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A friend who works in HR asked for my advice on how to get out of Egypt (better late than never). She was asking about Germany specifically, and how to find English speaking jobs. I am publishing our conversation so that everyone can benefit with some edits to make it fit the blog.

Finding English Speaking Jobs

“So, about the possibility of finding an English speaking job here, YES. There is very high possibility of finding an English speaking job. There are many tech companies in Berlin and they use English as the main language.

The challenge will be in finding companies that sponsor visas for non-Europeans. This is easy for tech people such as myself, but I don’t know if they would do it for non-tech functions like HR.

For example I see many HR people who are not from Germany, and don’t speak German, but I never met someone who isn’t from within EU.

I also don’t know how hard it is to sponsor a visa for a non-tech worker. Tech, medicine, and engineering are considered “rare skills” and that’s why the government makes the visa process fast and easy for them.

That being said, I believe you should try, it will be hard and takes time. The first job outside Egypt always takes time, the average of me and my friends was 1 year of continuous applications, studying, interviewing..etc.”

How to search?
1- LinkedIn: Set your job seeking status as ON. This will tell recruiters that you are looking for a new job.

Also set location filter to Berlin, so you always get the notifications and the job board filtered by Berlin jobs.

2- Indeed.de: Open indeed everyday, and apply for the latest jobs posted there. Make sure if you are using Google chrome it doesn’t translate the job descriptions, or you will be applying to German speaking jobs 🙂

3- Xing: Sounds Chinese, but it is actually German. It is the LinkedIn of Germany. Many times, you will find English speaking jobs on Xing.

4- There is a 4th way, it is non-scalable, but if you decided to leave you should give it some effort, search for companies based in Berlin, or companies that have offices here, open their website, and apply directly.

There are different ways to find companies based here, first you start with the big ones Zalando, Delivery Hero, Amazon, and the list of Rocket Internet companies (Rocket internet is the owner of Jumia, easy taxi…etc, they are based in Germany and have so many companies here).

Another way I used to do is to follow european tech news like Tech.eu, this is the TechCrunch of Europe. I follow companies news, and if any is based where I want to go, I open their website and check their jobs.

You can also, once you found a company with a position you are interested in, do what I call “recruiter hunt”. Go to LinkedIn, connect with the recruiter hiring for this position in that company, and start a conversation telling them why you are interested in the position and if you could get a chance to interview.

5- Use everyone you know abroad. Referrals, referrals, referrals.

Final remarks

It is not easy, but if you put your heart in it, it is doable in a year. I used to apply literally every day, and spend my weekends searching and applying. Also you have to accept rejections, they are part of life.

Someone asked me, what makes an office wheelchair accessible?

While there are many articles on the topic, I think most of them are very technical and target contractors, and designers. Here is my version for hiring managers, office managers, and non-technical people.

1. Is the building accessible with no steps? It doesn’t have to be from the main door, there just needs to be a way that’s flat, and not so steep.
2. Are there areas of the building that are not accessible? What are they? Sometimes they are not that critical like one cafeteria or few meeting rooms.
3. Is there a wheelchair accessible bathroom? This means it is spacious enough to have someone with a wheelchair inside with door closed, and it is preferable if it has grab rails next to the toilet, and other facilities such as the sink, the dryer, the napkins box are low enough for the reach of a wheelchair user.

Mostly the best person to know this is the office manager. They should be able to answer the previous questions.

Sometimes I think anthropology, and sociology could be extended to include the study of cultural differences in tech designs.

For me this is most obvious between American & European websites. I feel I can blindly differentiate if a website is American or European.

American websites emphasize on negative spacing, visuals, and typography.

European websites are more information dense, and bulkier.

This is most obvious when you compare specific verticals with almost identical functionality like travel and food delivery.

The connection I see is in European focus on efficiency (being blunt and direct), while the American focus on aesthetics and perception.

There are some exceptions here and there, like Deliveroo, and Zalando in Europe looking American, and Amazon in US looking European.

The connection is obvious if you give enough attention.

One of the surprises when I see jobs posted by German car manufacturers is they still post them in German. I am not talking about typical jobs, I am talking about jobs related to connected mobility and autonomous driving.

In a world more competitive than ever and with scarcity of skillful people for the next vehicle era, using German is significantly limiting those German manufacturers to compete with their American counterparts, and with smaller startups.

