It's a painstaking and time consuming process. There's a huge talent pool within the UK and mainland Europe however given the tech/start-up commonalities between the UK & US, it would make an enormous difference if the process of hiring from the US was simplified.
Oh god, I am beginning to feel kinship with Donald Trump and Ron Paul - I want to tell my government to stop interfering.
TechCityUK is a government quango?? I thought they were some kind of over-funded startup/charity. Give me small government or give me death.
Oh no, I've been reading American comments on here too long.
Edit: I was going to delete as not constructive, but genuinely this was a surprise, and not a good one. TechcityUK looks and feels like a well funded startup with great government connections but no business plan. I did kind of assume they were gov connected if only because they can do events with government ministers, but an actual funded quango just annoys me - they just got in the way the last time I visited (GDS/CCS roadshow, where the GDS staff and I just exchanged emails but I still somehow got on the TechcityUK mailing list - and hang on they keep trying to charge me - a lot - annually for the pleasure of funding them as a taxpayer. What kind of quango is this?
Aaargh, pass me the shotgun Mabel, I'm gonna gits me a revenoo man.
That sounds more like TechUK, which afaik isn't government funded and is a membership based lobby group. They did a bunch of events together with GDS last year. Different from Tech City UK which is more like PR to help the UK, and free training/events for startups to help them grow. Unfortunate name collision...
I'm happy to be corrected though! I've been slightly out of touch these last few months.
So, sniping from the sidelines, whilst fun, is not constructive nor man in the arena valuable so, in a debate with just myself, here is my five point plan for what my tax money should be wasted on
1. TechCityUK seems to have the usual, born out of a politicians excitement, mission to "bring together and ignite a spark". Now in our hyper connected, social media addicted, Meetup fueled entrepreneur scene, a government agency to bring us together is just laughable. As a case in point I have now been to I think three events at techCity and not one did I go to because of techCity - two were meetup.com and one was the GDS mailing list. Now perhaps they have great office space really cheap (it is a nice office slap bang in (expensive!) central London) but as I am supposed to go to a bootstrap business Meetup tonight above a pub in Kings X (Google Charlie Irish and apologise from me I might not make it as usual), as they manage without government subsidies I suspect the role techCity has is ... Redundant to the max.
2. Immigration. Oh let's get involved in that quagmire. I have actually sued the Home Office (back when we had a Home Office) to get a coder back in the country. Worked for us for 18 months then told to fuck off, we can find a Brit to do the job. Turned out we couldn't.
So here is my immigration suggestion. If I have a foreign coder working for me, and you tell her to fuck off out the country, you can either pay me compensation while I go find another British worker, and train them up, or you can fund her for six months in ForeignLand while she sets up a home office.
In short if you don't want foreign workers in our country dear government, paying taxes and doing value added work, then you can fund the difference between why, for heavens sake, I cannot find a British born coder for love nor money and why there are dozens of East Europeans with Maths degrees out of their bottoms wandering around London.
I may not have a coherent view there but I am definitely blaming government for it.
3. Open Source and procurement. Ok this is a bit of my own bugbear (http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto) but the CCS/GDS hub is doing a fine job, and needs to be cloned and passed around local and regional and the rest of central government. Whilst there may be difficulties with actual cloning, expanding their team and remit is more viable.
So firstly we need to make open source the default for all new government software development (it's more or less there). Then the default for existing services - this is fundamentally because we are now having our government run by software and like our laws we should be able to read it. It also means there will be massive massive opportunity to funnel the huge government spend out to an Eco-system of smaller developer communities who will do what TechcityUK cannot dream of.
And before or as part of that, we need to introduce acorn-like OSS projects - take expert civil servants, give them good project managers and funding and get them to seed OSS projects, hackathons, OJEU announcements, whatever. Start a project on GitHub, because the people we want to attract to working on government projects are not the kind of people who will do an RFT first.
