As someone who started on the tier 2 visa - I chose London for exactly this reason, so did several others. However, they then discussed increasing ILR timelines from 5 to 10 years, incl impacting existing immigrants. Literally everyone I know on this visa is now considering moving to US (better make double the money with the same pain) or back to India (similar salary to London now even if pollution is high). Doesn’t seem the current UK government cares what people do or how talented they are, they just want all immigrants out.

I agree. London is still a great place to hire in tech. I'm actually routinely disappointed that we get such a low volume of domestic applicants despite paying at the top of the market.

but also stuff like this?

Anyone who's seen developer salaries in New York or Bay Area would know that you definitely want to hire in London instead of there - you need to raise 2x+ the amount if you want to hire Bay Area developers. So: Raise from UK & US investors, hire people in the UK.

UK visa is actually very good. Many friends of mine got it. I wish O-1 was so good.

but i dont want to get shanked Tom

...with one of the worst tax schemes for startup employees out there

FYI @robprogressive @HarryStebbings @DanielPriestley @rosspower

Second that

This has to trigger more IT jobs to UK

The government incentevises our replacement. What's new?

X brought this post to me! We are building a platform that helps skilled talents find visa sponsored jobs in the UK and globally. Also, help companies find skilled talents. We are raising funds at the moment after early traction with MVP. Would you be interested ?

Why pay, they let anybody in for free

Yes, but then you need to live in London. A shithole city with half the salary, twice the crime rents as expensive as any other capital

Is this good for the English? In the US we have a glut of well trained developers but companies prefer to hire Indians instead due to lower wages and the threat of visa non-renewal Preventing the wealth building that would go on otherwise and keeping it restricted to investors

The UK used to have the benefit of eventual EU citizenship, now remove that value add and the taxes / COL in recent years. It’s only “an” option and not the most desirable one.

With everything you know, would you recommend a young founder building a startup in London over SF?

And doing taxes in England is fair easier tbh! Talking from experience! HRMC online site guides you pretty well, it's the easiest place to fill for taxes in my experience... (Did it on Spain, UK, Estonia and France before)

One concern about UK is that everything is in London. They need to spread out a bit to other cities and I’m sure there’s more talent who can’t fight the expense in London.

Income tax is so high that whatever bonuses companies willing to put in to reward performance, a big chunk went to the government. You cant be serious saying UK is better. Revolut founder just moved to Dubai as an example.

This is true - bringing talented engineers and scientists to the UK is super easy compared with the US (we do both)

