back to article British jobs for British people: UK tech rejects PM May’s nativist hiring agenda

“If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means." So British Prime Minister Theresa May told her party’s conference last week. Home secretary Amber Rudd laid out plans at the conference to make it harder for British employers to hire …

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  1. thomas k

    British jobs for British people

    I've seen that movie. P D James book, Clive Owens ...

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

    The elephant in the room is that those of us (in IT / everywhere really) who have had below inflation or no pay-rises for many years look at this article and think - I would earn more if the talent pool was reduced - I would be a bigger fish because the pond was smaller.

    Don't get me wrong here - I voted to remain - but if we must remove ourselves from so much free movement of labour, those of us left will earn more as a result.

    The downside however is that we will have to earn more to in order to survive - inflation will stoke-up soon enough.

    I bought my jar of marmite an hour ago just in case...

    1. Richard 81

      Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

      ...plus the employers may just bugger off.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      those of us left will earn more as a result

      Possibly.

      Your unstated assumption is that the number of jobs which need filling will not decrease by a larger amount than the number of people qualified to perform the job and available for hire.

      If, on the other hand, the need in qualified IT staff decreases substantially (e.g. because the UK banks lose their passporting rights after the brexit, or because of the possible economic slowdown due to the loss of the favourable access to the EU markets in the short term), you should expect your earning potential to decrease accordingly.

      Without a detailed socioeconomic analysis and the knowledge of the actual terms under which the brexit will happen (which in turn would require some serious precog capability) it is impossible to tell which trend will prevail.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: those of us left will earn more as a result

        Unfortunately all the multinationals are already relocating across Eastern Europe as the wages & expenses are cheaper. Romania, Hungary etc are huge savings. Whatever we do we have to deal with this. Even if we remained in the EU this would be a problem.

        If they want to stop the tech drain stop or significantly reduce intra company transfer visas. This has been abused for decades and normally results in the work going offshore. They could have done that without Brexit.

        The big problem is tax take unless jobs pay more & we get companies to pay more tax we are going to run out of money to pay for sweeties to bribe voters.

        People seem to present any limitation of movement as binary, We don't want cheap Eastern European waiters & care workers that must mean we won't allow immigration of world beating scientists. We had a points based immigration system before why wouldn't it work now?

        If we respond to reduced freedom of movement by upskilling maybe we will be better off.

        1. Tom Paine

          Re: those of us left will earn more as a result

          Unfortunately all the multinationals are already relocating across Eastern Europe as the wages & expenses are cheaper. Romania, Hungary etc are huge savings. Whatever we do we have to deal with this. Even if we remained in the EU this would be a problem.

          Sorry! You are mistaken. If you don't believe me, put together a fake CV showing a couple of years experience with Python, Ruby, Linux, MongoDB, Java, working as a junior analyst in finance. Count how long it takes for your phone to start ringing (and expect the head hunters to be cross-referencing to find your LI profile, Fb,..

          Believe me, this is not how a jobs market works when there is a surplus of supply over demand, as some of us more *ahem* senior commentards will remember from personal experience.

          Multinational firms pick the location of their sites (HQs, ops centres, dev shops,..) according to many criteria; cost of labour is one, certainly, but only one. (I was in CW on June 24th. As one banker said when it was put to her that they would all just move to Frankfurt: "Have you ever tried going out for a night on the town in Frankfurt?")

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: those of us left will earn more as a result

            > As one banker said when it was put to her that they would all just move to Frankfurt: "Have you ever tried going out for a night on the town in Frankfurt?"

            Moving to Berlin then?

            1. Tom Paine

              Re: those of us left will earn more as a result

              Banks cluster. For historical reasons, the German fs center is Frankfurt.

              If Citi, JPM, HSBC,.. etc move to Frankfurt, though, I'm pretty sure the nightlife will be a bit livelier in five years' time.

        2. WageSlave

          Re: those of us left will earn more as a result

          Brain drain vs. outsourcing Education?