4. Move it out of the South East. I have spent 40 years here on and off. It's not nice, it's just powering along. But it's sucking the rest of the country dry. Take those techCity funds, and rent out corrotated iron sheds in country lanes all over the land, and hand them to young idiots with an idea. And give them train passes to travel down to London to go to Charlie Irish's meetups to meet old idiots.
Have the gumption to directly fund and support young people with a vague idea that starting a business is a good thing. Have them attached to idiots like me who will ask difficult questions every month or six weeks and just accept that 90% will show no return - expe...
So just a small point because I think the names cause some confusion -- the organisation "Tech City UK" is based out of a small, desks-only office somewhere near Moorgate. Used to be a similar set up just north of the Old St roundabout. It's low key and really not an events space. My feeling is that Tech City UK is a lean, good value organisation.
There's also the neighbourhood loosely called "Tech City" which is Old St and east London generally, but I'm not sure how much that name has currency any longer. When it launched with that name - loads of fanfare, trumpets, press etc - Google Campus opened at the same time, as an events and co-working space. It's fancy. So for a lot of people Google Campus == Tech City. Separate entities tho. You may have been to meetups hosted there or somewhere like it?
And I have to say, a lot of my current goodwill towards Google is based on them opening Google Campus. Exactly the right intervention to catalyse the neighbourhood at just the right time.
On your point (4) -- Tech City UK's big focus right now is on the north of England. Tech North opened a month or so back to promote and help out, getting the startup ecosystem to properly take root across those cities.
> Take those techCity funds, and rent out corrotated iron sheds in country lanes all over the land, and hand them to young idiots with an idea.
You may think that everyone outside the M25 has straw in their hair but things are not quite that bad, I have running water and an inside toilet at my house.
I worked for two years in a ex RAF barracks. Not corrotated iron but the idea is we don't need to be in the south east or even in particularly fine accommodation - good enough is good enough when you are striving upwards.
When they succeed there will be folks wanting to build a better glass and steel edifice overlooking fine country side - and rent out a small part of it to help with the mortgage.
My biggest tech-envy went to a guy who had parlayed a freelance gig into a firm and built a small set of buildings out on farm land backing onto his house. It overlooked the best part of Essex, and was just how a "campus" should be - even if it was just twenty people.
Not an office, not a house, but a tech based, well it was nice and I wanted not to work there but to copy him.
... because BT loves to provide high speed broadband to sheds on farmland.
There is plenty of cheap office space in northern cities, good infrastructure and reasonably priced housing. I work from home in Manchester but only have to walk 100 yards to a light rail station that can take me either to the airport or in to the city centre.
I see that Tech North is running events here as well as elsewhere, I don't have a feel for whether they are doing anything useful though.
Had to be willing to put up with me ... Very rare skill set :-)
Yes, we should plan and prepare for non uk workers leaving. Just as for uk workers. But that is no way to build a team, saying, "dont do anything that we cannot hide someone else to do just as well". That's a race for the bottom.
You hire the best you can, trust them as much as you can and push them as far as you can. The results almost always pay you back. If that process will come to a natural halt on its own rhythms then fine. But When halfway through this process the men in black knock on the door and chuck your people out, phrases like "should have prepared better" aren't much help.
Every start up has people that it relies on - eventually they automate themselves away, and move on tot the next thing you totally rely on. But take them away for whatever reason and you is stuffed.
If immigration rules say ... You can lose that person with not a lot of notice, then really they are saying, only hire British.
So how much notice did you get that your employee would need to leave the UK? Was it that their visa was suddenly withdrawn, or was it that their visa was expiring but you hoped (but ultimately failed) to get it renewed?
I'm only asking because I haven't really come across this before - I know of cases where there's a lot of effort to get a visa but, generally, once they've got one, it's been pretty smooth.
"positive rebranding of the Exceptional Talent visa scheme" pretty much sums this up - spin on a lackluster program. Revolutionary - hardly.
Want to do something revolutionary or at least something that might make a difference, pull in teams from under-developed countries, train them up by putting them in top tier companies specifically not as cheap labour (a mini-YCombinator for want of a better description), then let them go do their thing.
