Praise for Irish Government
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009In December, 2000 I decided to apply for an Irish working visa after receiving an offer from Ericsson. Although offered compensation for a Senior Software Designer position was less than I had in Moscow at that time working for 2 companies simultaneously, I decided to accept the offer because of 3 primary reasons:
1. To learn spoken English
2. To work for one company only instead of many and dedicate free time to learning, reading and socializing
3. Working visa conditions such as the freedom to change an employer and virtually unlimited duration (permission to stay is renewed every 2 years)
If I had a US H-1B visa offer at the same time I would have definitely chosen the Irish one because I consider being tied to an employer in the case of H-1B as a kind of modern slavery. So Irish immigration is more progressive in this regard. When in March, 2003 I got my redundancy in another Irish company I was calm because I knew that I could find another employer in Ireland and I didn’t have to leave the country like many engineers did leave USA during dot-com crash and what we see now when USA companies lay off H-1B workers. Therefore I had my working visa renewed 3-4 times and after 8 years I got today a stamp that allows me to stay indefinitely without any condition (practically until my passport expires). This is very good and allows me to proceed further with Memory Analysis and Debugging Institute and associated publishing activities. I also applied for Irish citizenship that if granted gives me freedom to visit other EU countries on demand and ease access to USA and Canada. Last year I got an invitation to Canada to participate in the development of Windows Driver Foundation exam but I had to abandon my visit because of simultaneous passport change and the need to renew my stay in Ireland that happened to coincide with the visit dates.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -