The history of moving the system administrator in Germany. Part One: Job Search and Visa
Hello.
I decided to publish the history of my move to work in Germany, describing as much as possible all the stages - from making a decision to start looking for a job abroad to actually moving, finding housing and solving many issues on the spot. It led me to this, firstly, a very small number of stories of successful job search in Germany by the sysadmin (and in this area has its own specifics, different from programming), and secondly - some non-standardness of my case. Usually, people either go abroad alone or with their wife and children, but I left with my sister, which added a lot of nuances to visa issues.
It will be a long story in three parts, where I will try to highlight as much as possible all the rakes I had to go through.
First, probably worth a little talk about us. In the spring of 2017, I was 28 years old, and my sister was 30. We both worked in IT: I was mainly working on Linux (web, DevOps), some AWS and, incidentally, Windows infrastructure, my sister specialized in heavy enterprise solutions from MS, storage and virtualization . By that time, for about half a year, we studied German together at the wonderful Deutsch-Klub language school in the city of St. Petersburg, where we lived most of our lives. My sister "got sick" with Germany several years ago, and I first went to learn the language with her for the company, but then I discovered German musicals and I also got carried away. Then one day we sat by the panoramic windows of our rented apartment, looked at the sea of ​​St. Petersburg lights below, shared different thoughts ... We both had no real estate, no relationship, nothing kept us anywhere. That evening we decided: this spring should be our last in St. Petersburg and in general in Russia, in the fall we should move to Germany.
')
Then we did not have any clear plans or at least a rough understanding of what difficulties await us. There was only a common goal, to which we agreed to go together, helping each other. Now I am writing these lines from the town of Heusenshtamm, in the suburbs of Frankfurt. I have this text on one monitor, the console of one of the working servers is open on the second. The sister is sitting at the table opposite, leaning over a German textbook from the Frankfurt language school. We have succeeded; more than two months have passed since we moved to Germany. However, let's get better in order :)
You can get to Germany in different ways. The easiest way for a tourist is to get a Schengen visa and herzlich willkommen! But we wanted to stay in this country to live, so the tourist option fell away immediately. You can find German or Jewish roots and come along with preferential programs for immigrants - it also fell away: although we had some roots, it was possible to wait for a decision on this option for years, and without a guarantee of success. We didn’t even consider exotic options like residence permits for freelancers and other businessmen - we need to live in something new in the new country, and we are far from millionaires. Oh yeah, you can still marry a German or marry a German. It’s not for me to judge those who make such marriages of convenience, but for us this was absolutely unacceptable. There was only one option - work. There is a lot of it in Germany, it’s just what and for whom: EU citizens can work almost without restrictions, and it’s very difficult for a foreigner from Russia to get a work permit. However, there is an exception to this rule - the Blaue Karte program: in essence, this is a simplified issuance of a work visa for highly qualified specialists of certain professions. IT specialists, doctors, engineers ... The list is long. A specialist who has arrived under this program, after 1 year and 9 months of work in Germany, has the right to receive an indefinite residence permit (subject to knowledge of German at a level not lower than B1), and after 6 years - citizenship (subject to social adaptation etc).
The most interesting thing about this program is that the Blaue Karte visa is issued without fail if three conditions are met:
1. Higher education recognized in Germany
2. A working contract with a German company for the profile of your education (there are some loosening here: for example, a diploma in non-IT, but a technical specialty - physics, mathematics etc) is quite suitable for an IT specialist,
3. Annual salary, amounting to at least € 50,800 per year before taxes (for a separate list of essential specialties, which include IT specialists, at least € 39,624 per year). These numbers change upwards every year.
What is good compulsory procedure for issuing a visa? The fact is that most German visas are issued at discretion . This means that your application will be considered for quite a long time (from a month or longer) in Germany by an official from the Ausländerbehörde - Office for Foreigners, and the decision is made in each case based on the discretion of the official himself, so that the issuance of a visa can be refused without giving reasons . Or with the explanation that you ... did not convince the official of the honesty of their intentions, and it will be difficult for you to prove the opposite. But a Blaue Karte visa, if you meet the above conditions, you are required to issue.
It was in this direction that it was decided to move. My German frankly did not reach the level that allowed it to work, but I had good English, and in many German IT companies, English is the language of internal communications - so I evaluated my chances as good.
First of all, I wrote a detailed summary in English, which took me about two days. After reading this resume by several familiar IT specialists, friendly HR and an English teacher, it was mercilessly shortened and corrected: there were two of three pages left with the most brief and detailed “squeeze” of key skills and experience. After registering on monster.de, indeed.com, xing.com, stepstone.de and similar sites for job search, as well as subscribing to work groups for IT people on Facebook, I began to send this resume to suitable vacancies for me, where either there was no explicit demand for German, or it was explicitly stated that only English was needed. I always attached a cover letter to my responses, the template of which was written and checked simultaneously with the resume, and which I slightly changed for each specific job - to focus on the skills I needed there. At the same time, it was necessary to carefully read the job description - often there it was stated that the salary expectations and possible date of return to work should be reflected in the covering letter, or asked to send certificates or a copy of the diploma (in German) along with the resume. If no additional information or documents were clearly required, I was limited to a covering letter.