> Yes, let's have money decide who gets or doesn't get into the country
Yes, let's have money decide who gets or doesn't get food or shelter or medical care... oh wait.
Snarkiness aside, rich people can already buy citizenship in most countries, even the U.S. It's by far the fairest and most objective system to decide who gets in or doesn't get in. It also has the positive side effect of selecting those least likely to mooch off the state (a popular fear amongst those against immigration).
Yes, ideally those human rights would be provided for by the government. However, there is too much food poverty and lack of medical insurance, even in developed nations, for me to accept this to be the case.
> Yes, let's have money decide who gets or doesn't get into the country, who can and cannot get hired from abroad. Isn't legal bribery great...
I'm pretty sure that people with enough money already have ways and means to get around visa restrictions by doing contortions similar to what companies do to avoid paying taxes.
As an example, the US process for H1b visas is a highly technical affair that allows companies with large legal departments (e.g. IBM) to hire people significantly below market rate while other companies would have trouble employing people from abroad on an H1b visa. This leads to a double market distortion: one is positively discriminating for companies with a large legal department, narrowing the number of positions that people from outside the US can access, and the other is that the H1b holders themselves are (if you look at the facts) underpaid in comparison to the normal US job market.
Having an auction would ensure that the corresponding money flows to the state (and can help alleviate any qualification shortage that makes it necessary to rely on talent from abroad), while making sure employers have fair and non-discriminatory access to international employees, prioritized by the value these companies put on the talent. Also, an auction would mean that the price is set by the market, i.e. if one particular field of employment has a shortage, then paying extra money to sponsor a visa beyond what other fields can pay makes economic sense and companies from that particular field would spend more money but also get a larger share of the available visa pool.
I came to the UK from Canada to work in the software industry. My employer sponsored a Tier 2 General visa for me (cost me, and them, and took 1+ months). A friend of mine got into the UK under the "Youth Mobility Visa". His process was shorter and simpler, but AFAICT he can't renew his visa once it expires.
I don't consider myself exceptionally talented so I don't think a Tier 1 would have been right for me, but I wonder how many software tech (as opposed to sciencey/businessey/researchey) people get into the UK with that visa?
Very few. Seven in total last year I believe. I hired an exceptional Data Scientist from Moscow for a London based startup on a Tier 2 visa. He had a PhD plus a number of years of commercial experience and was being offered an outstanding salary. Technically, he could have qualified for a Tier 1 visa but the process involved was a nightmare. It was genuinely easier to bring him in on a Tier 2.
Any change to the current Tier 1 structure is a welcome change however, until they reveal the definitive qualification criteria, I won't be reading too much into this. The Tier 1 visa process in the UK is a logistical nightmare which is why only 7 of TechCity's allocation of 200 Tier 1 visas were utilised in the first place.
Yeah, the UK cannot deny entry to EU citizens, no matter how unskilled, so to make the number of immigrants more politically palatable, they're cracking down on non-EU citizens, no matter how skilled.
Easiest way into the UK is probably to naturalize in some other EU country first. I wonder where is easiest? Germany, Belgium, Ireland?
With the migrant tide - don't count on it anywhere. Unless you go the really nasty ways - like arranged marriage (cultural ritual, don't ask, you can marry the girl with parents permission, and she has almost no say) with roma bride in eastern europe.
Portugal has a Golden Visa scheme, which "gives foreign investors who spend 500,000 euros on a property ... the right to live in Portugal ... They are also free to travel around all the EU countries ... and after six years they can apply for Portuguese citizenship" according to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26636829 .
In fact, if you're a non-EU national, the easiest way to get into the UK is to marry (or be in a civil partnership or in a long-term relationship with) a (non-British) EU national. The paperwork is simple, cheap, and although it's not exactly fast you get a temporary certificate within a week or so.
Some of the highly English-speaking countries, like the Nordics, might be a good option.
Better act fast though, before the UK "brexits" the EU. I have no idea how difficult it would be for people(/me) to keep their(/my) address and company in the UK in that scenario.
