Hello, I am completely new to this forum, so I apologize for any mistake in posting or conventions.

I am facing an employment dilemma that I would like your input on. A couple of days ago I found out that someone who is really special to me might have to spend the next school year in Berlin (because of a very generous fellowship). I am a graduating college senior and was originally planning to work for Bloomberg in New York after graduating. Because of these change in plans, I would like to consider (key word here) the option of accompanying this person to Germany and finding work there instead. My question for you is this: do you think there is any chance at all of finding a programming job in Berlin without knowing any German (or knowing very basic German)? Are there for instance British/American/Australian companies looking to hire qualified Computer Science candidates in Germany? Or am I totally crazy to think so? I have good qualifications (meaning I have no problem finding work in the United States) as I am graduating from Princeton and have had internships at Sun and Microsoft, as well as more than 5 years programming experience in a wide variety of languages. (I will gladly e-mail a resume if someone would like to see it). I don't know if this makes any difference, but I am also fluent in Russian, because I grew up in Ukraine. If I did not ask the right question, but you have a comment to contribute, I would definitely appreciate it. If you need any clarifications or more info, please ask here or e-mail me at pyatakov@princeton.edu

As you can imagine, this is an important subject for me, so I would be very appreciative of any replies or leads. Perhaps one of you would even be interested in considering me for one of the companies you work for. Needless to say, I would be willing to take a pay cut from my current offer just to be able to work in Berlin. I would also be interested in longer-term employment, so please don't think I'd only be there for a year.

Thank you for all of your help. This is compeletely optional, but it would be very nice if you could also e-mail whatever reply you make to pyatakov@princeton.edu, so that I can be sure to get it.

Hi Goliaf

OK, you convinced me. I´d like to hire you but I guess I cannot pay you!

Jokes apart, I´m so sure you can get a job here. I think there are a lot of medium/small companies trying to find people with qualifications AND having the time/money/risk for you to make german courses to learn Deutsch.

But is allways a matter of numbers (or figures you say in USA?). You can check the link sent by Trusday (see messages left links) to check your possible salary. I´m sure in USA you´ll earn more money.

But, not all in life is money. So I guess the best way is to take a look in www.monster.de or in www.jobpilot.de and see what happens. Here in Germany people is really formal and if you send a resume surely they´ll reply you with "yes" or "no" very clearly.

I guess a very good idea is to find a friend or a translator that help you to translate to german your resume and to help you to write a cover letter. This is important for the people of human resources read your resume, otherwise you take the risk they don´t even read the resume because is in english.

Good luck and hope it helps

YO