Separately, it is worth writing about the salary. In 90% of German IT jobs, the salary is not indicated, and the applicant will be asked the question how much he wants to receive - which puts many compatriots at a dead end, like me at that time. How much to ask, not to sell cheap, but also not to seem inadequate? I looked at salary statistics in my industry for a specific federal state and average housing prices in a city where a vacancy was offered, and then correlated it with the tax class relying on me (it depends on how much you will get in your hands). Based on all this, I called the amount. She, of course, among other things, must fit into the aforementioned Blaue Karte minima.
In short, the job search was in full swing. My sister did about the same, with the only difference that her resume was in German - she had very little English, and she did German much longer and harder than me, which had a very positive effect on her vocabulary and conversational skills.
I received the first answers already after a few days, but these were either automatic remarks, or formal replies like "your resume has been received, we will contact you if it suits us." The yard was the end of April 2017.
The first real answer came about a week later: Daniel, a recruiter from a recruitment agency, wrote to me and offered to talk on the phone. To say that I was worried means to say nothing :) However, everything went well: we understood each other perfectly. Daniel asked me in details about my experience, said that he had several suitable vacancies, and with my consent sent my resume there with his comments. After a couple of weeks, he called back: I was very interested in one company from Frankfurt, who was looking for an DevOps engineer, and I was asked to go through online proficiency testing. Testing consisted of several problems of medium complexity on codigity, which could be solved in Python or Java, to choose from. I chose Python and coped without any problems, after which I was invited to an interview by phone, which was to take place in two weeks (this was explained by the high workload of the team leader). And a couple of days later I received a response from a company from Berlin, where I sent a resume to the vacancy of the system administrator: I was asked to fill out a questionnaire with an assessment of my professional skills, after which they appointed a Skype interview (after three weeks). Already knowing about German slowness, I was not particularly surprised.
Here you need to make a lyrical digression. From the very beginning of my job search, I was learning English skype with a teacher from the USA. For some reason, many people buy into the magic phrase “native speaker”, without thinking that knowing two languages ​​and teaching a language are two big differences. I initially looked for (and found) a teacher , and with experience in preparing people for the job interview, and he helped me a lot - we talked on a variety of topics, corrected jambs in my pronunciation and building phrases, lost a lot of possible situations and questions could be asked at the interview. As homework, first there were tests for fixing grammar and tenses, and then audio and video, which had to be heard and re-told in our own words without errors. I prepared a voluminous text with typical “HR-Style” questions and variants of my answers, which we “lost” with the teacher several times. By the time of the first interview, I was ready for all (well, almost) possible tricks and knew how to answer them.
In mid-May, it was time for the first telephone interview. The team leader of the development company from Frankfurt, who called me, turned out to be Russian, and also to some extent my colleague twice (he graduated from St. Petersburg University with a degree in radio-electronic equipment and high-frequency education). We communicated with it, however, exclusively in English. Having asked me about my experience in development automation, he gave me a “homework” (as I later found out from some German programming contest) and a week to implement it. I coped in 5 days, sent the decision, and we had a discussion by e-mail, because our results were somewhat different. As a result, Timlid had to agree that he himself solved this task erroneously, after which I received an invitation to the next stage - a videoconference with him and a lady from HR. At the videoconference, which took place in mid-June, I was asked standard “HR-Style” questions (in response to which I gave out my homework without hesitation), told a little about the company, and a couple of days later they sent an invitation to come for the final interview to them. office. The company paid me plane tickets to Frankfurt and back, plus hotel accommodation.
The Skype interview with a company from Berlin was at the end of May. For about an hour, I spoke with their Senior HR, who was also very savvy about IT. After a conversation on IT and universal themes, HR gave me a test task (write an average difficulty playbook for ansible subject to certain conditions). I coped with the task, and after a couple of weeks there was another Skype-interview, where in addition to the recent HR there was a team leader and one of the senior administrators. They have long and corrosively figured out why I wrote this playbook well and not otherwise, and how I would change it for such and such conditions. They asked a lot about the general principles of infrastructure services - AD, Exchange, Sharepoint, SCCM, plus there were quite a lot of questions about Linux. These topics were familiar to me through, so I kept quite confidently. At the end of June I was offered to come to Berlin for the final interview. He was appointed on Monday, and, to my surprise, the company invited me to fly in on a Saturday and two days to walk around the city. And the tickets and hotel for the entire stay - also at their expense. Suddenly, but nice.