Malta has the reputation of being the easiest to acquire EU citizenship.
It's unlikely that Germany would be one of the easiest, as it requires 8 years of permanent residence to become a citizen. After living in Germany for 8 years it's unlikely you'd still want to move to the UK anyway, as you would have learnt the language and have come to appreciate the higher quality of living.
I know Malta sells citizenship for some million Euro, but having millions of disposable Euros doesn't sound "easy" for most people :)
The question is entirely academic for me, since I'm close to having a green card in the US. But is the quality of life in Germany really better than UK? I'm from South Africa and speak some Afrikaans, so I suspect I could learn German more easily than your average English speaker.
Of course one disadvantage of Germany is they don't allow dual citizenship...
Technically, yes however employer 2 would still need to jump through significant hoops as the individual visas would still need to be transferred. It's easier but not easy.
I'm not sure why the article focuses on hiring people from Silicon Valley... Mostly people hire externally to the UK to reduce wages but in CA wages are roughly double what they are in London, let alone the rest of the U.K.
We hire outside of the UK to have as broad a talent pool as possible. People cost what they cost.
What this article is actually about is tier ii visas being gutted to pander to the right wing anti-immigration lobby.
Tech employees are jumping ship from this country left right and centre already - the EU is important both as a hiring pool and a market, and when the UK leaves, so will a big chunk of the tech industry.
Really? You feel that strongly that the people of the UK will vote to leave? Whilst there is vocal support for leaving, there are also a lot of level headed people who understand the benefits of being part of the EU.
I'm British, and while most people who are clued up on what the EU does for Britain do not want to leave; other people do not have the time in their life to make an informed opinion and must rely on what friends/family say.
Because the media is manipulated completely, this causes a few people to just 'take' the information from the media and think it's close to real, and those people spread the same message forward, making it more respectable to believe in until you fill up minds of 90% of the people.
so, 90% of people believe the EU community is 'the big bad' who 'steals all the money' and imposes stuff on us.
I have a hunch that this may play out in a similar way the Scottish Independence Referendum did last year.
It is in the interest of business and the elite to stay in, while there is significant popular opinion and some small businesses that want out.
If in the run up to the actual vote things are looking close, as they did in Scotland, the side campaigning to stay in will wheel out the big shots (former PMs, captains of industry etc.) and throw money at the problem - resulting, I suspect, in a narrow win to stay in.
Right now we don't even have a date for the referendum, so it's too early to be expending resources like that.
> Really? You feel that strongly that the people of the UK will vote to leave? Whilst there is vocal support for leaving, there are also a lot of level headed people who understand the benefits of being part of the EU.
Or the EU might just kick out Britain for good. British "special rules" are holding the EU back everywhere - the EU doesn't have a Foreign Minister just because of British proudness, and don't get me started on how Britain evades any responsibility for the refugees.
Either Britain becomes a FULL member of the EU with ALL responsibilities and rights or GET THE FUCK OUT. Rest of EU has had enough of them.
> Either Britain becomes a FULL member of the EU with ALL responsibilities and rights or GET THE FUCK OUT. Rest of EU has had enough of them.
This breaks the HN guidelines and so have some of your other recent posts. We ban accounts that do this repeatedly. Please re-read the guidelines and follow them.
And those level headed folks who are prepared to think and reach a conclusion based on empirical facts are a distinct minority - as a sibling post relates, most will follow the perceived direction of the herd - and the broad perception in the UK is that the EU is an evil monster who took our jobs and gave prisoners luxury sports cars and the immigration and the gets breathless.
I struggle to see how a referendum won't end up with an out vote. The "out" campaign is oriented around emotion. The "in" campaign is oriented around rationale and logic. People act based on emotion.
To believe that one side is pure, misguided, emotion while the other is, in your eyes, perfectly positioned in logic highlights that you have taken your own bias to be fact at the expense of a balanced argument.
It seems that a deeper dive into the pro's of the out campaign would, at the very least, help you to understand their reasoning beyond simply emotion.
