5 year cap works against UK.
1. A novice from India with an tech degree and barely a couple of years under belt, comes to UK for 5 years, builds some "real" skills and goes back.
2. An Indian company hires him and 4 other novices. Shows the "team" to the UK company. The "skilled" guy does the talking, win the project. Runs a tight ship initially.
3. Result: 5 UK jobs lost. Probably the well-paid-but-not-top guys. Probably the guys who knew some module history very well though.
4. Our "skilled" guy leaves for a new project, leaving a deputy in charge.. but as a result quality of code goes down. Dev team in UK starts firefighting the customer issues.. product innovation suffers.
5. product starts losing reliability/credibility/market share/mindshare and has to be killed.
No new dev means the dev team in UK is fired. 20 jobs lost.
6. Entire product (basically support at this point) is moved to India. Indian outsourcing
firm hires another 15 novices.. some of them as replacements for attrition in their ranks.
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Instead:
- if a company hires from outside, they should put in a deposit with the govt that this person will not go back and they will sponsor his/her citizenship.