The first step for German manufacturers to catchup is to switch to English, in Germany.

I was rolling somewhere and found one of the cleaning people using this German flag colored dust cleaner.

It reminds me of the first chapter in the righteous mind by Jonathan Haidt. The first case he presents is about the morality of using the country flag to clean the toilet, and how different cultures would react to such act. Americans for example are very proud of their flag. This shows me maybe the Germans don’t care.

I love questions. I ask many of them. I also love being asked questions. Questions lead to thoughts, and thoughts lead to epiphanies.

However, there is an expectation problem when people answer questions. Sometimes people think they answered the question, but the person asking the question is still confused.

That’s why I like ending up my answers – most of the time – with an important question: Does this answer your question?

You will be surprised by how many times you didn’t actually answer but the person wasn’t expressing their confusion, misunderstanding, or disinterest. Try it.

I have been using twitter for 8 years now, and since then I had more than 70,000 tweets. Yesterday I finally managed to delete most of them.

The reason for my decision comes from the fact I am trying to declutter my life, and control my online presence. My twitter account was full of stupid things a typical university student posts, before realizing the danger of what one says when their opinion changes, or like Trump, they become the president of the united states.

It wasn’t easy to delete all of them though. It turned out that twitter limits the number of publicly available tweets to 3200. The rest of your tweets are buried and can only be shown if you use the twitter search functionality. While one might feel safe something can only be found if the exact text in a tweet was searched for, I still wanted to delete them.

After some search, I found an open source tool that lets you delete all your tweets. The way it works is you download it on your machine, and download your twitter archive. The tool then parses the twitter archive, gets the link for each individual tweet, and deletes it. It took almost half an hour to delete 72,000 tweets.

There are still a few undeleted tweets due to glitches in twitter. One particular retweet is stuck on my timeline and every time I un-retweet it, it is still retweeted. I will wait a few days to be able to re-download my twitter archive, and do a second round of deletion on the remaining 700 tweets.

Only the paranoid survives.

Since I am trying to learn German, one of the best techniques that work for me is audio courses. I bought a couple from Audible and they are relatively good.

I mostly use Audible to listen to audiobooks. Amazon has whispersync, which syncs where you stopped on the audio book with what you are reading on your Kindle, given you bought both the audio and text versions of the book.

Amazon also has the same book narrated in English, and German. One idea that comes to mind, what if there is a way to use whispersync between the English and the German version, where I can listen to a book sentence by sentence both in English and German, allowing me to learn the language while enjoying the books I am interested in.

It is a language audio course powered by books.

When I was applying at booking.com I read that one of their success factors is price parity. Their contracts with the hotels state that the hotel can’t offer a lower price anywhere else.

This price parity is what makes them able to offer “best price guarantee”, refunding users the difference if they find the same room with the same conditions cheaper anywhere else.

However, this recently became under scrutiny by the European Union. Some countries ruled it is illegal and anti competition, giving hotels the freedom to offer cheaper price on their website.

I am working recently on a side project that I will announce later, this project involves visiting many hotel websites. I noticed the following:

• Parity is dead. Almost all hotels offer a cheaper price if you book directly through them. The ranges are between 5% up to 20%, with 10% being the most number I saw.
• Consolidation is happening across the board. Smaller hotels are being swallowed by bigger chains. Each chain has its different brands for different price segments. One example for this is the Ibis and the NH chains. From budget to 5 stars.
• This one is more of a question than an observation: is there a chance for a no commission, software as a service OTA? The current problem hotels have is that they are not tech savvy, and consumers are lazy to have an account, and put the credit card on every hotel website they book. Maybe there is an opportunity for the Shopify of hotels with single user management system, and no commission model.

Yesterday I read a very exciting piece of news about a group of international scientists being able to edit DNA in a human embryo to fix a disease caused by a defect gene.

This is super exciting news, and could pave the way to treating many diseases like mine. There is a bias in the medical research community to only work on hot topics. Rare, non-deadly diseases like mine go with no attention. There is little incentive to help such a small number of people who are not dying, regardless of suffering from hundreds of fractures in their lifetime and the impact on the life of those around them.

Finding such generic solutions will save many lives, and improve even more. I see some voices against it, out of fear of abusing it to alter humans, but if we can alter genes to get more healthy, smarter, and stronger humans, why not?