UK Tech Visas Quadruple After Applications Soar (telegraph.co.uk) 83
James Timcomb, writing for The Telegraph: Technology industry demands for special measures to let companies hire foreign workers after Brexit have been boosted by a surge in demand for technology visas. Tech City UK, the government organisation that processes applications for the dedicated "Tier 1 Exceptional Talent" visa, said successful applications had more than quadrupled in the last 12 months, with 260 endorsed in the last fiscal year. It follows fears in the British tech community that access to skilled computer coders would be hit by restrictions to freedom of movement when the UK leaves the EU. David Cameron introduced the tech visa scheme in 2014 in a bid to make London the technology capital of Europe and rival Silicon Valley as a destination for start-ups, and amid fears of a shortage of skilled coders in the UK. The "Tech Nation" visa scheme allows Tech City UK to endorse applications from non-EU workers, and lets successful applicants stay in the country for five years, after which they can apply to settle. Just a handful of visas were granted in its first few months, due to what were seen as onerous requirements, and the rules were relaxed in 2015. Applications have soared since then, and rose again after the Brexit vote.
Is this free movement or not? (Score:3)
I read the article but it didn't say if it would bind a worker to a specific employer, which is just indentured servitude. If the workers are free to switch jobs and free to collective bargain then I would generally agree with it. As long as it did not become the sort of dysfunctional H1B indentured servitude we have in the US.
Does anyone have more details or pointer to more details?
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https://www.gov.uk/tier-1-exce... [www.gov.uk]
The foreign national is the sole applicant and the holder of the visa, its not restricted to a single employer and the employer has no say i
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There is a reason that level of visa has the word "exceptional" in its title, though. You don't get one of those if you worked at Google for a couple of years. You get one of those if you're Sergey Brin or Larry Page.
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I can wiggle my ears, does that count as exceptional? Maybe these are now being treated like participation trophies.
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Well, there's always interpretation in these things, but this is a Tier 1 visa, essentially the top level. To put this story in perspective, it made the news because they issued more than their normal quota of 200 of these for applicants from across the entire world within an entire year.
There are some slightly vague criteria for tech visas, including some adjustments depending on things like whether someone is planning to bring key tech skills to the main northern cities. However, for comparison, this is p
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Thank you this was the information I was looking for.
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I read the article but it didn't say if it would bind a worker to a specific employer, which is just indentured servitude. If the workers are free to switch jobs and free to collective bargain then I would generally agree with it. As long as it did not become the sort of dysfunctional H1B indentured servitude we have in the US.
Does anyone have more details or pointer to more details?
This visa is only meant for founders and key employees of start up businesses.
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This visa is only meant for founders and key employees of start up businesses.
What it is meant for . . . and what it is actually used for . . . may turn out to be two entirely different animals.
But Brexit fears give anything remotely related to Brexit additional leverage:
"My company needs to hire these cheap foreign IT replacements . . . otherwise, my company will not survive Brexit, and you will lose the election next year over the economic fallout!"
"Plus . . . the UK workers that we let go will be free to pursue jobs that require even higher skill levels! This will make the U
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Well, at 260 per year this clearly isn't the way the thousands of Indian contractors are getting into the country.
I supported Brexit and immigration was a factor in that. Nonetheless I'm very comfortable with this visa letting in so small a number of genuinely skilled people, even though they're actually competing with me for jobs.
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This visa is only meant for founders and key employees of start up businesses.
This just isn't true.
They're seeking almost all high-tech style engineering, engineering management & product management skills. Do you have good cloud experience? Good sysadmin experience? Good product management experience? Written some device drivers? Written serious fuckin' code? Done random marketing fluff? .. along with many other skills .. ie, have you worked in a high tech environment of late? If so, then you probably tick a lot of the boxes.
Source: I have one of these visas.
--Q
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Only if you work outside the centre of London. May be dodgy anywhere in the South East or the M4 corridor, but pretty trivial in the Midlands or Up North.
If you're willing to go up to half an hour commute anywhere outside the City is probably manageable, or anywhere outside the South East if you want your apartment somewhere nice to live.
If you're willing to commute for 60-90 minutes each way you can get very rich very fast by working in the City. You wont need a big apartment though, you'll only be in it t
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This is not actually true. EU citizens can be asked to leave if they don't get a job within a few months. They also can't claim benefits until they have been working for a while.
