Softwareentwickler zieht um – brauche Rat

You’re making a huge mistake.

Incredibly naive

Man that’s a faulty plan from start to finish.

It will be months before you even get an interview. You will be stuck in expensive short term accommodation (hotels and airbnb) because no landlord will rent to you without a job.

You will be tourists until you get a job and get a temporary social security number. No bank account, no acces to the healthcare system.

You must leave Norway after 90 days if no job fond by then. Sure it might as well be a trip to Sweden, but you must know you are not granted permanent residency without some sort of immigration (job, family reunion etc). Udi.no holds all the info you need for immigration.

Is your partner in IT as well? If not, the chances to find an office job without fluent Norwegian are zero. Forget about home office. Even in IT, 2 days a week in the office is not that common. Being open about her condition during interviews will work against her.

Thr salary you expect is optimistic for a newcomer. Don’t expect more than 750k in your first year.

Have you went through immigration rules for pets? You can’t just show up at the airport with yoir cat.

Linkedin is the place for all white collar jobs, finn is for both white and blue collar.

Salary expectations seem reasonable. If anything, a bit on the lower side. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard of an Android developer with 8 years experience earning 1M-1.1M either to be honest. It depends how the employer interprets your skills in an interview process.

Last year the market for engineers chilled down a bit, but it was more challenging for juniors than more experienced engineers. It feels like it is turning around a bit these days but clearly not as hot as it was a couple of years back.

There is two main types of employer’s the way I see it, consultancies and inhouse engineering departments.

It is the large-ish consultancies that sell mostly fully staffed projects to customers. For someone senior I think this is probably your least attractive option. Benefits are relatively large community of engineers, professionalised processes. Drawbacks would that you are „just a worker invoicing hours“ and that salary is „normal“. Companies I’d put in this category is Sopra Steria, Cap Gemini, Bekk, Accenture.

The other type of consultancies are the smaller ones. It is a smaller community and they doesn’t staff full projects so you might be sent „alone“ on a project to a customer. But there you are often put in a larger team as an extra pair of hands. The salary model in these companies would often lean towards a larger part of the salary varying depending on whether you are invoicing a customer all the time or not. Higher upside, but also more risk of you are not put on a project. There’s always a base salary, but it might be relatively low (for an engineer) if you are not working for a customer. Examples of companies I’d put in this category is Kantega, Forse, Shortcut.

For inhouse you have the larger, established companies developing digital products. This is more stable than consulting, you will work in the same domain for a longer period of time, and probably easier for you to lean on more soft skills as well as product development. Salary would be relatively similar to the large consultancy companies. Examples include FINN, Oda, Vipps, Ruter (TET Digital).

Another inhouse alternative is startups. Quite a few startups exists that are looking for engineers. I would expect salaries to be on the lower side. Possibly there’s some ownership stake to be had of you are early in the company, but consider that as a lottery ticket. You shouldn’t work in a company like this for the money. Hard work and as an engineer expect to do all kinds of engineering. It’s nice that you know Android, but they will need someone that can do both backend and web, probably. Very unlikely they would afford having someone that only want to do Android on their payroll.

Regarding remote work, I think it is normal to expect employees to be in the office at least once a week, preferably 2 or 3 days. Relatively few places accept fully remote employees. Of course there are exceptions.

If you work inhouse you save everyone a lot of time to mention your expectations on home office in your first interview. It’s better for everyone if you and the employer’s expectations match. I wouldn’t be afraid of mentioning the epilepsy, but I don’t see why you would need to. Lots of engineers focus better at home when they have very clear tasks they can work on alone. No need to explain why you prefer to work from home a couple of days per week.

If you work for a consultancy, then they will typically say that it is the customer that decides if you can work from home or not. The consultancy can’t really guarantee how that will be for you and practices might change when you .over between customers/projects.

I’m going to end with one last tip and that is the fact that it is extremely common in Norway to have a 3 month notice period. This means an employer looking for an engineer will expect that it takes some time for someone to actually join. This plays to your advantage as you can start applying for jobs around 4 months before you arrive and be a relevant candidate. If you don’t score a job offer right away then it might turn into an advantage as you can start earlier than most of the other candidates. The benefit is obviously that you would be able to secure a job in advance of actually moving. That makes it easier to rent an apartment etc.

I would try and secure a job first, then move. The prospect of spending time in Oslo during the winter without a job, and without bank ID and all the like, seems daunting. I keep being told that the market for IT isn’t the best right now. Good luck, though.