for bikes? Etc.etc. A couple clicks in the app will help provide useful info to openstreetmaps, and they are used by quite a lot of services. (The app is called StreetComplete)

Surprised I had to scroll down that far. QA Automation when you're overqualified for the job is unbelievably easy. I was an okay-ish coder and did Test Automation for a big company. 2 hours of work a day tops and they said I was the most productive employee they've ever seen. My colleagues knew just basic Python.

Oh, and the best part? If you find odd bugs, it's not your job to fix them!