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Comment by jchallis | Hacker News Reader

One option is to emigrate to the United States, driving up pressure on the engineers who remain. My near-term ancestors all left Germany due to poor wages and a tendency for Bismarck to sacrifice draft-age men in wars, and while moving to the US helped their own status it also did a bit to increase pressure at home.

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> One option is to emigrate to the United States

Not an easy feat. Most would be reliant on the H1B program.

Which is not an issue for people immigrating from Europe.

In what way? Unless I've missed something significant the visa options for those emigrating from Europe to the US are limited. What options are there other than the H1B?

Some paths are quota based by country of origin, so getting a green card is exponentially harder for a Chinese or Indian citizen than an Aussie, for instance.

> Some paths are quota based by country of origin

Yes, but that has little effect on H1B visas. European applicants are in the same pool as everyone else.

> getting a green card is exponentially harder

Nobody mentioned getting a greencard, which is a problem in itself. Just a work visa. Which, if you're a European citizen, is dependent on a lottery.

Yeah, it's easier for an AU citizen to get a visa (because there's a special program for them), but you haven't said why it's easier for an EU citizen to get one. Please back up your claim.

You quote me yourself saying ‘some paths’- I was deliberately excluding H1B and stating so.

Not 'significant' but you can use L1 internal transfer visas after you work for a while in a branch of an American company.

American company also means a sales or support office (if registered correctly) of a European company.

Why is it not an issue? They have to compete for the same ~65K visas/year as everyone else.

No the quotas aren't evenly split.

It's a big issue and a primary reason why you don't see massive developer migration from Europe into US. Most devs in Europe are just comfortable enough to not want to deal with the whole H1-B hassle. People who are money-focused move to the few places in Europe that tend to pay more and/or switch to contracting, which is a hassle too, but still orders of magnitude smaller than trying to get into US.

EU engineers should vote with their feet. That's the only way.

Wont work. Big brother will import talent from Africa, Middle East, India.

It has been working for over a century up to today. What will change that it "wont work" any more?

FAANG companies are filled with British/European refugees.

But they don’t because having an average pay in Europe is still preferable to having a high pay in America.

I suspect you don't have any evidence for this claim. Looking at immigration numbers, a far higher percent of Europeans move to America than Americans move to Europe.

A higher percentage of software engineers, though, like the thread was asking?

For how long though? In my personal experience only one out of 5 people from Western Europe are still in US after 4 years, the rest moved back home.

Do you have evidence for that claim ?

Pre Brexit, there was > 500 million people in the EU with free movement between member states, most tech companies still sourced a substantial number of their employees from outside the EU - some even had majority non EU tech employees.

The only jobs filled by locals were those which had artificial cap on employee numbers and local regulations(accountants/legal)

Whilst some of these engineers were A+ level brilliant, most were mediocre and doing jobs that could easily be done by local talent.

The benefits for companies doing this? - immigration visa tied to job and ability to lowball salary (as residence in host country was itself a major plus) thus ensuring salaries rose way slower than demand would otherwise have made them.

The one off cost of Visa is nothing compared to the money those companies saved.

'most were mediocre and doing jobs that could easily be done by local talent.'

I think most people are mediocore, and doing mediocore jovs -thats ok

Keep in mind that this allowed some compabies to afford half-decent engineers whereas they would nornally only be able to afford junior talent. Whether that works out to a net benefit is ofcourse debatable.

I personally find that a lot on management of engineers in UK is shockingly inefficient. I dont kniw what its like elsewhere, but i recon average 'efficiency' is under 50%

> I dont kniw what its like elsewhere

"Efficient management" is a meme in Russian IT industry.

Is it like “British scientists discovered...”

Nah, it literally grew from managers bragging very often about how much efficient they are, even though the facts were showing the very opposite of that.

I'm surprised "British scientists" meme has a good Wikipedia article in English[0].

P.S. Runet's memepedia Lurkmore redirects from "Efficient manager" to Stalin page.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_scientists_(meme)

Can you support those claims ? at least in Sweden this is far from being the reality

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