          How about this for a cynical thought: if we reduce our tech education output (they are more costly to run than yet another Estruscan Pottery / Sociology degree ) but have free movement of both student and labour, then we let other universities / countries fund the education and skim off the brightest to come back into the UK to apply those expensively-acquired skills. Seems like a historical policy that's now badly back-fired !

          If we now block those freedoms of movement & we need to train up internally which means a massive re-investment in STEM from the ground up, which won't yield a sufficient number or quality of grads in just 2 years.

    3. Dr. Mouse

      Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

      if we must remove ourselves from so much free movement of labour, those of us left will earn more as a result

      Not necessarily.

      Wages, as with the prices of almost everything, are governed by supply and demand. If the supply is reduced but demand stays the same, the price should rise.

      However, we are unlikely to see demand stay the same. There will be companies who choose to move at least part of their business elsewhere. This reduces demand. There may be people who bring jobs in to the UK, too, but they are unlikely to be in exactly equal numbers, so demand will change.

      Therefore it will be the difference between the change in demand and the change in supply which will determine the change in pay. There is a good chance that there will be a large reduction in demand, so wages actually fall. There is also a good chance that there will be a lower reduction in demand (or even an increase in demand), which could see wages rise.

      But it's definitely incorrect to say that if all the foreigners leave, we will get better pay.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

        >if we must remove ourselves from so much free movement of labour, those of us left will earn more as a result

        But there will still be competition from all those other Brits driving down wages.

        The obvious way to boost IT salaries is to reduce the number of tech graduates. If we close all the science and engineering depts except say Imperial and have a quota of say 20 graduates/year. Then those few graduates will see massive salary rises (although they may have to do a lot of overtime)

        1. Tom Paine

          Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

          ...or just make the work environment so riddled with sexism and harassment that no women want to work in the field. Half the supply of labour == double the pay! Right, kids?

      2. Eduard Coli

        Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

        "But it's definitely incorrect to say that if all the foreigners leave, we will get better pay." That is counter-intuitive and history has already shown that it is wrong. Supply and demand still works.

        Before they opened the floodgates to outsourcing and visa abuse IT workers were in high demand and IT jobs were indeed much better paying.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

      There is a fine balance between bigger fish in a small pond or the last big fish in a pond which is drying out.

      What the brown shirts (sorry, they are traditionally white in Britain) want and what GruppenFuhrer Rudd is expressing on their behalf will lead to drying out of the pond by making it so small it will evaporate.

      Eu import as such does not stagnate salaries that much. First of all, there are not that many, second in IT and sciences they are highly educated and specialized, third they can always leave and go back to their countries where IT salaries are now on par with UK and Western Europe while the cost of living is still about half (at least in IT, it is only a matter of time until it happens to science and other engineering). The starting salary in IT in Brno, Bratislava or even Sofia and Bucuresti is actually now on-par if not higher than the starting salary for IT in most of the UK.

      The real salary stagnation in high tech is from out-of-Eu import from countries which do not have anything like the Eu living standard. Even if it was financially feasible for them to leave, that would never get pas a "In-Law" with a plan for "son-in-law development". They got out. It is socially unacceptable for them to come back for anything but an arranged spouse import. So they will do anything it takes to stay (something a lot of companies exploit). They are also imported in quantity on "can I have 20 heads" requisition, not to fill a single particular job spec. Unfortunately, as the Eu people leave, we will have MORE of these, not less.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

        I work in Switzerland, where prices are high, and salaries even higher.

        My team is composed of four Swiss, three Poles, three Russians, one German, one Rumanian, one Serb, and one American.

        The people working at the London office sometimes complain about their salaries, which seem about 20% lower, in a city which is even more expensive than Switzerland. I always tell them we are hiring.

    5. JustNiz

      Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

      >> I voted to remain - but if we must remove ourselves from so much free movement of labour, those of us left will earn more as a result.

      So you voted for the option that would be exactly contrary to the thing you correctly observe needs doing? You do realise that staying in the EU would mean less controls on free movement in future not more right?

      1. Paul Shirley

        Re: The elephant in the room

        This all presupposes it actually becomes as hard for skilled UK workers to head to the EU post brexit as the UK wants to make it for EU workers coming here.

