Moving to Germany as a Software Engineer (Part 1)

Photo by Maheshkumar Painam on Unsplash

This is my first series of stories, that I decided to share with a wider audience. In this series, I am sharing stories and my learning experience about “How I moved to Germany as a Software Engineer?” For simplicity and your valuable time, I have divided this into multiple parts. Links are at the end. Links are at the bottom.

Being a Software Engineer and working for Multi National IT Companies, for a boy from a tier 2 city (Patna, Bihar) in India, is a dream come true thing. Especially when I started in 2014 right after my graduation (BCA), and currently working as Senior Software Engineer at Zalando. At the early stage of my career, I understood and learned that experimenting and failing to learn, iterate and try again is key to surviving in this industry and in life.

Moving fast forward, life happens, after 7 years of working in software service companies and a startup. Things started getting stale and repeated, like working, learning new technology, and switching jobs. At some point in time, I started feeling it's easy to change a job rather than stay in a job.

It was December 2020, after the COVID lockdowns, I started exploring opportunities outside of India, especially in Europe. I always seek experience, because I believe experience is what makes us and help us to make decision in life. In short, experience shapes our life in the long run.

I realize life could be different, even if you do the same work, but live in a different country. Where different cultures, different work styles, and different languages, well these differences create challenges and as engineers, we all love to solve these challenges in day-to-day living specially compare to Indian culture and European culture. In the process, we learn and failed and try again to learn. It's almost a year since I moved to Germany, and I can definitely say my life shaped differently since then.

Well, I started my research for moving to Europe, and a few of new terms learned “Skill shortage” (Currently Germany has a shortage of 400,000 skilled workers), “Work life balance”, “happiness index”, “ease of living”, ”cost of living” well all these are an important factor to know before moving to a country.