[fennecfoxen]

Immigration policy is interesting.

I'm actually doing (early-stage) interviews with a number of companies in London and elsewhere. The visa situation for a US national hoping to work in the UK is obnoxious: assuming you've signed up to be eligible to sponsor people already (~8 weeks and a thousand pounds or so) you then do a little dance with an overly-tailored job description to demonstrate you can't hire someone locally after N weeks, pay another thousand pounds or so on the visa application, wait an additional ~6 weeks for processing, hope you get approved (quotas are falling dramatically) and if not, well, maybe you could to an inter-company transfer after a year of working for them elsewhere. Big companies benefit disproportionately while startups try to avoid the complications. Could be worse, though: it could be like the US.

In a place like Amsterdam or Berlin I'm given to understand that you can hope for a straightforward and relatively cheap approval process with very short turnarounds (on the order of two to four weeks) and much higher likelihood of getting the requisite approval.

Having access to a functioning tech industry in English-language friendly Scotland with low barriers to immigration would be awesome -- but then again, by the time it happens I'll probably either have married the girl or moved back to the US. :)