        There's nothing the UK could do to stop the EU offering very low barriers to desirable UK workers, the referendum and it's immigration spin mean the UK could not do the same without going to war with it's voters. Yet another area where the brexiteers have no leverage over the EU and could only threaten their own people to prevent it.

        If that happens, there might well be higher wages for the few that remain here. Might not be many companies left though.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The elephant in the room

          This all presupposes it actually becomes as hard for skilled UK workers to head to the EU post brexit as the UK wants to make it for EU workers coming here.

          That one is easy to fix: just impose exit visas. Another useful approach would be to make student loans (with a suitable early-payment penalty) automatically due in full on the date you take a job abroad. Another option would be to make passport renewals for overseas resident cost a fraction of their income.

          The possibilities are endless if you put your mind to it.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: The elephant in the room

            > That one is easy to fix

            Out of those, only the first was ever implemented in the USSR. We all know how that ended.

        2. Paul Shirley

          Re: The elephant in the room

          There's nothing the UK could do to stop the EU offering very low barriers to desirable UK workers

          Seen chatter that some German politicians are already floating the idea of brexit refugee citizenships with 0yr residency requirement. The most elite Sunderland car workers might have a future after all.

    6. Lars Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

      I think you could have added a question mark at the end of your title. While I don't know who this James O'Brien is I think he has some very good questions regarding "stagnant wages" here.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgn552kz7rE

    7. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

      > but if we must remove ourselves from so much free movement of labour, those of us left will earn more as a result.

      You made me laugh.

      Oversimplifying things a bit here, but the reason IT jobs (like yours?) exist in the UK in the first place is because it combines two (three) attractive premises:

      1. Ease of access to finance (London)

      2. Ease of access to qualified labour (EU)

      3. (Bonus) English is a dominant world language, making things easier for everyone involved.

      If you remove #2, you will see businesses moving to places like Berlin or Silicon Valley. Capital may follow (it's easier to move capital than people).

      So instead of getting a higher salary for exactly the same job, you're more likely to end up having to pull up stakes and move to Berlin, San Francisco, Prague, or Barcelona.

    8. Aitor 1

      Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

      The trick is making the pool smaller without the companies moving.

      With hard brexit I just see how the companies are moving elsewhere.. hard luck.

      So maybe I will have to move country again.. it seems that every time I buy a house somewhere, that place goes south.. maybe my fault...

    9. ckm5

      Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

      I live in Silly Valley, where we have insane salaries for anyone in tech (eg. interns getting $9k/month) and enormous demand. I'm also responsible for tech hiring in my company and we have an office in the EU (not UK). I'm not sure what upside down world the thread starter lives in, but salaries in tech are def. not going down anywhere we are recruiting.

      They are actually going up in unaffordable ways for small companies like ours. Not just in SV, but also in our EU location. Competition for candidates is fierce, with salaries going up double digit percentages in just the past few years.

      So, my reaction when I here 'my tech job is being outsourced' or 'I haven't gotten a raise in years' is to wonder what that person has done to keep their skills current or why they are stuck in their current position. Because the only jobs I see being outsourced are things like tech support and non-critical operational roles. Critical devops, developer, UX/UI designer/builder and data-centric jobs are in HUGE demand, but you must keep your skills relatively current.

      Everywhere I look and every single statistic I read say there is a huge shortage at every level of tech, so something just doesn't sound right. Yes, I know, the hiring process sucks (it's no better on the inside) but there really is tons of work out there.

      From my point of view, Brexit looks like a disaster all around for any tech company in the UK. The best thing to do would to move to an EU country, like Ireland or the Netherlands, which both have pretty good tech scenes. I also think there will be a massive move of financial firms to the continent if the UK really adopts a hard line. There is literally no reason for these business to stay - another poster pretty much nailed it with the three reason outline.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

        > "I'm not sure what upside down world the thread starter lives in, but salaries in tech are def. not going down anywhere we are recruiting."