Frankly, I was somewhat uncomfortable. I have never been to Germany before, although I knew a lot about this country. And then the plans of emigration through the work of something speculative for the first time began to look real. It all seemed very strange to me - is it that in Germany there are so few qualified IT specialists that serious companies are ready to solve many problems in importing a specialist from abroad? I was skeptical, but there was no time for reflexing: the gap in time between the two final interviews - in Frankfurt and in Berlin - was only three days. I had a valid Schengen, so, fortunately, I didn’t have to issue a visa at the fire tempo, but before the trip I had to solve many issues, buy tickets (I had to pay for them, but I had to look for suitable flights myself), motivate my absence work, study maps of cities on the subject of habitat, offices, attractions ... Plus, I did not stop sending out resumes for suitable vacancies, which also took some time. But now, finally, I was sitting on a plane that carried me to Frankfurt. So I saw this city for the first time - from the airplane window, in the early July morning:
A company from Frankfurt, who invited me through a recruitment agency, was looking for an employee to the position of DevOps Engineer. In all telephone interviews there was a great emphasis on coding, and I did not get tired of repeating that I was not a programmer. I was told that "this is not a problem" and "we are satisfied." I still doubted, but the experience of an in-person interview in Germany would be clearly not superfluous for me, and who would refuse to fly overseas for someone else? Arriving on the eve of the interview, I walked around Frankfurt all day. It was the beginning of July, the sun was shining in a cloudless sky, the city was buried in verdure. Gaining courage, I even tried to speak German, and they even understood me. My sister, in order to expand language practice, wrote me WhatsApp quests - to go there, ask the local population this and that, and so on :) I really liked Frankfurt - a beautiful modern city interspersed with antiquities.
The next day, at 8:30 am, I went for an interview. They drove me through Java and Python for a long time, after which they said that I was no match for the post of DevOps due to insufficient programming skills, but they have a vacant admin post. Then I spoke very positively with the head of the admin team, answered all his questions and made, as it seemed to me, a good impression. The final was a conversation with HR Manager - a stern lady under 50 years old, with a military bearing and a suspicious squint. She asked me a bunch of unpleasant questions, which boiled down to the idea that I wanted to get a residence permit through a company by deception and immediately run across to my competitors. At the end I was promised to give an answer within a week. I walked a few more hours around Frankfurt, ate the Bretzel, and flew home. A few days later I was refused without explanation.
The second company, located in Berlin, was looking for a system administrator, and this was one of the first vacancies where I sent my resume. We discussed all possible issues with them via Skype, and on Saturday morning I flew to Berlin - the company gave me the opportunity to get to know the city I was supposed to move to, for which I was paid for the flight and the hotel (even with breakfast) from Saturday to Tuesday. Having walked around Berlin all weekend, on Monday I spent a full-fledged working day in the company's office, I passed a couple of interviews with top management and performed a rather extensive test task - entirely on the subject of Linux, since I fully demonstrated my skills on Windows in previous interviews. The task began with the fact that it was required to crack the admin password on the machine, for which I had to perform it :) I coped successfully, we parted in a positive way, and promised to give an answer in four days. In the evening after the interview, I climbed up to the Berlin TV tower, wandered around the night city and flew back to St. Petersburg in the morning.
Four days later, I was called by the HR company and said that they apologize very much, but still cannot agree on me in any way, so they need a few more days to think. Realizing that it smells like kerosene, I sat down the same evening and rolled out a large motivation letter, in which I wrote how I liked Berlin, how I appreciate the company's generosity and how happy I will be working there, which I sent to all those interested. Whether the letter took effect, or the stars came together, but early next week they called me and said two magic words: “job offer”.
On the same day they sent me a draft contract. The next day I wrote down that the contract was fine for me, and another week left the company for its internal approval, during which I had to urgently shake my former management regarding the recommendations requested by the company at this stage. Moreover, HR, having received a written recommendation, was not too lazy to call and inquire in detail what kind of employee I was (and I then heard a lot of interesting things about myself from the former boss, whom they began to call at the height of the rally). Finally, they sent me a formal job offer and a contract, I signed it and sent it back. Now they had to sign a contract on their part and send me the original by express mail, after which they could go to the consulate and apply for a German national visa.
Everything that happened seemed unreal to me - and, as it turned out, for good reason. When I was already registered at the consulate of Germany, I was suddenly called personally by the CEO of a Berlin office. He apologized profoundly and said that they were forced to withdraw the contract, as the company's investors suddenly spoke out strongly against hiring a person from outside the EU as a system administrator (for security reasons). Then I wrote to HR, who also apologized a lot and explained that they had done everything possible to convince investors, but nothing happened. And, since they understood that withdrawing an already signed contract was extremely ugly, I was offered monetary compensation for the inconvenience ... Which, of course, was very nice, but the fact of the collapse of all who had already begun to translate into action plans for the move could not be fixed.The yard was the end of July.
