Category: Cyprus

I live in Cyprus for many years now. It is a beautiful little island in Mediterranean Sea. It features warm weather for most of the year, sea, very kind and hospital people, plenty of jobs in IT industry, good food and plenty of alcohol, stable currency, and more. It’s really a nice place to live if you can handle small towns and villages. It’s also a great place to raise the kids.

Not much happens here. It is a quiet and simple place. Yet, when something happens or when I write about it, I post it to Cyprus category.

Kikis Kazamias, the merchant of doom and gloom

Once in a while I stumbled upon a piece of writing which is a pleasure to read regardless of the subject. Today I was catching up with Cyprus news when I saw this article in Cyprus Mail. You have to read it even if you couldn’t care less for Cyprus or the state of its economy.

WHEN our finance minister Kikis Kazamias speaks in public about the economy he sounds as optimistic and cheerful as a man who has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness and told he has two months to live. 
He really does convey the piss-poor state of the economy and its zero prospects with his lifeless, slow, monotone delivery which, if you listen to for longer than a few minutes, you decide to transfer all your money to another country, and if you have no money you are tempted to slit your wrists.
And it is not just the deathly, self-pitying tone of his delivery that is depressing, but what he says as well – things could take a turn for the worse at any moment, that there may be a need for more austerity measures and at best we would achieve zero growth in 2012.
This litany of gloom did not prevent the opposition parties from accusing the government of tabling an over-optimistic budget, as far as its revenue forecasts were concerned. 
If Kikis, the merchant of gloom and doom, carries on talking in public, like he has been doing in the last few days, we will have severe depression epidemic spreading across the country, not to mention a major outflow of capital. 

Doesn’t these just span images upon images in your imagination?

Average salary for programmer in Togliatti, Russia

Yandex, also known as “Russian Google”, recently introduced a service for salary comparisons across Russia, based on the known job vacancies. This is a handy little tool that provides a lot of insight into how things are in Russia and across. For example, I immediately checked the average salary for a computer programmer in Togliatty – my hometown.

23,000 Russian Rubles approximately equal to 530 Euros. On the same graph, average salaries for Moscow and Saint Petersburg are also indicated – 1,200 EUR and 1,500 EUR accordingly. Unfortunately I don’t have an equal or reliably objective resource for Cyprus, but based on my own knowledge and experience, I’d say at least in Limassol the average salary for a programmer would be somewhere around 2,000 EUR. Moscow’s 1,500 EUR is roughly the minimum, I’d say.

First of all, this graph once again confirms that Moscow and Russia are two different things.  Prices, salaries and opportunities are very different.  Even Saint Petersburg, which is the second richest city in Russia is obviously behind here.  Togliatt’s average salary being almost 3 times less than the one for Moscow clearly indicates the huge difference.

Secondly, this makes me question (not that I haven’t before) all those bright and brilliant mass media reports of how fast the Russian economy is growing and of how well things are improving in the regions.  With 500 EUR being an average salary for a qualified professional – economy has a very long way to go.

Thirdly, it is sad to see how stale the IT industry is in my hometown. The city of almost a million in population has only 55 vacancies for a programmer (according to Yandex only, of course).  And out of those most are C++ and 1C (popular accounting software package) vacancies.  There are a few web developer positions available, but for the city that large these are too few.

Octoberfest celebrations at Bavarian Delicatessen

Bavarian Delicatessen once again organizes an annual celebration of the Octoberfest.  Coming Friday, September 30th and Saturday, October 1st, they will host an all you can eat buffet, beer, music and more beer.  Since the place is small and is likely to be packed, make sure you book a table by calling either 25-747441 or 99-603051.  Here is a photo of a poster hanging right outside the Bavarian Delicatessen shop right now.