        The reporter lives in the UK, which, from what you've said, is somewhere you aren't recruiting. ;) Looking at job adverts over the last 5 years for .NET programmers or DBAs in the rough area near me, the going rate has been around £40k for the entire time (note: banks pay way more, but aren't near me, and I've ingored the silly minium wage DBA posts that pop up ocassionally).

        > "Because the only jobs I see being outsourced are things like tech support and non-critical operational roles. Critical devops, developer, UX/UI designer/builder and data-centric jobs are in HUGE demand, but you must keep your skills relatively current."

        Sorry, but I've seen all development oursourced to large "tech partner"-type companies, who may then do it themselves, or subcontract it to teams based "somewhere cheaper", and ops posts go "to the cloud" as companies go to managed services (or, in globalised companies, the whole department sent overseas).

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

          > Looking at job adverts over the last 5 years for .NET programmers or DBAs in the rough area near me, the going rate has been around £40k for the entire time

          .NET? I thought we were talking IT here, not service companies for businesses.

          How much demand do you think there is in Silicon Valley or Berlin for .NET tinkerers?

          As for DBAs, are we talking someone who contributes patches to PostgreSQL or has founded a couple of Elastic Search start-ups, or someone who is entrusted with admin credentials into Oracle or MS SQL Server (or whatever it's called).

          Did you read with the other guy said about keeping your skills up to date?

        2. Tom Paine

          Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

          Looking at job adverts over the last 5 years for .NET programmers or DBAs in the rough area near me, the going rate has been around £40k for the entire time

          Well gosh, maybe those aren't such hot skills any more? Maybe the high demand a decade or two back attracted a lot of get-rich-quick timeserver / cert mill types, such that they're now commodity skills, and you might have to go learn something new now?

          I got going in the mid 90s, not long before "HTML programmer" [sic] started to turn up in job ads. Easy money! But it was very obviously the sort of skills that would be taught at secondary school level before long (I thought) so I looked around and decided back-end stuff was more interesting and probably more lucrative. Taught myself Perl, Linux, Apache, very basic MySQL and that kept me going for another five years. And so on and so forth.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

        Interesting comment: one friend working for a US dot com in London is on an excellent wage. I asked him how he got as much and his reply was that " they can barely believe they can get a decent neteng for less than $250k pa, so I look cheap!".

        I think you're being over optimistic about the EU economy. Outside of Ireland there isn't that much going on in the EU job wise.

        1. Tom Paine

          Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

          Depending what your definition of "network engineer" is, that sounds about right to me (CCIE, designing and operating a global network with three or four DCs, a few dozen branch officers, maybe some retail outlets,..)

          If you mean "can set up a Catalyst switch and plug in 32 patch cables", yeah, you're not going to get anything like that.

    10. streaky
      Mushroom

      Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

      Wages aren't stagnated, they're dropping in real terms.

      It's all based on the perpetual lies that firstly there's a skills shortage in the UK (there isn't, there's a shortage of decent jobs at fair pay) and secondly that the UK isn't being asset stripped (it is) and that all of these companies are paying their fair share of tax to cover the supposed skills shortage that apparently exists but in fact doesn't as denoted by have you even seen the fees for university on courses that are in part designed by some of these companies complaining about a skills shortage in he first place. Also FWIW the universities are filled with truckloads of foreign students in the first place.

      All this is circular and the only way I could think to resolve it was to vote to leave the EU because if nothing else we can get a handle on foreign transfers of cash and the taxation thereof which we can't do in the EU - and if we still don't we can find a government that will.

      It's not racist or xenophobic to give a shit about people growing up in the UK who will never see anything but 3 part time jobs to pay off extortionate student fees that they'll never get to use because tech companies obsess about setting up shop, paying no tax and only employing foreign "talent".

      I want to do a part time degree in AI and despite being by UK standards fairly well paid and working in tech as a software engineer - I can't afford to and if certain companies would actually pay non-derogatory levels of tax I could maybe afford to because the fees would be lower and in theory, assuming they're hiring British workers, everybody should benefit. I'm just not holding my breath..

