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Comment by Sholmesy | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about it for a bit. I'm not affected by Brexit (Commonwealth citizen), but my partner will be (EU/Italian).

I think it's going to be a bit overblown. It's easier for EU tech employees to move their lives, than it is for London tech companies to up and move elsewhere. Because of this, I theorise that there will be an intermittent period where there will be a labor shortage in London, due to lack of EU workers to supplement the demand in London tech. This will balance out with time, with EU companies moving more of their offices out of London.

I think we have started to see this already, at my gig, we have found it quite difficult to get decent candidates through the door, and anecdotally a lot of our better candidates have been from the EU. We are about 50% Londoners, 30% EU, 20% World.

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I'm a UK citizen contracting for London investment banks by day, and bootstrapping evenings and weekends. I'm looking forward to the London labour shortage. Regulatory driven work keeps piling up in banks, Brexit will only add to that, and short supply in the dev market will send contract rates through the roof. And if we get a really hard Brexit, and EU citizens are compelled to leave, then contracting day rates will be stratospheric!

I'm not at all criticising the parent post for the opportunity that they see in Brexit.

However, increased costs from complying with new legal systems and a shortage of skilled labour pushing up prices are two ways in which the average person will experience Brexit as a bad thing.

(Though personally I think the economic costs are not the most important aspects of Brexit.)

Ha ha. I work in a similar line to you.

Once that has all died down hopefully there will be some Scottish Independence work or something :-)

Sadly I started contracting too late to get in on the Y2K bonanza.

Every time I go for a new role I get asked "Have you worked on a regulatory project before?" Er, where have you been? Have there been any non-reg projects in the last five years?

That's an interesting point. Never let a good crisis go to waste (cf. Naomi Klein's 'Shock Doctrine'). I guess it's also an opportunity for Govtech startups (that said they need to develop solutions for ~5 different types of outcomes).

I think there'll be a big rise in near-shore work. I've worked at companies in the past with either direct satellite offices in eastern Europe, or just simple sub-contracting to an outsource firm.

The difference between a team of 6 UK/EU devs living in London, vs. 6 EU devs remote working from Poland isn't that much. It's a little trickier to manage, but is cheaper in terms of living expenses and therefore salary.

So far from Brexit bringing back jobs to the UK, it'll just drive away anything that can be done remotely.

This means that the companies will probably still stay in London, but the jobs will go elsewhere.

Yup. Unless May adds some stiff penalty for doing this (which is its own problem)... this is exactly what will happen.

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