This is a case where policy will have to lead public opinion and culture. It has been done successfully in many countries, though less traditional than Japan to begin with. Subsidise childcare, make maternity leave longer, ear mark some leave for fathers etc. Then you'll see change eventually.
Yikes, I'm sorry for your experience. I think highly skilled foreigners coming to Sweden to work is such a recent that society is lagging behind. I've heard many stories of people changing their last names to their husband/wife's in order to get job interviews etc. I hope as time goes on people will be more accepting.
This is the biggest problem. There really is no rental market to speak of, so talking about rental queues being 10 years long is not really relevant. If you want to live in Stockholm for a longer time you need to buy. This also means it takes months and months getting your loan approved, finding an apartment and waiting to move in. Only the waiting to move in part can take more than 3 months.
The flip side is, once you've bought a place, it can be really really cheap to live in with the current interest rates. We pay less than $1000 for a two bedroom in central Stockholm for instance, all included (interest, fees, electricity, water, heating, tv, broadband). This also means absolute prices are insanely high, and will probably continue to rise since there's still room for it to grow.
Months of getting your loan approved?
At _MOST_ its takes a week. This is also been the subject of many issues connected to the rising prices. Low interest rate == easy loans dishing out.
It takes more time to actually find a decent place you like than to secure the loan. That took a month for us. We saw
30 apartments.
Btw bids on two apartments.
One was a low ball and they didn't want it.
The second one the price rose 200k (SEK) before I won.
No, I didn't mean it takes months to get your loan approved for most people. It did for us though, since we moved from abroad, having no work history in Sweden and no jobs at that point. That means you have to get two job offers first (for a couple) and that takes time. During this time you are looking at apartments but can't bid since you haven't secured a loan. Then comes the looking part, which for us took maybe 2 months. There was a lull in availability (and extreme competition between bidders), and we were outbid for everything. When we finally found one, and outbid another couple (price rose 700SEK btw), we had to wait another 3 months to move in.
Everybody's experience is different, but I think we can agree this is madness and not good for our economy. I rarely have much positive to say about the US, but one thing is that you can literally go to almost any city (except maybe SF and NYC), live in a hotel, and within a week you have found some place to live. Might not be the highest standard of living, but you can always trade up.
I had the same experience as you in terms of previous work history. I just moved back to Sweden and had approx 1 month job history (and not even full-time but a trial). Got my loan approved in a single day. Called back a week later to expand the amount I wanted to loan.
I got the "lånelöfte" (guarantee to loan) from the bank in a single phone call which allowed me to bid.
May I ask what bank you went to? I can add that I had the necessary 15% but outside the country.
They never asked about it, nor previous work history.
Also, I don't have a Swedish name if you were wondering :-)
Not really, part of the reason people want to live centrally in the first place is the density and the high quality turn-of-the-century housing. Tall ceilings, nice wooden floors, large windows. It sounds like you've never actually been inside one.
> It sounds like you've never actually been inside one.
No, I've actually seen several ones (not Swedish though)
Most of them are cramped (especially in Ireland/UK)
I've saw the tall ceilings (not really an advantage to me), wooden floors are nice as well as the large windows, seems like this is more common in Continental Europe (France/Germany)
But: no elevators until they managed to fit one somehow, the old doors/windows may be a liability (maintenance also they are not very good heat insulators)
I'm talking about continental Europe and Scandinavia (including Stockholm where I live). UK is very different in terms of apartment condition. I've seen many carpeted floors, and even carpeted bathrooms of all things, really not acceptable here. Older buildings are very well renovated, and are generally better built than most new buildings.
As for the rest of Europe, the demand speaks for itself, even if you don't personally like the style and high ceilings, most people do.
Modern housing on the continent is far superior to that in the UK (and I like carpets!).
There were standards on house building which assured a minimum floor area which were later abandoned. The UK now has the smallest homes in Europe. The windows are tiny, and the materials are cheap.
I agree turn-of-the-century housing was generally generously proportioned, and well built, and stand the test of time. And the housing that followed up to 1940s, even the austere housing that followed in the 50s wasn't bad either. But from the 60s onwards the quality took a nose dive (there are some good quality social housing complexes), and the puny mock victorian 80s and 90s houses are the worst examples.
I'd be interested to hear why the UK took a turn for the worse, and other places didn't (or perhaps they did to a lesser degree). Belgium is similarly cramped but seems to continue to build good proportioned housing.
After relying on Google Maps a lot for many years living in the US, I have (maybe unsurprisingly) noticed that it doesn't work nearly as well in Europe. As in, I'd zoom in on central Stockholm and search for something common, like the name of a restaurant, and Maps would promptly swoosh me to Nicaragua where it found a place with that name. It's doing stuff like this so often that I rarely use it anymore.
I don't know why they all make the same mistake of hiring literally a thousand people after their one big hit. Only Mojang seems to have kept small enough to sustain themselves in the long term.
I guess it's not a mistake if you are a highly paid CEO with shares that grow exponentially in value as your firm does. Exit quick or at least sell off some of those shares before it goes to hell and then move on to your next job having "been at the helm of a company with thousands of employees".
I'm late to the party, but I want to share an insight I've had regarding game development and UI applications. It baffled me for a long time why building UIs were such a pain, and doubly so in a web app. Why could I, and others, create such seemingly advanced graphics and interactions in a video game, but try to make a UI and you're stuck with thousands of difficult to discover bugs. After I started using react, I realised games are "easy" for the same reason react is a huge productivity multiplier: you re-render the game every single frame. You have the data that represents your game state, there's a game loop, and you render every single little damn thing, every damn frame. It's a one-way flow of information from your explicit state to the presentation layer. React works the same way, only it re-renders only if the state changed. That's it. Super simple, but it's a mind shift.
Regarding 30. wasn't it recently concluded here on HN that obese people actually end up costing less to society since they tend not to survive into their 80s/90s? Not that his thought is good even if this was not true.
An obese person costs more per year but less per lifetime since he dies sooner. Correspondingly, an obese person should pay more each year but they will pay less over their lifetime.
Sweden and Russia don't pose any direct threat to each other, but even though Sweden's military has been defunded in the past few decades after the cold war, it's still one of the biggest weapon exporters in the world.