      1. MonkeyCee

        Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

        "I want to do a part time degree in AI and despite being by UK standards fairly well paid and working in tech as a software engineer - I can't afford to "

        Study in Europe then. I'm doing Data Science at Maastricht, and their AI Masters program is very nice. Taught in English, fees are 2k euro a year.

        Massive demand for interns from the course (roughly two internships offered per student) and if you've already shown to be able to work at a professional level you;ll get a wide range to pick from.

        Get in now, and you can probably finish before the Brexit negotiations finish :)

        1. streaky

          Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

          Study in Europe then

          Aside from I shouldn't actually have to and everybody just swapping countries all the time is silly, I actually *like* living in the UK. I want to continue living and working in the UK. My job is in the UK.

          See the problem right?

          one friend working for a US dot com in London is on an excellent wage

          Startups don't count. For many many reasons.

          If you can't get a job in IT today, in London / SE / major conurbations anyway, you're either not trying, or you're not as good as you think you are, or you don't have useful skills

          I already have a job, with decent pay, that I enjoy. It's the rest of the country I worry about, I'm not from London but I had to move here because there's really nothing outside, even in non-tech. There's a whole country of hard working people with necessary skills and everybody can't move/commute to London, the city would collapse under its own weight, apart from the other issues.

          As an aside it really bugs me how poor the UK (and companies within at) are doing at providing something like apprenticeships in tech related fields.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

            > Aside from I shouldn't actually have to and everybody just swapping countries all the time is silly

            ???

            > See the problem right?

            That you / other people can't be arsed?

            > Startups don't count. For many many reasons.

            Such as? Just half a dozen or so reasons should be enough, no need for an exhaustive list.

            > I'm not from London but I had to move here because there's really nothing outside, even in non-tech

            No doubt things will get much better with less access to markets and labour.

            > There's a whole country of hard working people with necessary skills

            Let's be honest, unless your job involves drinking large amounts of tea and gossiping around the kettle... Besides, you don't want hard workers, you want efficient, productive ones.

            > As an aside it really bugs me how poor the UK (and companies within at) are doing at providing something like apprenticeships in tech related fields.

            It's called competitiveness. Apprenticeships go hand in hand with quality education and a grown-up attitude towards work, along with realistic expectations of what, if anything, you will be paid during it. This is not to say there isn't people with the right attitude... they just move to Germany :-)

            1. streaky

              Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

              No doubt things will get much better with less access to markets and labour

              Yep. More trade, less mouthy clowns from the EU apparently willing to work for tuppence and less EU-sponsored tax evasion, and they can keep the rest. Germany can have the banks too.

              Oh is that the sound of Deutsche Bank going down in flames and the German government doing the lalalala I'm not listening routine? Okay maybe not so much with the banks.

          2. Law

            Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

            "I already have a job, with decent pay, that I enjoy. It's the rest of the country I worry about, I'm not from London but I had to move here because there's really nothing outside, even in non-tech."

            Plenty of decent jobs here in the north west (of England) - tons going around Manchester, Liverpool, Warrington, etc.

            The main issues I'm facing here are house prices, roads and public transport.

            There are now several companies that will hire you as a work from home dev (with a substantial salary) now if you are good - even big named companies based in the US.

            Whether that'll be the case after 2019, we'll have to wait and see.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

        > "It's all based on the perpetual lies that firstly there's a skills shortage in the UK (there isn't, there's a shortage of decent jobs at fair pay) "

        ^ Very much this. Plus, employers writing poor-quality job adverts (therefore discouraging people from wanting to apply), or expecting all of their staff to come fully-trained, making it rather hard for graduates to get a start (hint: at some point someone has to be trained by someone!).

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

          > (hint: at some point someone has to be trained by someone!).

          Might there be a clue there as to an attitude problem?

          It would be unusual for new hires these days not to have a portfolio of open source code that they can link to on their CV (which in part explains why there is so much shit and dead code on Github and the like), showing that a) they had the motivation and intellectual curiosity to solve interesting problems without prompting, b) that they acquired the relevant skills in the course of their studies, and c) that they complemented those skills with their own learning and research.