I've dived deeply, and I have yet to see a single cogent argument in favour of leaving - they have all fallen under the category of "parade of horribles". The motivation to leave comes from whitehall and can be summed up as "power and money" , and is perfectly rational for those proponents of a departure - but in order to garner broader support they must have "reasons" which appear reasonable, but toy with basic emotions.
Do you have a sane, rational argument in favour of leaving?
The problem is how varied income is across the UK. There are jobs that pay 65k in London that pay 40k in most of the rest of the UK, and I don't think that imbalance is fair (as it essentially means there will be a disproportionate number of immigrants moving to London).
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] thread* Publications
* Keynote speaker at global conference
* Won or nominated for a recognized Tech award
* Major Open Source project(s) maintained
TechCityUK is a government quango?? I thought they were some kind of over-funded startup/charity. Give me small government or give me death.
Oh no, I've been reading American comments on here too long.
Edit: I was going to delete as not constructive, but genuinely this was a surprise, and not a good one. TechcityUK looks and feels like a well funded startup with great government connections but no business plan. I did kind of assume they were gov connected if only because they can do events with government ministers, but an actual funded quango just annoys me - they just got in the way the last time I visited (GDS/CCS roadshow, where the GDS staff and I just exchanged emails but I still somehow got on the TechcityUK mailing list - and hang on they keep trying to charge me - a lot - annually for the pleasure of funding them as a taxpayer. What kind of quango is this?
Aaargh, pass me the shotgun Mabel, I'm gonna gits me a revenoo man.
I'm happy to be corrected though! I've been slightly out of touch these last few months.
Ah well, who needs karma points anyway
1. TechCityUK seems to have the usual, born out of a politicians excitement, mission to "bring together and ignite a spark". Now in our hyper connected, social media addicted, Meetup fueled entrepreneur scene, a government agency to bring us together is just laughable. As a case in point I have now been to I think three events at techCity and not one did I go to because of techCity - two were meetup.com and one was the GDS mailing list. Now perhaps they have great office space really cheap (it is a nice office slap bang in (expensive!) central London) but as I am supposed to go to a bootstrap business Meetup tonight above a pub in Kings X (Google Charlie Irish and apologise from me I might not make it as usual), as they manage without government subsidies I suspect the role techCity has is ... Redundant to the max.
2. Immigration. Oh let's get involved in that quagmire. I have actually sued the Home Office (back when we had a Home Office) to get a coder back in the country. Worked for us for 18 months then told to fuck off, we can find a Brit to do the job. Turned out we couldn't.
So here is my immigration suggestion. If I have a foreign coder working for me, and you tell her to fuck off out the country, you can either pay me compensation while I go find another British worker, and train them up, or you can fund her for six months in ForeignLand while she sets up a home office.
In short if you don't want foreign workers in our country dear government, paying taxes and doing value added work, then you can fund the difference between why, for heavens sake, I cannot find a British born coder for love nor money and why there are dozens of East Europeans with Maths degrees out of their bottoms wandering around London.
I may not have a coherent view there but I am definitely blaming government for it.
3. Open Source and procurement. Ok this is a bit of my own bugbear (http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto) but the CCS/GDS hub is doing a fine job, and needs to be cloned and passed around local and regional and the rest of central government. Whilst there may be difficulties with actual cloning, expanding their team and remit is more viable.
So firstly we need to make open source the default for all new government software development (it's more or less there). Then the default for existing services - this is fundamentally because we are now having our government run by software and like our laws we should be able to read it. It also means there will be massive massive opportunity to funnel the huge government spend out to an Eco-system of smaller developer communities who will do what TechcityUK cannot dream of.
And before or as part of that, we need to introduce acorn-like OSS projects - take expert civil servants, give them good project managers and funding and get them to seed OSS projects, hackathons, OJEU announcements, whatever. Start a project on GitHub, because the people we want to attract to working on government projects are not the kind of people who will do an RFT first.
