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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

I didn't expect tech to significantly leave London unless it became a lot harder to hire foreigners in the UK, and as far as I know it hasn't - non-EU immigration has increased hugely since Brexit. Unlike e.g. food or manufactured goods, software and related services don't have tight regulatory borders and the services are generally sold globally, not into discrete markets.

Finance is deflating like a slow puncture. There's fewer listings in London[1]. Open positions[2] is another early indicator. I believe the US is generally a bigger beneficiary than any EU competitor city. There is no emerging EU alternative to London, instead other cities are consolidating in specific verticals. It's a bit tricky to split out finance industry trends from the broader economy of course.

[1] https://www.standard.co.uk/business/peel-hunt-london-listing...

[2] https://www.efinancialcareers.ch/en/news/2024/01/brexit-bank...

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>>and as far as I know it hasn't

>>non-EU immigration has increased hugely since Brexit.

Both things can be true at the same time.

If you run a British business it has become vastly more difficult to hire someone from the EU(where there is a lot of high skilled talent, especially in IT). Before Brexit if you found a candidate say in Spain, they could start working for you the next day, with the same paperwork as any British employee. Now if you wanted to hire the same candidate the hoops to go through to get them a visa are crazy and it takes minimum of 2-3 months to sort it out, not to mention the extra cost.

But since now the expense and effort for hiring EU candidates is roughly the same as hiring non-EU ones, is that really a surprise non-EU immigration has increased? Not to mention that EU candidates don't want to move to UK, and who could blame them - why accept a job on a 2 year visa that gives you and your family zero stability, when similarly paid jobs are available within the EU. And again - if you were going to bother with the whole visa nonsense why not go straight for US and get a much higher salary for the same job.

Just my 2c as an immigrant to UK.

I seem to have noticed engineering teams I deal with having a bigger proportion of people from the Indian subcontinent now. Before Brexit there always seemed to be a couple of Polish, Hungarian, Spanish or Italian people in there, but they seem a lot rarer now for sure.

> Finance is deflating like a slow puncture.

i think that’s just a snapshot of the current economic situation around the world, not a long term trend:

https://www.morganmckinley.com/uk/article/london-employment-...

charts 15 and 16:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64ad6d32fe36e...

this has a bunch if interesting stats:

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06...

> It's a bit tricky to split out finance industry trends from the broader economy of course.

that didn't stop you from trying though

"79% fewer job listings" is not the same thing as "79% fewer jobs"

yes, fewer people hiring at the moment because the cheap money has dried up

none of this is specific to the UK

I'm not sure how I could have been more clear than explicitly saying "open positions".

The obvious alternative to London is Dublin which is HQ for a lot of tech companies already - so maybe it doesn't fall under 'emerging'

The alternatives to London are Paris (the closest competition as a city qua city), Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Dublin, and I believe they specialize differently.

When I buy EUR-denominated ETFs, they're almost invariably listed in Dublin with IE ISINs. Euronext stock exchange, the largest stock exchange in the EU, is in Amsterdam (domiciled - it's got multiple market places). For financial services, Frankfurt just overtook Paris[1] but they're pretty close.

[1] https://www.euronews.com/business/2023/10/21/europes-top-fin...

London's population is almost double all of Ireland. Dublin is not an alternative at all. The annual production of new STEM graduates in the UK is half the population of Dublin alone.

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