Hi @t_blom I have some points in good faith as someone that reads these posts almost every single day and gets increasingly frustrated - I am not xenophobic. I have been applying and trying to source out work doing what I am good at - I am talented, I was taught modesty so I wouldn't self describe as 'super talented' & have been told various times that I likely suffer from Imposter Syndrome. I have created my own systems, my own software, my own applications & my own sites. I have created autonomous systems & 'agent' frontend/interfaces that actually do not exist elsewhere, I should know since I quite literally invented the concept they are built around. I have shown & proven that I can actually work independently, but fail to secure or get any form of work at these 'tech companies' - but what I do see are posts like this that are joyous in having Visa Sponsorships (and presumably a fairly high number of them). I recently applied for a role, got to selection & then found out that it had been cancelled - this was due to this. 5-10k? This sounds like a lot of money (it might not be to yourself, or whoever this came from, but to me it would be life changing), so why can't these companies look for this 'talent' locally? When I have applied recently, I have found my efforts to have either been futile - or to have fallen on deaf ears. This can be, in most part, put down to a few factors: 1) The role was never advertised locally, therefore was never an option. 2) The HR/Hiring Manager looking at the CV has their own self interest or just doesn't know what 'super talented' actually is, and instead goes off of buzzwords & 'experience' (which can just be made up, or exaggerated, we all know 'fake it til you make it' culture is more present in the industry than we'd like to admit). 3) The intention wasn't to hire an actual effective worker as much as it was to hire someone who is more or less bound to the company on the grounds that they have to leave if they cannot find other employment if they do lose their job. You work in Tech, you work with YC, you know full well that someone who is a 'full stack developer', knows Js, Rust, Python etc is going to be replaced by largely automated coding agents - you are aware of this, or somehow completely isolated from your peers. You know the end goal with a lot of these companies is that a lot of their employees become expendable. I live in an area known for Tech, and that houses a fair amount of workers who do work in London, I have talked to a lot of these people personally - I have asked them what they do, where they do it & most importantly: what actually makes them 'talented'. The answers? Not really anything. They just have 'skills' that they can translate into words to put onto CV's to impress the sorts of people that you mention (who are looking for KPI/Number Go Up). I have these sorts of people contacting me, asking me how I do what I do, how I have made what I have made - but I can't even get a job doing basic data entry because of a combination of the reasons above (and others). It is, quite frankly, irritating & disheartening to see this sort of take - to see the potential of talent that already exists here (& this is more than just myself, by far) be completely disregarded because of these very simple reasons. It is, to be honest, driving resentment - and believe me I'm not the only one. I can see in a fair amount of your responses you have essentially said 'skill issue' - it is easy to imagine how you would say this in person. But then is it not a skill issue that YC got played at their own game, and probably still does, by individual(s) who have lied on their CV's? Played by one guy who made up their experience, and got multiple jobs at multiple YC backed companies at the same time? I can almost guarantee you that there's people still doing this that you haven't figured out. That seems like the kind of thing that people like this actually get. You think you're getting 'super talented' because Number Go Up, but in reality...? a lot of the things you people back are just System Prompts with a fancy looking ShadCN powered Frontend slapped onto a Vibe Coded backend (more than a few cases of this). The fact there are people splashing out tens of thousands to even hire for these roles is actually worrying. I have no doubt there is some truly great talent that has been sourced via migration, via Visa Sponsorships, but I also have no doubt that across a whole swathe of different sectors this over reliance is causing significant issues that impact society at large. Your increase in productivity is translating to people who are ill informed, but angry, voting for parties & policies that make everyone elses lives harder in the long run. They don't see these Visa workers being above a 'wage' that makes them immune to the proposed changes to ILR, in fact they probably don't even know what that means, they just want them gone - and this affects the people who don't get given comfortable comps and high paychecks - frontline workers, people who keep this country going who don't get paid enough, who aren't beyond that threshold proposed by the current opposition. I live with somebody who works in Special Education, she probably does more good for this country than somebody you're paying 10k to get to come here and Vibe Code a UI, but she is looking at having to leave - because the company she works for won't be able to pay what is required to keep her here. Make that make sense, make any of this make sense. The Talent already exists here, you people just won't look past the LinkedIn brain criteria you are defining to source it, and paying thousands for something you could quite easily find here if you actually invested in individuals.

Oh ffs

It can be a very quick process and those that meet the requirements will notice this. The only pain point is paying the Health Surcharge - you pay in advance for NHS plus continue to pay in taxes. So if you have a 2 year visa you pay 2 years upfront.

Yeah and you can hire engineers at the salary of a checkout clerk in USA. And the best part, the government would take away 50% of their income to give them no service 🙂 that’s why UK economy is growing at 9% every year.

In the UK, there’s an amazing visa - Global Talent Visa. Essentially, you just need to provide 10 evidences proving your talent and 3 recommendation letters. I put it all together in 5 days. The visa lets you work, build startups, or do nothing at all for 5 years.

England can't train its own engineers?

Now go walk around London and you will understand why that is not wanted here

"Debt crisis" (2025, 80 x 100 cm) This painting is about the debt crisis in the US and the coming devaluation of the dollar. People all over the world, both poor and rich, will lose their savings. This is the inevitable consequence of the US leftist economic policy. When the king runs out of money, he takes it from his vassals.