4. Move it out of the South East. I have spent 40 years here on and off. It's not nice, it's just powering along. But it's sucking the rest of the country dry. Take those techCity funds, and rent out corrotated iron sheds in country lanes all over the land, and hand them to young idiots with an idea. And give them train passes to travel down to London to go to Charlie Irish's meetups to meet old idiots.
Have the gumption to directly fund and support young people with a vague idea that starting a business is a good thing. Have them attached to idiots like me who will ask difficult questions every month or six weeks and just accept that 90% will show no return - expe...
Though I must admit you sound more like the traditional moaner who wont pay for training and wants some one else to pay/do that for them.
There's also the neighbourhood loosely called "Tech City" which is Old St and east London generally, but I'm not sure how much that name has currency any longer. When it launched with that name - loads of fanfare, trumpets, press etc - Google Campus opened at the same time, as an events and co-working space. It's fancy. So for a lot of people Google Campus == Tech City. Separate entities tho. You may have been to meetups hosted there or somewhere like it?
And I have to say, a lot of my current goodwill towards Google is based on them opening Google Campus. Exactly the right intervention to catalyse the neighbourhood at just the right time.
On your point (4) -- Tech City UK's big focus right now is on the north of England. Tech North opened a month or so back to promote and help out, getting the startup ecosystem to properly take root across those cities.
You may think that everyone outside the M25 has straw in their hair but things are not quite that bad, I have running water and an inside toilet at my house.
When they succeed there will be folks wanting to build a better glass and steel edifice overlooking fine country side - and rent out a small part of it to help with the mortgage.
My biggest tech-envy went to a guy who had parlayed a freelance gig into a firm and built a small set of buildings out on farm land backing onto his house. It overlooked the best part of Essex, and was just how a "campus" should be - even if it was just twenty people.
Not an office, not a house, but a tech based, well it was nice and I wanted not to work there but to copy him.
I still do ...
There is plenty of cheap office space in northern cities, good infrastructure and reasonably priced housing. I work from home in Manchester but only have to walk 100 yards to a light rail station that can take me either to the airport or in to the city centre.
I see that Tech North is running events here as well as elsewhere, I don't have a feel for whether they are doing anything useful though.
You genuinely couldn't find one? What kind of skills were you looking for?
Yes, we should plan and prepare for non uk workers leaving. Just as for uk workers. But that is no way to build a team, saying, "dont do anything that we cannot hide someone else to do just as well". That's a race for the bottom.
You hire the best you can, trust them as much as you can and push them as far as you can. The results almost always pay you back. If that process will come to a natural halt on its own rhythms then fine. But When halfway through this process the men in black knock on the door and chuck your people out, phrases like "should have prepared better" aren't much help.
Every start up has people that it relies on - eventually they automate themselves away, and move on tot the next thing you totally rely on. But take them away for whatever reason and you is stuffed.
If immigration rules say ... You can lose that person with not a lot of notice, then really they are saying, only hire British.
That annoys me
So how much notice did you get that your employee would need to leave the UK? Was it that their visa was suddenly withdrawn, or was it that their visa was expiring but you hoped (but ultimately failed) to get it renewed?
I'm only asking because I haven't really come across this before - I know of cases where there's a lot of effort to get a visa but, generally, once they've got one, it's been pretty smooth.
Want to do something revolutionary or at least something that might make a difference, pull in teams from under-developed countries, train them up by putting them in top tier companies specifically not as cheap labour (a mini-YCombinator for want of a better description), then let them go do their thing.
Yes, let's have money decide who gets or doesn't get into the country, who can and cannot get hired from abroad. Isn't legal bribery great...
> Or let in anyone who surpasses the average native in education
And how do you determine that?
Yes, let's have money decide who gets or doesn't get food or shelter or medical care... oh wait.
Snarkiness aside, rich people can already buy citizenship in most countries, even the U.S. It's by far the fairest and most objective system to decide who gets in or doesn't get in. It also has the positive side effect of selecting those least likely to mooch off the state (a popular fear amongst those against immigration).
