> What made you leave?
Missing friends and family, very hard to reach with 12hours difference even by phone. Requires lots of coordination.
Very isolated - very little "new" jobs, conferences(Scala) etc... all in respect to EU (where there are hundreds of scala positions etc.).
I was on very good salary (100kNZD++ dollars / year), life was very very comfortable. Besides huge purchases buying house or like that which I couldn't do I found it very hard to spend over half my salary (never cooking, eating twice a day out). I was living alone in AKL renting all the time.
Weather is very nice, but sun is very very strong, so you require sunscreen 100% of time.
> Did you miss european culture ( or sports on TV or anything like that)?
Yes. I'm not sure how to put it, as I'm not native English speaker, but I hope noone will get offended by following. Also this may wildly differ outside of AKL. There are lots of ethnicities, which is fine, but I am single and I am most attracted to single type, so the pool for me to find girlfriend from is much much smaller (I'd say about 20-30%). While people are very very friendly there, the nightlife in Auckland is pretty bad (was much better in Wellington when I flew there once).
> How did you deal with the time difference between Europe and NZ? When I was in NZ on vacation I missed being able to watch the stuff that I am used to on TV in the evening, due to the twelve hour time difference to Europe. I dont think I could ever switch from soccer to cricket.
I don't watch TV so I didn't miss it, and they occasionally had NHL live games on, which is great, since I couldn't watch it in EU since lots of them were at crazy times. They are huge for cricket and rugby, which I given some try but I did not enjoy it as much.
All in all, I do not regret going there and it's awesome country, but my take on it is, if you have a family, it's the ideal place to move into. Schools are great, it's very safe country, people are mostly happy, and salary of programmer's is very very decent. If you're single, and move there on your own, you're gonna have it a bit tougher, but lots of that depends on you.
Very isolated - very little "new" jobs, conferences(Scala) etc... all in respect to EU (where there are hundreds of scala positions etc.).
I was on very good salary (100kNZD++ dollars / year), life was very very comfortable. Besides huge purchases buying house or like that which I couldn't do I found it very hard to spend over half my salary (never cooking, eating twice a day out). I was living alone in AKL renting all the time.
Weather is very nice, but sun is very very strong, so you require sunscreen 100% of time.
> Did you miss european culture ( or sports on TV or anything like that)?
Yes. I'm not sure how to put it, as I'm not native English speaker, but I hope noone will get offended by following. Also this may wildly differ outside of AKL. There are lots of ethnicities, which is fine, but I am single and I am most attracted to single type, so the pool for me to find girlfriend from is much much smaller (I'd say about 20-30%). While people are very very friendly there, the nightlife in Auckland is pretty bad (was much better in Wellington when I flew there once).
> How did you deal with the time difference between Europe and NZ? When I was in NZ on vacation I missed being able to watch the stuff that I am used to on TV in the evening, due to the twelve hour time difference to Europe. I dont think I could ever switch from soccer to cricket.
I don't watch TV so I didn't miss it, and they occasionally had NHL live games on, which is great, since I couldn't watch it in EU since lots of them were at crazy times. They are huge for cricket and rugby, which I given some try but I did not enjoy it as much.
All in all, I do not regret going there and it's awesome country, but my take on it is, if you have a family, it's the ideal place to move into. Schools are great, it's very safe country, people are mostly happy, and salary of programmer's is very very decent. If you're single, and move there on your own, you're gonna have it a bit tougher, but lots of that depends on you.