          I know guys in Austria and Germany who started their own companies before graduating. I also know someone who started his before he even *started* uni (he's a billionaire now, btw). Over in San Francisco, Mssrs Brin and Page did not particularly seem to suffer from a "lack of training" either, to put an example.

          So I'm sorry, but seems the world has turned into a more competitive place since the last time you looked.

        2. Tom Paine

          Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

          If you can't get a job in IT today, in London / SE / major conurbations anyway, you're either not trying, or you're not as good as you think you are, or you don't have useful skills. If you pick commodity skills area - something that you can pick up in a five day boot camp course -- so could anyone else, and it follows that they will, competition will be higher and pay lower.

        3. Pompous Git Silver badge

          Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

          expecting all of their staff to come fully-trained, making it rather hard for graduates to get a start (hint: at some point someone has to be trained by someone!).

          Around 1990 The Git was declared unemployable by an expert in such matters. So, The Git purchased a computer to replace his rather aged typewriter. Wrote magazine articles and a book. And a newspaper column. Started a computer training business. Undertook several training contracts in the local village saving the 2 hours commute to the city. By 1999 he was banking $AU10-14,000 per month. That was the year he made enough money to build his dream home. Winding up the business, he saved ~$AU100,000 by building the house himself, so that was money he didn't have to earn and pay tax on, or borrow and pay interest.

          None of this was offered to The Git. He had to do it himself. Not bad for someone declared "unemployable". By an expert.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

        > It's not racist or xenophobic to give a shit about people growing up in the UK

        Of course not, but I do not see how those proposals actually help anybody, if anything they're terribly counter-productive. What on Earth is their stated aim anyway?

        > I can't afford to and if certain companies would actually pay non-derogatory levels of tax I could maybe afford to because the fees would be lower

        Or you could move to Scotland, Finland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Sweden, Argentina, Uruguay, or Brazil. Germany is pretty affordable too, at around €600 per year.

        Do note however, that unlike in England, where if you can pay you can play, access to higher education in many of those places is merit-based and the entrance examinations are character-strengthening to say the least. Perhaps not a bad thing for someone who blames their failures on "those tax-dodging companies (that I would actually love to work for if I had the chance)"?

      4. Tom Paine

        Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

        You could always, y'know, take advantage of the colossal volume of Free / open degree course material out there and teach yourself on your own time, not the mention a million mailing lists and forums stuff full of people happy to help, -- maybe even (gasp!) spend your own cash on a textbook or two, rather than expecting someone to come along and take responsibility for your life. "Impossible!" Not at all -- I dropped out of my (non-CS) degree course, have absolutely zero formal education in the field, and have a fairly well-paid* job doing infosec in the City. Yes, it's a bugger getting the first job where you're actually paid for skills you can't show evidence for; that's where hard work, initiative, being prepared to get knocked back a bit especially at first, being prepared for a pretty basic income and lifestyle, come in.

        * (you can get some idea by looking at efinancialcareers.com if you care how much)

    11. Tom Paine

      Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

      those of us left will earn more as a result.

      The fallacy here is the same as the "they take our jobs!" argument. You'll only be paid more if demand for your employer's goods or services stays the same. That is, to put it politely, an optimistic assumption.

      1. Terry 6 Silver badge

        Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

        Which does raise a degree of confusion in my uninformed head. Some Leave voters undoubtedly say, and maybe really believe, that we would be better off as a trading nation outside the EU. My confusion is that, in my uninformed way, I have been waiting to hear where these new trade deals are coming from that will let us buy stuff we need more cheaply than we can from within the EU or sell stuff more expensively. Maybe I'm just too ignorant of economics: Simple logic tells me that if countries wanted to sell stuff more cheaply they would already be doing so. And if they wanted to pay more....

        1. streaky
          Black Helicopters

          Re: The elephant in the room - stagnant wages because of the free movement of labour

          Maybe I'm just too ignorant of economics: Simple logic tells me that if countries wanted to sell stuff more cheaply they would already be doing so. And if they wanted to pay more....