Re: Is this free movement or not? (Score:1)
Emphasis on the word "can". In practice, they are not.
The local homeless charity has had to recruit 3 Romanian interpreters because 60-70% of their clients are now Romanian migrants.
It's the same with food banks, and tax credits for low end jobs (especially big issue sellers). All predominantly new accession EU migrants.
EU health tourism is also rampant. For example some MS drugs are not available on government health systems in all EU countries, but are in the UK. A friend is a neurologist and his MS clini
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Sure, but therein lies the whole problem with the Brexit argument - it's based on blaming the EU for things that our government are at fault over, and given that leaving the EU doesn't mean leaving our government, why would anyone think leaving the EU would fix anything like this?
Case in point, government has been saying it wants migration down, but it's consistently been at the 300k+ mark for years, yet over half of those people come from outside the EU. As such, any government could at any point have more
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This is not actually true. EU citizens can be asked to leave if they don't get a job within a few months.
Really? They have to be able to support themselves, I've never seen it stated anywhere that they have to get a job.
Which legislation states that?
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"Freedom of movement" is actually the freedom of movement of four things: capital, goods, services and labour. Note that it doesn't say "people". Thus, you can only use your freedom of movement rights for moving your labour around.
In practice EU courts have ruled that a person is allowed to go and look for work, but only for a limited time.
There is something of an exception to this rule, which is family. In order for freedom of movement to be meaningful, people must be able to bring their families with them
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by free movement I meant free movement between employers. Perhaps I should have clarified it. And yes, I want to know if this will preserve the rights of the imported workers to choose the jobs they want at the wages they want. And yes I mean that if this is just another way to import cheap labor stripped of their rights to destroy indigenous workers wages and rights I am against it.
Indentured servitude is a crime. Workers should NEVER be in this position. If a worker is is a contract they should at least
Re: Won't stop the offshoring (Score:1)
Good. Refuse, get replaced anyway, lose the severance package. You will regret it in a week or less as bills start to pile up and money runs out.
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unlike in the USA, companies can't withhold severence (redundancy) packages in the UK. Something I'm sure will change once EU regs no longer apply
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The survival of the NHS, for one thing?
The entire Memorial Day weekend was British... (Score:2)
Yet Slashdot didn't feature one story about Dr. Who. So much for news for nerds.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/doctor-who-just-pulled-off-a-barnstorming-cliffhanger-1795631931 [gizmodo.com]
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You're right, we need more stories of how you're not fat, "girls" want to have sex with you, and dozens of unrelated meandering irrelevant personal anecdotes.
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It's been downhill since Tom Baker hung up the scarf. and the second loop of the scarf. And the third loop.
260 people. 260. Count'em. 260! (Score:2, Insightful)
Their idea of becoming a "technology hub" is similarly sound and impressive.
Re: On the dole and proud of it. (Score:1)
People vote UKIP and BNP because they're bigots who don't like Muslims or brown people or foreigners in general, or anyone who isn't like them. It's either based on fear of the unknown or the way their bigoted parents raised them and they've never had the courage to think for themselves. The prejudice comes first, the "reasons" are added later.
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A while ago they showed on TV a bunch of UKIP MEPs celebrating that the UK decided to leave to EU, and I swear they didn't look like normal human beings. To me, they looked like the result of generations of incest.
Re: On the dole and proud of it. (Score:1)
Vote Labour then. They have promised to abolish tuition fees from this autumn.
Re: "Talent" (Score:1)
All 260 of them. Some "flood".
Of course (Score:2)
Clearly happening just because all the offshoring companies who's staff all have degrees from Indian "universities" that are clearly no more than certificate printing shops can't get US H1Bs anymore, so now the poor old UK is next in line to suffer a giant plague of cheap, inherently buggy and totally unsupportable code.
Say good by to UK IT (Score:3)
Utter Crap (Score:2)
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We pay market rates
So does my employer, but those market rates are heavily impacted by the substantial number of immigrants that are available and willing to take those rates.
It gets even sillier than that; my employer is only willing to pay market median rates in my city and bases pay raises on that rate, ignoring that anybody living nearby has access to jobs across half the country, and anybody any good can invariably get paid more elsewhere.
Add in that for my specific skillset we can't recruit anybody for less than 20% mor
Simple reason for that (Score:1)