Prague is a beautiful city to visit, be it for a weekend or a week. But living there long term sucks - most of the Prague apart from historical centre is properly fugly, as soviet-style architecture is still all over the place, cramped high rise residential areas with high criminality, little nature around (major mountains are > 500km away, sea even further), Czech love to constantly complain and moan about almost everything (it really gets to you after some time). Gap between rich (ie IT workers, managers) and rest of population is big and widening, people constantly hate politics but vote an a-hole after a-hole for last 20 years. So rich often discuss how to shield themselves financially from the rest of country, politics and economy as much as possible - not an indication of paradise. Half of the country is xenophobic and/or racist (although ie Roma question is a complex one).

I've worked there for couple of years, to be successful in IT was trivial due to constant lack of senior people, from what I heard its even worse now due to massive off/near shoring of multinationals. When looking back, moving away was one of the best decisions of my life and major step up in quality of life.

Of course there are positive aspects, just like everywhere. Professionals (I can judge IT) are smart and work hard, beer is the best there is (for me) and as mentioned its a great starting point for career. There are people who consider it the best place for them. Interestingly, none I know in this category lived abroad for longer to properly compare.

But that's me, I love these high altitude places, and based on amount of Czech you can meet anywhere in the Alps even people there love them. The thing is, high mountains are the last place of true wilderness, rest has been conquered and cultivated long time ago and is usually just a substitute for things that were.

I've met people in Prague that didn't get this, they were asking what the heck am I doing in those stupid mountains. Everybody is different, the only thing important is to be happy with where you are. I've found my place (Switzerland, in 45 minutes drive I am right under Mont Blanc).

The nature of the outsourcing/nearshoring industry sets the top limit for the salaries at ~90k CZK annually and imply problems with finding senior professionals.

Funny, so do all ex-Yugoslavs, and I understand Russians do too. Could be some kind of Slav thing. Or communist :-)

It's quite saddening to read CZ has similar issues. We've been in CZ in 2007 and Prague in 2017. I liked Prague a lot in 2007, not so much after ten years.

(I'm a software engineer and use Uber in Prague every week or two.)

There are local companies that are a bit cheaper, as others have already said.

Can you explain more what the platform of the "Pirate" party is? As an American I would have thought the the "Pirate" party would be far right libertarian (free market, downsize government, reduce or eliminate taxes).

The context is that we have very big gov't with lot of benefits, and (kind of, it's complicated) high taxes.

In such situation left has nowhere else to go (defending status quo is not very popular), so it's full of (often stupid) populists.

"Intellectual" elite is heavily leaning right, to the point of being anti-populist (they are regularly sacrificing votes just to virtue signal).

Pirates seem like a non-bullshit party that tries to stray from both extremes. They had some PR fails (they sometimes seem amateurish), but mostly seem to be really good alternative for people wanting to limit the gov't but not cut it to little pieces.

At the same time yes, they propose to downsize the government and tax reduction, but not elimination. They also propose digitalization of government and reduction of bureaucracy, but they also want that as a base to build more control on.

Many specifics of the Czech Republic are at play here, since the party is no longer a minor one and at the same time is the only major "non traditional" one (no historical baggage including people - actually that's very important) that isn't Babiš (ANO, but everyone knows the party is him, basically - including people in the party who went public), it attracts the interest of many very different people ranging from left wing radicals to free market anarchists; people who weren't as "radical" (they're not radical at all but definitely more than other parties) rather joined ODS (right, major party), ČSSD (left, almost irrelevant) or TOP09 (center, now totally irrelevant).

Then the free market anarchists created their own party (Svobodní - "The Free Ones", never even became relevant except a very tiny little bit of relevance in the EU parliament) and the result is that Pirate party is more leftist. Sadly soon after conservatives have "attacked" (joined and changed the program) the party and made it conservative, and a lot of previously pro-free market people became conservative because of the immigration crisis and rapidly increasing EU influence that nobody here really likes, left or right (these same issues also gave rise to the fourth biggest party SPD, which is an openly racist pro-russian one, luckily they're largely irrelevant except for municipal politics in few places).

You make them look like they actively go around destroying bridges. One footwalk collapsed by accident and people rushed to investigate other bridges to prevent another collapse. Of course they found them in state of crumbling down so obviously tehy had to be shut down/prepared for reconstruction. You attribute the blame to ANO while it was more due to chance.

You listen too much to house development lobby if you attribute the housing bubble to them. It'm more likely caused by global historically low interest rates.

The taxi mafia question is hardly going to be solved unless the next government has economic understanding of the problem. By appeasing to all parties involved they can hardly move it forward.