          FWIW on this, the EU is a customs unions, external tariffs are set by the EU and if the EU takes a disliking to a country the UK does a lot of trade with (or wants to do a lot of trade with) or fails at negotiating low tariff or tariff-free deals with that the UK trades heavily with then the UK gets screwed.

          China is your classic case of both, UK was happily buying solar panels from China trying to get some low carbon infrastructure going. Some German (and I think Spanish) trade groups got all hot under the collar, protested to both the German govt/EU and the EU slapped a huge tariff on Chinese solar panels without much investigation because the Germans didn't feel like being competitive. Ironically the German govt later said they regretted the whole thing because it turned out the Germans were doing the same as the UK and buying from China rather than German suppliers and nothing they could do would get rid of it. Which is circular to another problem with the EU massive inertia/momentum depending on the situation - that's not surprising because the EU is huge and it's member states are very different but that's a problem they've made no attempt to resolve, it's not even clear they recognise it is one. The EU isn't seriously looking at a deal with China and when they do it could easily take 10 years to sort, again because of the sizes of both sides.

          The US is another example of UK trade harmed by the EU. The UK wants a trade deal with the US; it has done for decades. The UK pushed the EU-US deal and it got turned into the 7-headed monster from the deep now known as TTIP. It's not surprising because both sides of the deal are massive - but it's so big and so comprehensive (excessively so) that even before the brexit vote it looked somewhat dead in the water and post that and post-Obama I can't see it surviving. Talk about all your eggs in one basket. It's hard to even tell which side of the Atlantic hates it more so perhaps it should be put out of its misery.

          There's loads of examples of this all over the EU, there was the one where T&L can't import cane sugar from poor states because of a combination of subsidies on sugar beet which we *really* shouldn't be subsidising for a long list of reasons including but not limited to - it's sugar; and the fact that the EU slaps tariffs on those imports because no logical reason; which is not only damaging to the EU via budgets and via health (sugar is far too cheap in Europe which is why you hear about countries looking at adding tax to it all the time which is completely illogical) - but is also damaging to poorer countries that could be doing things like growing sugar to export to richer countries to help make them less dependant on aid.

          I could go on all day with examples that even I know about and I assume what I know isn't even the half of it.

  3. Tom7

    As others have pointed out elsewhere, this is the problem with having a government full of remainers implement brexit. They see the referendum as a xenophobic, isolationist outcome and feel bound to abide by it - when that's not the basis the campaign was fought on and, when asked, not the outcome those voting leave say they wanted (on the whole). So they end up proposing what amounts to a sick caricature of what the leavers actually wanted.

    When UKIP thinks you've gone too far in your immigration policy, you need to sit down and take a long, hard look at yourself.

    1. Jamie Jones Silver badge

      Tom, whilst it's true that many people of the BRexits voted for more control, and the supposed chance of making more lucrative deals abroad, and honestly had no xenophobic intent, the rest of your post is BOLLOCKS, and you know it.

      The whole circus was taken over by bigots, racists, and those old codgers who still believe "Britannia rules the waves" - so much so, that most of the BRexit people I know keep it quiet, as they are ashamed of what the whole event actually became, and don't want to be associated with the pond scum who swung the vote.

      *Your* intent may have been pure, but that's not how BRexit played out.

      1. sabroni Silver badge

        *Your* intent may have been pure, but that's not how BRexit played out.

        It's very difficult to judge how many people answering the question "Should Britain leave the EU?" were actually responding to "Are there too many immigrants?" The way this government is twisting one to mean the other is pure bullshit.

        Claiming that "pond scum swung the vote" is just as closed minded. The racists and little Englanders were always going to vote to leave. The vote was arguably swung by those who's decision was based on the economic possibilities.

        The name calling from both sides is equally divisive and needs to stop.

        1. Tatsky

          Re: *Your* intent may have been pure, but that's not how BRexit played out.

          @sabroni

          I agree that the name calling has to stop. The fact is that there were so many irons thrown into the fire with the leave campaign, that it's incredibly difficult to come to some reasonable conclusion about what the leavers voted for.

