deniedeee

I'm from Argentina. Are you a non-EU citizen? Some country with better relationships?

Argentina

No, it was for a regular work visa. The person handling my case explicitly asked if I was applying for a BlueCard and I said no (because it does require a degree).

At this point I'm blaming it on the situation being too different from what the immigration workers are used to, but it gave me a lot of headaches (and wasted time/money for me and the company).

That's not my experience at all. The company that hired me went to great lengths to get the approval and got rejected every time.

If you don't have a degree, it's more like a lottery that depends on whoever gets to see your case at the embassy/labor department.

So it's actually worse, right? Having to find a job that pays much more is actually more difficult, isn't it?

I have 17 years of experience in my area (DevOps) and was recently denied a work visa by Germany. Reason: no degree. I had an already signed contract with a major company to earn 58k EUR/year.

The company appealed to the ZAV multiple times and got rejected.

And software developer is in the shortage list. I don't advise trying it without a degree even though I got assurances from every recruiter I talked to that a degree was absolutely not necessary. I should have trusted my gut.

EDIT: I showed the embassy formal proof of my work experience, countless IT courses, many certifications (LPI, Kubernetes, Oracle, etc), participation in open source projects. They shrugged it all off and said "no degree, only ZAV can approve you". ZAV wasn't happy about it either. So I'm not how serious these countries are when they talk about a shortage of skilled workers. It seems they can't help themselves with the bureaucracy.