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Comment by ponzored | Hacker News Reader

Just sign up for a degree at a degree mill and you'll get a student visa and an easy route to permanent residency.

New Zealand (and Australia) don't care about quality migrants, just quantity, to keep up demand for housing (both countries have housing-bubble-based economies) and to add extra consumption to national GDP.

The migrants they really want are Indians who can put downwards pressure on wages. Go to Auckland, its basically an Asian city.

Go somewhere like Poland, Romania or Portugal and hire your own workforce. You won't even be in the ass-end of the world like NZ.

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There is no way I would choose living in Poland over NZ. Unless you like breathing coal smoke. I actually quite like Poland too, but it isn't even a choice.

Also 'basically an Asian city' sounds, basically, racist.

> Also 'basically an Asian city' sounds, basically, racist.

Presumably, ponzored is from Harvard; we mustn't blame him for his upbringing.

Have you travelled to a city in India? Not exactly a pleasant experience, particularly if you are female.

Basically this. Europe has a lot of cheapish countries with wasted talent that typically migrates to the US, UK or Germany for corp.

I'd say that Portugal is a great choice.

> Just sign up for a degree at a degree mill

That's the advice I was given when looking at NZ. At the time I had about 15 years experience in IT but that couldn't be considered as I didn't have a relevant degree.

"Do night classes for a couple of years and get a degree"

Instead I decided to forget about NZ even as a tourist.

My wife and I considered moving to NZ as well; I'm a cloud engineer with 10 years experience (20 total in software/sys admin) in the US, I've worked for startups and enterprises. NZ won't even acknowledge me because I don't have a silly bachelors degree. Too bad I spent those 4 years getting experience instead of university.

Definitely worth a visit, I'd suggest. It's really a beautiful country.

I have a Bachelor's degree in CS. Nobody will hire me because I don't have experience.

Funny thing is, before I got my degree, they were happy enough with my experience but wouldn't hire me because I didn't have a degree. Even had the same interviewer tell me one of those things on either side of my graduation.

"Get a degree and we'd love to hire you for your experience!" "Oh, sorry, you're qualified but don't have any experience."

It's like my degree reset me to zero.

I do have a bachelors, but it’s in physics, so I get the same “well, you don’t know computers, but you do know how to contact spirits. We don’t need spiritualists - rejected”

Jesus, if I had a penny for every time I’ve had to explain that physics and psychics aren’t the same thing I’d be a rich man.

I’m more or less at the point of just giving up on being gainfully productive.

I'm not sure if that's really sad, or very funny, but you made me smile and I appreciate that.

Unless you have lived in Poland, Romania or Portugal, I wouldn't be so sure in suggesting these places. These countries have their own challenges starting from language barrier to inefficient bureaucracy. I don't think either of these countries are well-known for their tech quality either.

I don't know about Portugal, but both Romania and Poland have a well developed tech sector. They're not dumping grounds for projects (think Infosys & co).

But you're right that the bureaucracy is really bad right now...

Irrespective of anything else, I had to laugh at the description of one of the most beautiful places in the planet as the "ass-end of the world".

Why? Asses can be beautiful. And it doesn't change the fact that NZ is about as remote as you can get.

In the past decade or two, NZ's remoteness has seemed increasingly like a feature, not a bug.

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