I am from Brazil.

I was born in a 200k inhabitants city where the major economic force was farming, specially sugar cane (to make fuel alcohol actually) and also there are some cow farms there.

Later I lived a 1 million people city that is our equivalent of the sillicon valley, I saw somewhere that the city has 60% of all Brazillian programmers and also most of the scientists in many fields. It is named Campinas.

Then I moved in a 100k people town where 60% of the population is in the 10% most rich, that town is actually only a place to live, and the population there mostly work in other cities.

Now I live in São Paulo, the town proper has 11 million people, the whole metropolis has 27 million.

So, what is the experience here? Well, Brazil has one interesting issue: it wants to be US...

Except it copies the US worst stuff, without the good.

São Paulo has the second highest cost of living of the world, unfortunately I don't remember where I saw that ranking. (in Mercer São Paulo is in tenth, still very high anyway). But the wages here suck.

I worked two years ago in a big company that made mobile stuff for the biggest airlines, banks and pharma here. In the company structure I was above the senior programmers, being tagged as "solutions architect", yet my wages were around 15 USD hourly. (the wages of a senior iOS programmer were 11 USD, junior it was 7 USD).

Right now 1/3 of my money is to pay student debt, and most of the rest to pay common bills (food and rent), I don't own a car (I live in walking distance of the office, and my girlfriend has her own car), so I don't have car-related costs. To buy Bjarne book on C++ I had to use birthday money from my grandmother.

Our laws are mostly left-leaning, they reflect a lot what Obama would do, our government is horribly corrupt, and we are losing freedoms in the same speed that US is, or at a worst speed (for example to have a gun here is almost impossible, and by the way, gun crime is rising, the more gun control we have, the more gun crime rises, but gun control keep getting tighter as we started now to get school shootings too).

Public education suck. Our government is so bloated that Oscar Niemeyer (the guy that designed Brasilia) complained that the presidential palace had 4 times the daily traffic than the maximum that he designed and he was fearing the thing would one day have structural failure.

There are plenty of opportunities to make money, if you are willing to venture in illegal stuff some way or another, things here are so absurdly regulated that it was calculated that some multinational companies might spend 5% of their income just to understand the regulations (and not paying taxes or anything like that). Here in Brazil 4.2 million laws were created in the last 20 years, this mean that if the parliaments worked every single day without breaks or vacation or sunday and saturday they would still create 1150 laws every day. Try to keep track of that ;)

Also Brazil is very, very, very violent. I am 25 years old, I witnessed so far: 2 firefights, from 2 different bedrooms in two different cities, 3 times I got a gun pulled on me, and I had lots of friends tell stories like that, also my parents house got about 9 break ins in 4 years, and the cleaning lady that knows everyone in my parents neighborhood every week come with news of who got murdered.

Also here in São Paulo we had about one mass robbery (where a huge group of bandits enter a restaurant and rob all clients) for every week in the last year, and every day several people get murdered at night, and we have about 100 cops murdered last year (in São Paulo city alone).

I typed too much, maybe I write more later, time to work :)