Emigrating

Those developers who have emigrated from the US to an overseas country, please relate the details.

What was your connection to the country?
How did you find your job?
Did you have a job before you went over?
What do you wish you would've done differently?
What's the visa situation like in your country? Is it hard to get an extended stay w/o becoming a citizen?
Can you get by on limited or non-existant 2nd language skills?

 
Monday, April 26, 2004

> What was your connection to the country?

Country of birth.

> How did you find your job?

Networking.

> Did you have a job before you went over?

Yes.

> What do you wish you would've done differently?

Being more sensitive to the culture and attitude differences. Besides living in the same kind of home and eating the same kind of food, the brain make up of a north american is very different from that of an asian on too many levels.

> What's the visa situation like in your country? Is it hard to get an extended stay w/o becoming a citizen?

It is possible to bring in technicians, however former citizens are expected to serve military duty if the stay is too long. Besides that, regular professional qualifications applies.

> Can you get by on limited or non-existant 2nd language skills?

To live day to day outside of the office yes, but professionally it can set you back quite a bit. It depends on your job.

Li-fan Chen
Monday, April 26, 2004

>> What was your connection to the country?
I was born there (Israel) and still have lots of family there. But I grew up in the USA since the age of 2.

>> How did you find your job?
In the classified ads of one of the major newspapers (Yedioth Aharonot). But it was written n English (since they needed English speakers, among other things).

>> Did you have a job before you went over?
No, but I was enrolled on a kibbutz program to last 5 months.

>> What do you wish you would've done differently?
Come in with the knowledge that English mother-tongue is a valuable skill, especially in the high-tech field. (I would've found work quicker had I known this; I was pretty naive.)

>> What's the visa situation like in your country?
Anyone who can prove that at least one grandparent was Jewish can get citizenship.

>> Is it hard to get an extended stay w/o becoming a citizen?
I don't know.... But many tourists come to visit and/or study for up to a year.

>> Can you get by on limited or non-existant 2nd language skills?
Yes. Israel is an immigrant country, made up of lots of Russians (and those for the former USSR), Argentinians, Western Europeans and North Americans. While it's important to know Hebrew, getting by with English or Russian is definitely possible.

Yoav
Monday, April 26, 2004

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