From the EU, of course 
Peter wrote:
So I don’t think “economic migration” was ever easy into the UK, in recent decades.
But it is right now. If we advertised in Poland and found a suitable candidate, as of now we can bring them over and they can work for us with very little bureaucracy.
Come April next year (or maybe 2020, who knows how it’s going to end up at this stage) we lose a massive pool of talent we can hire from.
So what happened to all the Brits who could do real code (assembler and C )? Did they all move up into project management when they saw Borland Delphi?
Peter wrote:
Did they all move up into project management
There’s a cultural thing in the UK that when people are good at their jobs they get promoted to a management position, but the problem especially in some of the technical trades is that being good at the job doesn’t necessarily make you good at managing e.g. people. And people get advanced one level above their ability, because you only find out they can’t do the job after the promotion. Higher pay for the same position is probably the answer, but doesn’t provide a job title to make the Joneses envious.
Capitaine wrote:
There’s a cultural thing in the UK that when people are good at their jobs they get promoted to a management position, but the problem especially in some of the technical trades is that being good at the job doesn’t necessarily make you good at managing e.g. people. And people get advanced one level above their ability, because you only find out they can’t do the job after the promotion. Higher pay for the same position is probably the answer, but doesn’t provide a job title to make the Joneses envious.I don’t think this is specific to the UK but ubiquitous. Sometime in the 90s Swedish telco Ericsson introduced a system with “expert careers” where you can get promoted and get a posh title without becoming a manager. Unfortunately, I don’t think many companies have followed suit.
I also think there is a culture of people getting fed up with constant learning curves on the for ever changing software tools. I know a guy in Germany who is about 55 and works for a bank and he spends half his time having to learn new stuff, rather than just write code. The bank is using programmers in India for coding but the quality is reportedly awful so his job includes a load of boring testing.
Moving into “management” gets you out of that treadmill; you get a nice pay rise and the main downside is that you have to swallow a load of corporate bullsh1t until you retire I friend went up this ladder at Cisco and at the end he was getting 150 CCd emails per day (obviously he didn’t read them).
Whereas in the old communist bloc people aren’t so much on the make. That will probably change in due course…
Peter wrote:
150 CCd emails per day
The number of CCs on an email is inversely proportional to someone taking responsibility or making a decision
alioth wrote:
I have recent first hand experience of the UK immigration system
My wife will be doing this soon and I’m not looking forward to it now. Would an arbitrary points system be ‘fairer’?
@alioth’s experience is as someone who has good use of English, money (I assume) and who can live in the kind of street where a politician might live next door.
The experience for a destitute non-English speaker with no friends and no contacts is 100 times worse, often involving periods living on the streets at enormous risk from illness, Police and racists.
This trope that they are economic migrants is so infuriating. I have now had over 25 refugees living in my house. All of them have been economically hugely worse off than they used to be.
I have had one of the top neurosurgeons in Syria. He was told to take a job hod-carrying. We had the boss of a ME Saatchi office, who is a brilliant graphic designer. He is a bouncer.
We had until recently one of the top radio personalities in his country (no more detail on him, his government really want to kill him.) He is a hotel receptionist.
We had a Sergeant Major from the Afghan army; a Marine Engineer; lawyers; teachers; academics; you name it. None of them economic migrants (and we are not selective.)
All the people we have housed we have helped with getting through the Home Office system. I cannot give every story, but take it from me, I know of what I speak and @peter’s experience half a century ago is nothing like how it works now.
Capitaine wrote:
My wife will be doing this soon and I’m not looking forward to it now. Would an arbitrary points system be ‘fairer’?
Our bad experience (and most of them) was nothing to do with the particular system to be admissable in the first place. It wouldn’t have made any difference had it been based on points rather than marital status.
In our case, it was about the most straightfoward case that is possible: all requirements were met (and exceeded, in some cases by multiple times – e.g. income requirements), we had an immigration lawyer who ensured the paperwork was 100% perfect and met all requirements and there were no errors, we supplied mountains of documentation and identity information and kept very good track of it all. The problems were all due to the way the system is run: the deliberate opacity, the deliberate hostility, and the deliberate (and successful) attempt to make it impossible to find out what’s really happening or even talk to someone who might know – meaning to get any help at all it had to be escalated right to the very top.
The horror stories in the press are unfortunately not being sensationalised. It really is that bad. If you’re lucky and they don’t lose your paperwork it might go smoothly, but as soon as there is a problem it’s really hard to find out what’s going on. Once the Home Office are dealing with 3 million EU citizens wanting to get ILR it’s going to get worse, so I’d get it out of the way before Brexit day.
Peter wrote:
. I know a guy in Germany who is about 55 and works for a bank and he spends half his time having to learn new stuff, rather than just write code
If you’re in a software development job and you don’t like learning new things, you’re in the wrong career.
I would have got bored and left software development years ago if I didn’t get to learn new things all the time. It’s by far the most fun part of the job. Doing the same thing over and over again on the other hand isn’t fun.