You mean human rights which are covered by the government for those who can't afford it?
I'm pretty sure that people with enough money already have ways and means to get around visa restrictions by doing contortions similar to what companies do to avoid paying taxes.
As an example, the US process for H1b visas is a highly technical affair that allows companies with large legal departments (e.g. IBM) to hire people significantly below market rate while other companies would have trouble employing people from abroad on an H1b visa. This leads to a double market distortion: one is positively discriminating for companies with a large legal department, narrowing the number of positions that people from outside the US can access, and the other is that the H1b holders themselves are (if you look at the facts) underpaid in comparison to the normal US job market.
Having an auction would ensure that the corresponding money flows to the state (and can help alleviate any qualification shortage that makes it necessary to rely on talent from abroad), while making sure employers have fair and non-discriminatory access to international employees, prioritized by the value these companies put on the talent. Also, an auction would mean that the price is set by the market, i.e. if one particular field of employment has a shortage, then paying extra money to sponsor a visa beyond what other fields can pay makes economic sense and companies from that particular field would spend more money but also get a larger share of the available visa pool.
It's not like the current systems are reward paragons of virtues with a visa.
I don't consider myself exceptionally talented so I don't think a Tier 1 would have been right for me, but I wonder how many software tech (as opposed to sciencey/businessey/researchey) people get into the UK with that visa?
Easiest way into the UK is probably to naturalize in some other EU country first. I wonder where is easiest? Germany, Belgium, Ireland?
Better act fast though, before the UK "brexits" the EU. I have no idea how difficult it would be for people(/me) to keep their(/my) address and company in the UK in that scenario.
But it's doable...
It's unlikely that Germany would be one of the easiest, as it requires 8 years of permanent residence to become a citizen. After living in Germany for 8 years it's unlikely you'd still want to move to the UK anyway, as you would have learnt the language and have come to appreciate the higher quality of living.
The question is entirely academic for me, since I'm close to having a green card in the US. But is the quality of life in Germany really better than UK? I'm from South Africa and speak some Afrikaans, so I suspect I could learn German more easily than your average English speaker.
Of course one disadvantage of Germany is they don't allow dual citizenship...
What this article is actually about is tier ii visas being gutted to pander to the right wing anti-immigration lobby.
Tech employees are jumping ship from this country left right and centre already - the EU is important both as a hiring pool and a market, and when the UK leaves, so will a big chunk of the tech industry.
Really? You feel that strongly that the people of the UK will vote to leave? Whilst there is vocal support for leaving, there are also a lot of level headed people who understand the benefits of being part of the EU.
Because the media is manipulated completely, this causes a few people to just 'take' the information from the media and think it's close to real, and those people spread the same message forward, making it more respectable to believe in until you fill up minds of 90% of the people.
so, 90% of people believe the EU community is 'the big bad' who 'steals all the money' and imposes stuff on us.
and there's no way to change that really.
It is in the interest of business and the elite to stay in, while there is significant popular opinion and some small businesses that want out.
If in the run up to the actual vote things are looking close, as they did in Scotland, the side campaigning to stay in will wheel out the big shots (former PMs, captains of industry etc.) and throw money at the problem - resulting, I suspect, in a narrow win to stay in.
Right now we don't even have a date for the referendum, so it's too early to be expending resources like that.
Or the EU might just kick out Britain for good. British "special rules" are holding the EU back everywhere - the EU doesn't have a Foreign Minister just because of British proudness, and don't get me started on how Britain evades any responsibility for the refugees.
Either Britain becomes a FULL member of the EU with ALL responsibilities and rights or GET THE FUCK OUT. Rest of EU has had enough of them.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
I struggle to see how a referendum won't end up with an out vote. The "out" campaign is oriented around emotion. The "in" campaign is oriented around rationale and logic. People act based on emotion.
It seems that a deeper dive into the pro's of the out campaign would, at the very least, help you to understand their reasoning beyond simply emotion.
Do you have a sane, rational argument in favour of leaving?
What I hate is specific targeting of tech industry professionals.