          Some I know voted for parliamentary sovereignty at the cost of the economy, which now seems a tad ironic as the PM is actively trying to keep parliament out of it.

          I know some who voted to have control of our own laws, which I think is Ironic as the government want to pass a bill to have all EU mandates written into UK Law.

          I do know some people who voted based on immigration, and to be honest those lot are quite ignorant and ill informed.

          I heard of one guy who from Newcastle who voted to leave to cause problems for Nissan at Sunderland.

          So there is a wide spectrum of leave voter reasons.

          My concern is that Tory HQ seem to have latched firmly on to the Immigration factor, by targeting foreign doctors and students first. This seems absurd to me, as we were told by the leave campaign that "low skilled EU migrants" are driving down wages, but the Government have started with some of the most talented, skilled and highly qualified people in society in Doctors, and the future talent in foreign students.

          As one commented said above "this could be great for home grown techies as our salaries will go up" but my feeling is that by scaring off tech talent, we run the risk of the UK becoming a less attractive place for tech startups and tech companies, resulting in less work for all of us.

          1. Tom Paine

            Re: *Your* intent may have been pure, but that's not how BRexit played out.

            it's incredibly difficult to come to some reasonable conclusion about what the leavers voted for.

            Well. Up to a point. I think the issues were pretty comprehensively explored during the campaign. More people chose to believe what I, and most people here, think was a transparent pack of lies, and ignored or severely underestimated the consequences when they were explained to them. If they don't understand modern life, well, that's very sad, but I'm afraid it's also tough shit. We don't get to select an electorate by intelligence or lack of gullibility - that's sort of the point of democracy - and if people chose not to, or are incapable of, understanding pretty straightforward obvious general knowledge level stuff,... well, maybe next time some thought should be given to the pros and cons of not standing up to a thirty year tabloid campaign of xenophobia, hate and lies in the name of cheap votes?

      2. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        @Jamie

        The problem that you point out is true, but probably not because of what you have stated.

        Both sides in the referendum campaigned on negative agendas. As a result, the people in the exit camp were campaigning against Europe, rather than for a particular model of Britain's future. It thus became a wide church, covering a range of people who are out-and-out xenophobic, all the way to those who are prepared to live in a global society, just not one controlled by Europe. There really was no one issue other that Europe itself that the voters could agree on.

        And for the campaign that wanted to stay, they really did overplay the fear card, claiming consequences once we had left that are unlikely to pan out to the extreme cases thay envisaged, so much so that many people just didn't believe it.

        As a result of these broad campaigns, we have a situation where even if you just look at the leavers, whatever deal is chosen eventually will upset significant numbers of people. It's unavoidable. There is no way there can be a solution that will satisfy a majority of the UK population.

        The referendum was just not thought out properly, and was framed in a way that, because David Cameron thought he could not lose, did not actually ask what kind of Britain people wanted.

        I would like to have seen a third option of "kick it down the road for a few years". I believe that most people would have voted for that rather than stay in or leave, which would have shown Europe that the UK was not happy with the way things were going, and put them on notice that we really could leave.

        I myself have no problem with working with people from other races, creeds and colours. I have no problem with them living and working here as long as they are doing something that cannot be provided by the local workforce (but please see below about my views on training).

        My view was that I no longer wanted to be shackled to a group of countries that were becoming inward looking and so bureaucratic that it was going to become impossible to achieve any change, while the rest of the world was moving in a different direction. So I voted to leave. I did not want to be part of a United States of Europe, which I believe is the direction it is going.

        I understood that in the short term, there would be economic costs, but my belief is that within 10 years, as long as we don't end up with some membership-lite deal, the UK will pull ahead of Europe.

        Where I do have a problem is with a predilection for businesses to employ people from abroad in preference to training our own young (or even older) people to do the jobs. This not specifically a European issue, but was complicated by free movement within Europe. The lack of training upsets me greatly, as I want to invest in future generations. As I look at it, it should be a no-brainer to make sure we have a adequately trained and experienced native workforce. We have to do this for the sake of our children and children's children.

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