Where are they going? The US is famously hard to get into for foreigners wanting to work, as is Australia really. Are they working in the EU, or nomading?
Those from the eu are moving back to the eu, and those with skills in demand that hold british citizenship only and cant leave find remote work in the us or the eu. The uk contract market which used to be the ultimate goal for highly skilled engineers is getting slaughtered by silly regulation that pushes work either to outsourcing companies or, surprise surprise, to remote workers from the eu.
For instance, when i speak with folks from east europe they tell me there are remote jobs available from … the uk (somehow remote within uk is not ok, remote outside is). With a pay gap of roughly 20-30% that means that due to the cost of living and taxes being lower their pay is significantly higher than pay within the uk. The reasons companies outsource or externalise are because hiring contract workers is a tax nightmare (have to prove they are not disguised employees, otherwise rates would be much higher since the worker will have to pay as much tax as an employee..although non employee taxation is also pretty high, because eat the “rich”).
Then you have companies that hire locally in a crappy hybrid setup. As if anyone with skills in demand is going to uproot their family or want to live in expensive london only to work on crappy agiled to death products, where the only challenges are getting the process to work instead of solving actual problems.
It feels as if this country is making one wrong choice after the other. Brexit was one of them but since then there are plenty more.
I do believe that things can turn around, and as such, I will call out what i think damages progress any time i see it.
Hybrid or onsite that’s forcing people to return to an overcrowded over expensive city such as london is one of them. Get real and grow up, the world has moved on from wanting to piss their money away on commutes and rents, and the tech for remote is already here.
I don't think the US is that difficult for tech workers specifically. You do have to put up with a couple of things (H1-B instability) but it's not that different from the UK, where e.g. you have at will employment until you have worked at the same company for 2 years, which for tech workers is also when a lot of ICs are looking for a new position!
As for the lack of holiday and paid health insurance, that's easily compensated by the huge pay disparity in tech. Honestly, the only reason I didn't go to the US is that I was afraid I might meet someone there and end up staying there. That's on my personal political views of the US which a lot of people wouldn't be bothered about.
It's easy to talk in generalities without data. The data is - immigration to the UK is up by a lot, including tech workers.
However, those people are mostly going to work outside the startup bubble. The startup scene that a lot of us work in here is not doing so great. Funding is much harder to find, pickier, and more interested in revenue now than a story about the future. Frothy startups are imploding.
The result of this is that, if you look at the indeed jobs data, while the overall jobs market is pretty good, the tech jobs market is about 60% of what it was in 2019.
I imagine a lot of people who got into tech during the pandemic hiring bubble (go on furlough, do an online javascript bootcamp, get a 70K salary) are going back to what ever they got furloughed from.
So it is harder to get a job for everyone, but the relatively easy visas for tech workers and english working language mean that the flow of labour into the market continues to increase.
We can expect this to result in continued divergence between UK and US salaries. UK tech salaries remain about 2-4x Indian tech salaries for equivalent workers for instance, so the UK remains an attractive destination for earning money and building a nest egg back home.
