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Re:Ask HN: Is it possible to get asylum for developers? by avar on Sunday March 02, 2014 @12:12PM (#7329811)
I work at a company in Amsterdam that employs a lot of non-natives (myself included) including several Russians & Ukrainians. I don't think it would be appropriate to name-drop the company given the topic, but contact me if you're interested.

Anyway, given my admittedly somewhat limited knowledge of immigration law I don't think what you want to be looking at at all is getting asylum somewhere. That's going to be a process that's a giant pain in the ass anywhere in the world.

There's also lots of major caveats with getting asylum, generally to do with you or your ethnic/social group being specifically discriminated against or otherwise in danger. You're generally not going to get asylum just because you don't like the general security situation in your country of residence. If that was the case the first world would pretty much grant blanked asylum to millions to billions of people living in the failed states of the world.

If you have a specialist skill such as being a developer a much better and quicker path to emigrating is to get a work visa somewhere, and go from there to potentially getting a permanent residence permit or even citizenship

Re:Ask HN: Is it possible to get asylum for developers? by strangeworks on Sunday March 02, 2014 @12:30PM (#7329866)
Thank you for the comment, could you tell please, what kind of projects do you have in your company? Do they have ruby or rails positions, or frontend-based positions open?
Re:Ask HN: Is it possible to get asylum for developers? by avar on Sunday March 02, 2014 @12:43PM (#7329919)
I work at Booking.com. We don't use RoR but yeah, we have plenty of frontend positions open: https://workingatbooking.com I'm also happy to answer any of your questions, my E-Mail contact is in my profile.

But aside from where I work more generally there's lots of companies in more stable countries in Europe (or elsewhere) that would be willing to hire a competent developer of whatever skills you might have.

I just wanted to point out to you that you'd have a much easier time if you could get a work visa and work your way towards permanent residence or citizenship than starting out trying to request asylum.

Re:Ask HN: Is it possible to get asylum for developers? by atsaloli on Sunday March 02, 2014 @10:13PM (#7331834)
Booking.com has an unfortunate reputation in the perl community

http://blogs.perl.org/users/booking_employee/2014/01/booking...

Re:Ask HN: Is it possible to get asylum for developers? by dkuntz2 on Sunday March 02, 2014 @01:08PM (#7330026)
> I don't think it would be appropriate to name-drop the company given the topic

Next response:

> I work at Booking.com

Wat? Sorry, things like this really stick out to me, and I thought it was odd. I have no opinion you choosing to, or not to, reveal your employer.

Re:Ask HN: Is it possible to get asylum for developers? by avar on Sunday March 02, 2014 @01:14PM (#7330044)
I wasn't expecting a follow-up question to be a question about the company I was working at in particular. I mainly replied to give some (admittedly amateur) general advice on seeking asylum v.s. pursuing a work visa.

Since he did ask what projects we have at the company that I happen to work at I thought it was simpler just to mention where I work.

We have a lot of promotion & hiring material online, and it's way easier just to mention where I work and have the OP check that out than for me to write up some some long-winded description of what the company does, all the while trying not to mention what company I'm talking about.

It's not like there's that many companies in Amsterdam that run online hotel booking websites. So any interested reader could infer what company I was talking about anyway if I were to describe what sort of projects we work on.