This is interesting to hear. I'm in the process of applying for an Australian visa (no CS degree). To get an independent visa, I need 2 more years of work experience, before I qualify to apply to have my skills tested by ACS in very specific (and almost esoteric) programming knowledge.
And this is only the first step to apply for an 'invitation to apply' for a visa.
What are my job prospects as a US software developer seeking to emigrate to Australia? How often do Australian companies sponsor visas for overseas workers?
> What are my job prospects as a US software developer seeking to emigrate to Australia?
Frankly, assuming you have the right to live in the US, you are much better off staying in the US if you want to maximize your opportunities as a software developer vs. moving to Australia.
I say this as a Canadian who worked as a software developer in Southern California for 4.5 years but moved to Australia two years ago, largely to escape the restrictions of US work visas and try my hand at doing my own startups.
Sydney and Melbourne are the only two cities in Australia with sizable markets for software developers. Compare that to multiple regions in the US with large software industries (SV, SoCal, Texas, Research Triangle, NYC).
There are very few pure technology companies in Australia so the vast majority of software development is in-house development for banks, insurance companies etc. Australian companies also tend to be relatively conservative in terms of technology platforms so PHP, .NET and Java are the norm vs. Python or Ruby.
Certainly there are very talented and capable software developers in Australia, but the software industry is so small and under-valued (compared to e.g. mining or real-estate development) that there's very little opportunity to advance professionally.
Funnily enough realestate.com.au is one of the places running a Ruby on Rails dev shop, since I've seen them advertising for Ruby on Rails devs on lists that I'm on.
My boyfriend lives in Melbourne; hence the motivation to move. ThoughtWorks has an office in Melbourne, and Google in Sydney, but it was hard to find other pure tech companies in the area.
It's a shame that there isn't a well-defined exchange program between countries like the US and AU. In all other aspects I meet the visa criteria head-on, yet the fact that I don't have a degree will slow me down by 2-3 years.
IIRC you don't need your skills tested if you have at least 5 years experience and can find someone to sponsor you on a 457 visa. After 2 years you can enter the transition stream for PR. You might find that easier than direct entry if you don't have a relevant degree. It's worth talking to an immigration lawyer even if you have to spring a couple of hundred bucks for the privilege.
As for your job prospects, they're excellent in Melbourne or Sydney, and good to fair elsewhere.
I haven't talked to an immigration lawyer; and I think that they will be able to clear up quite a bit for me. Mostly I've been working through this on my own, with some help from the Australian Embassy as well. I will get in touch with one. Thanks for the tip!
There are plenty of people out here who Ron even have degrees who know gigantic amounts and are highly skilled, and who the ACS wouldn't even talk to. They are a complete waste of time.
When I was starting out in German, I started listening to the audiobooks and reading the German text. Knowing the small words (prepositions and other stopwords) isn't of much use on its own, but having a general feel for the plot and knowing the context of what 'should be happening' in the book helped give me a much broader understanding (and richer vocabulary!) than merely ploughing through the German 101 textbook.
tl;dr: Applaud the idea, but it's misguided. You need to focus on understanding words in greater context to derive any meaning.
My final year I forced my way through Faust by using an old Danish translation side by side with the German version to bring my grade up.
I'm Norwegian, so the old Danish translation gave me a "halfway house" - modern Danish is very understandable for a Norwegian; older Danish gets quite a bit closer to German. I still missed a lot of what was going on, but it brought me up a full grade in a semester.
Of course I'd probably had done just as well with less effort had I chosen something easier - I was being pretentious about it.
yes. but apparently he had a group of couriers, so we don't know if the couriers who were running the USB disks to internet café's were the same as the two brothers who owned the house
apparently he had a number of trusted couriers, and judging from what I have read on tracking these couriers down[1], it wouldn't surprise me if he had multiple levels of courier for his email
[1] apparently the couriers were so good at counter-surveillance that even when the CIA had tracked one of the brothers down to Pakistan, it took them two years to link them to the compound, since they both took exhaustive counter-intelligence measures to make sure they were not tracked. amazing story
On the contrary, I found the book engaging and interesting. Maor's passion for trigonometry shows through in his clever examples and humorous stories. (Read the prologue about Ahmes the Scribe)
What's the point of this? Drinking a beer on an empty stomach will compound the alcohol absorption, and mixing a depressant with red bull puts you at serious risk of heart problems.
If it's a new diet fad you're after, you'd be much better off just drinking water for three days.
You're probably right, and this makes me very sad. For all the supposed rights US citizens fight to defend, both the TSA workers and air travelers are just rolling over at the threat of being called a "terrorist".
What we need, then, is a dedicated civil disobedience campaign against it. If just one person does it, it ruins their day, week, or even several months dealing with the court battles. If 100 people do an act of civil disobedience, it becomes a movement; it might make some more significant news, attract some more significant attention.
If a thousand, or ten thousand people engage in civil disobedience, it starts to put a real strain on the system. It overwhelms the TSA. The court costs become prohibitive.
Why do we have so many people going to a rally in DC that won't really do anything (rallys almost never do)? And most of them will likely meekly go through security, without a fuss, on their way there. Why don't we instead organize 10,000 people to take a flight on the same day, and all wear aluminum jock straps and bras, or strip nude as they go through security? This would demonstrate how ridiculous the system is; this would help overburden an already overly expensive system to the point of breaking.
But of course, it's easy to talk tough on the internet, and a lot harder to get people to actually do anything. We all have our jobs to do, families to support. We have rallies for "truthiness" to go to. Or some of us don't even know where to start; don't know how to assemble such a group, and get them to follow through with it.
But perhaps we should put all that aside for freedom's sake, and go out, and disobey authority in a civil manner; it's our country, and we need to take it back.
Being arrested is not the same as being indicted. Pulling a prank like this might put you in handcuffs for a while, but if you have the time, it may still be worth it.
no matter how many times I read this, I'm always slightly caught off guard. The image many people seem to engender of fb is one of a public service -- ie they only "see" their friends on fb, not some abstract CEO.
With that reasoning, it makes sense that people pour so much blind faith into the Web site as they do -- they simply do not see a corporate structure to their giant online playground.
I expect Facebook to archive my profile and everything I've ever posted there or publicly. I don't really expect them to archive my private chat and not give me a way to delete it.
And this is only the first step to apply for an 'invitation to apply' for a visa.
What are my job prospects as a US software developer seeking to emigrate to Australia? How often do Australian companies sponsor visas for overseas workers?