A Web Dev On A Relocation To Helsinki — First Month At Work

Alex Jilkin
2 min readApr 4, 2021

Happy to say that we have the keys to our first apartment,
A nice 55 square meters in Taka-Töölö with a view to the Sibelius park.

It was a journey of understanding where we would like to live, we went through different neighborhoods.
The one at Meilahti that we really liked but the apartment owner didn't want to approve our cat, or the one at Pasila with a private sauna and a view to the central park that felt distant, or the one at Kallio that almost got to the finish line with some nice urban and diversified feelings which go interrupted by the winner.

We like this neighborhood, it’s close to the center, feels urban and yet has a villagy feeling to it.
The apartment building is not part of a 7 story block, its a small three stories building located at a small street with the Sibelius park right in front of it.

Back to work, the first month got by very smoothly, my company is organized in it’s onboarding, and development environment.
I guess its a combination of both experience and the quality of the onboarding that leads me to feel already very natural working here.
Got a few tasks already merged, worked with other teams, did some reviews, got some reviews, got a feedback, gave a feedback, been to at least 20 intro orientation sessions.
Overall I would think that its the end of my first year, not first month. Pretty cool.

What else? I guess that tech companies are similar in many senses.
I dont feel that it is very different from what I experienced so far with one big exception — transparency.
Everything tries to be transparent as much as it can for a tech company the has hundreds of employees.
Every conversation is encouraged to be in the public channels, the hr channel is filled with people asking if something is paid for.
Which is great. people are not afraid to ask, and later on other people can easily get what they deserve as well.

To sum it up, so far relocating to work at Helsinki is proving itself to be very nice and peaceful, while being full of new experiences and challenges.
Which to me feels like the best combination.

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