It was founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (Danish) in equal measure. The software was based on Janus Friis' earlier work (the Kazaa p2p network). It was developed by an outsourced team in Estonia.
Barcelona native here, lived and worked for years in the NY tech scene and now I am in London, although I go back to Barcelona often, and I'm seriously considering moving back. (I don't know the situation in Madrid well enough). Here are my points:
On the one hand, the tech ecosystem is clearly not as strong as Berlin/London or even Paris, and the average engineer salary is _low_. That also might mean there is more room to experiment and make an impact, offset by a general not-so-mature or agile business environment. Barcelona has good universities, and that means many good developers eager to work on cool shit for lower pay than in other places, if you're into starting your own thing.
Barcelona has many peripheral, small offices of large companies, so I'd say you may be able to find some of the jobs you're looking for in that circuit.
Additionally, Barcelona has a wonderful creative scene. Many strong designers, any many studios doing interesting stuff. Not sure if that's a world that interests you, but many small and big agencies have offices in the city.
And I know you're not asking about that, but dude, quality of life is unbeatable: weather, food, culture and pace of life compensate for what you may be missing on the other end, particularly if you have cultivated relationships in the rest of Europe that you may be able to maintain and use to secure business.
It may depend on what you are looking for. If you truly prioritize really good tech jobs, I would say don't do it. Adjusting your expectations in terms of salary and general ecosystem is required. Salaries won't be at London or Berlin level by a pretty big margin, but at the same time you should adjust by a cost of living that is about like 40% of what it would be in London.
If you want something more balanced, and a rich well-rounded human experience (ha), I'd encourage you to consider the full picture and do it.
There was a moment during my wife and I's honeymoon to Mallorca/Barcelona where I was jogging through Gracia and I truly thought that this was where I was meant to live. A really...really beautiful and amazing city. Once my two huge dogs pass(I can't bear the thought of moving them overseas) I will try my darnedest to move to Catalonia.
If you didn't want to wait, and if the problem is the flight, you could take the QE2 ship from New York to Southampton with your dogs. Unless they're particularly huge.
From Portsmouth harbour (30 minutes from Southampton docks) there are ferries to Santander or Bilbao in Spain, which also allow pets.
The thing is, BCN is mostly as expensive as Berlin, but salaries seem considerably lower for developers. I love BCN, but prefer to work and live in Berlin and visit BCN once or twice a year. Berlin has a lot to offer as well, certainly no beach and pretty bad winters though.
That is all true. I really love Berlin and I consider it as much an option as Barcelona, or better. The amount of culture and stimulating things happening is incredible, plus the most liberal city and the most interesting tech scene in Europe (sorry London). The weather has the worst of NYC and the worst of London together though.
How long have you been here? I would be very surprised if the weather was considerably worse than NY and especially London. Current 7 day forecast looks pretty comparable :)
Summers here in Berlin are fantastic and probably have London beat. November-April are really depressing though and seems to take a big toll on everyone.
My girlfriend and I are seriously planning on moving to BCN (or a nearby seaside town) within the next 2 years. We're also coming from the NYC scene. We're not EU citizens so I can't just go find work there but I've heard salaries in the EU are lower than the US anyways so I am going to try and work remotely for an American company.
What's the tech meetup scene like there? Are there conferences? You mentioned the creative scene is great there and I'm totally into that. I'm very interested in getting into interactive installation pieces where art and tech converge. Like what Eyebeam does in NYC.
but high pollution in Barcelona and Madrid. They're big cities and a good part of the population relies on scooters on cars. Jogging there may not even be good for your health in such places. Of course, London is even worse, but Paris is better and the Riviera is the top.
I was afraid of air pollution in Barcelona too as my wife is allergic to some pollutants but if you don't take a flat facing the street and go slightly uphill (gracia, sant gervasi, sarria, ...) it is totally fine. She hasn't had any problems.
The benefits of physical activity far outweigh the increased longterm risk from air pollution. Also the pollution might be high compared to the best cities, but its still far from places like Beijing were the air is downright toxic, and still people live there.
If you're into political action, live in London and are proficient in THREE.js or WebGL, well, we could definitely use your help here -> www.forensic-architecture.org/jobs-internships/
That was also one of my favorite moments of the day when I worked in NYC, lunch at Washington Square, listening to whatever jazz band was playing and watching people. A thousand times better than Union Square :)
> In the longer-term, I'd like to explore match making between data visualization people who would like to get into machine learning and machine learning researchers publishing papers.
As a data viz person, I would be absolutely thrilled to work on this, I'm trying to scratch time here and there to position myself better in that respect, learning more and trying to bridge that gap.
I agree, and I think the misleading headline is aligned with traditional resistance to consider BI as a serious economic policy.
In fact, what seems to be a common story in the article is that giving money directly in a way that is sustained over time allows people to plan long-term, stand on their feet and find better work or start businesses, making better long-term financial decisions to reverberate to the whole of the community.
The easy resistance to BI is to say that it will remove incentives to work, and that is what the headline seems to imply. The content of the article seems to suggest the opposite.
There is a solution that can help you get here, and it worked for me: unfollow everyone and everything.
By unfollowing everyone except a handful of boring sites that barely ever publish anything, my newsfeed has become very boring and I rarely feel the pull towards it or any of its addictive power. The end result is that when I do log in, I only see notifications for a couple of groups full of my friends or interests that are truly relevant and I don’t waste any time scrolling.
At this point in my life, Messenger (not from the main site, but from its own site) and Groups are quite convenient, and both are a bit necessary for me at the moment, so I can’t quite disable Fb, but I’m very happily giving up on the feed for good.
I might eventually quit altogether, but this method has worked for me quite well for the last few months.
This works well for any follow or subscription based network. Taking the instant gratification and new-content-every-five-minutes aspects out, just leaves you with something that does not incentivise you to keep returning so often (and therefore waste your time).
I have several friends who would benefit a lot if they stopped following hundreds of accounts, keeping their feeds and brains busy with "nothing."
Thanks a lot for your advice, this is great. Former academics / PhDs are good pool of people with wonderful skills (I didn't finish my own PhD, but I know the environment). Some PhDs might hopefully also be more attuned to the social problems like the ones we are looking into, so we will definitely be considering that.
The challenge we could have is more on looking for usability and frontend expertise, considering the type of tools we want to build, and these are not necessarily in the programming skillset you grow during a PhD (generally more about data analysis / engineering, but of course it depends on the line of work).
Thank you! We are paying a liveable wage for London and are pretty flexible on many fronts, and the satisfaction and passion for the work we do covers the rest of it (at least for me).
I am confident there are people who find the combination reasonable and think similarly, so hopefully we'll be able work that out.
