My story about relocating from Russia to Germany and looking for a new job
Hello everyone! My name is Roman and in this blog post, I’d like to tell you a story about how me and my wife relocated from Moscow to Berlin. It took about 4 months to solve all the bureaucracy issues and find a job, but this post is not a detailed instruction on how to relocate and find a job but just a narration about the experience and feelings I had during this period of time.
First and foremost, let me introduce myself. For most of my life, I had been living in Russia in Moscow, and over the last about 15 years I’ve been working as a programmer. I have had a lot of different jobs, but the most interesting step in my career before relocating was the previous six years I’d been working in Yandex.
Yandex is a large Russian IT company, which was started in the mid-90s as a local search engine and in that time it could have been considered as the “Google of Russia”. Russia is one of a short list of countries where the local search engine is more popular than Google. These days Yandex’s business is much wider than just internet searching. The company built a taxi service and acquired Uber in Russia; Yandex is famous for its self-driving cars; it created its own open-source column-based database called Clickhouse, ML library Catboost and dozens of other less famous but high-quality products. Nowadays, Yandex can be considered not only as the “Google of Russia”, but also as the “Uber of Russia”, the “Amazon of Russia”, “Whatever you can imagine” of Russia and most of these services are more popular in Russia rather than their international counterparts.
Me and my wife Olya had been dreaming for a long time about relocating from Russia to a few specific European countries, but we both wanted to get a job. I, with my experience, was sure that I would be able to find a job and we wanted Olya to find one first.
In Russia, Olya had been working for a Russian representative of a German company when in the summer of 2020 that company decided to close its Russian office and Olya was invited to continue working in the Berlin office.