To say that I was upset is to say nothing. Not to give up after such a deafening failure was difficult, but my sister strongly supported and motivated me. In the meantime, three more responses appeared on my resume: from Cologne, Neustadt and Frankfurt. In the first company (a major system integrator, Linux direction), I passed all the technical interviews, but was refused due to the fact that I ... didn’t smile much and therefore “will not fit into their corporate culture”. The second company, also a system integrator, the Windows direction, wrote that I was very interested in them, but I transferred the date of the interview many times (either they got HR sick, they were on a business trip,or an alien invasion ), and I spat on them.
Finally, the third company ... Let's start with the fact that for some reason their response got into my spam, and I saw it there purely by chance. I was invited to a telephone interview. The head of the department and the senior administrator talked with me, and told me that they were a small government office that was looking for a specialist to administer the WEB infrastructure under Linux, with skills in related fields. I was asked a lot of questions on my experience, the decisions applied, their rationale and reasons, on the projects in which I participated, on relationships with colleagues. At the same time, they didn’t ask a single “HR-Style” question in the spirit of “tell me about your shortcomings,” which I immediately liked very much. That same evening, they sent me a test task - a rather extensive one, which includes writing a detailed plan for deploying a fault-tolerant infrastructure for the given introductory ones.On its performance was given a week. I coped in two days, trying to paint everything in detail, using all the solutions that I knew (and even those I had heard about, having read a bunch of specialized websites for this and in consultation with colleagues). Having sent the resulting document to a potential employer, I waited.
Imagine now my surprise and joy when the very next day I received a letter with an offer, the conditions of which were even better than I could have expected! So, without personal acquaintance and a trip to their office, after one telephone conversation, the company decided to hire me (I learned about the reasons for such efficiency later, on the spot). Of course, I agreed, and the next day they sent me a contract. He got to me not without incident (hello to the Post of Russia), but this is already particular. It was in the middle of August.
It is time to prepare documents for a national visa. It was necessary to collect everything, translate it into German, fill out questionnaires, decompose in a certain way ... I even had to go to the consulate once again to find out if I needed to send my diploma to confirm its compliance with German higher education. It turned out - no need, otherwise it would have resulted in an additional 200 euros and 2 weeks of waiting.
Here is a list of documents that I submitted to the consulate:
1. Application form for issuing a national visa
2. Statement of responsibility for providing false information
3. Passport with two copies
4. Regular passport with two copies
5. Employment agreement with two copies
6. Autobiography on German with two copies
7. Diploma with a translation into German and two copies (no need for an apostille)
8. A printout from ANABIN recognizing my specialty as equivalent to German
9. An employment record with a translation into German and two copies
10. Help from a German language about language courses with two copies
11. "Schengen" medical insurance with two copies
At the St. Petersburg consulate of Germany, I accepted the documents right away, although they were cursing because the contract was in English (the company where I got a job was international). They promised to make the visa not earlier than in a week, but in fact she was ready in a day - on August 23. Departure, we have planned for September 22.
The funny thing is that in a couple of days after going to the consulate, the office from Neustadt “woke up”. Bearing in mind that in Berlin I was eventually sent even with a signed contract, I agreed to talk with them. Since I already had, in general, all the same, I didn’t bother too much about what and how I said it - I was joking, I went into lyrical digressions on general website topics, pursued provider bikes, a couple of times passed from English to German in those phrases where I felt confident ... An hour later, after completing the interview, I received a job offer with a postscript from HR in the spirit of "we are shocked by such a quick decision, but you are so impressed with the head of the department that he does not want to see other candidates."
However, all this was already the lyrics, and the question before us was serious enough: how to get an opportunity to leave with me for my sister, who hadn’t yet found anything. She is a very good specialist, in some areas much better than me, but ... she didn’t have a profile diploma, which meant that she wouldn’t even accept documents for a visa, since having a higher technical education is a prerequisite for issuing Blaue Karte under an IT contract . Of course, the sister did not conceal this fact in her resume. The possibility of obtaining a visa for a standard (not Blaue Karte) “working” paragraph without a profile diploma is there, but it can take months and creates a verymany problems for a company that decides to hire a specialist in this paragraph from outside the EU. Therefore, German companies are primarily considering those who meet Blaue Karte conditions - there the procedure is not much faster and simpler.
However, at first everything seemed quite simple: according to German law, specialists moving to Germany according to Blaue Karte have the right to take with them close relatives, who are automatically issued a “working” residence permit. But when we read this law carefully, it turned out that only spouses and minor children are considered “close relatives” there. Parents, brothers, sisters and children who have reached the age of majority are not included in this category and they are not entitled to a residence permit.
We began to consider other options that give the right to obtain a residence permit for the sister. Visa for job search also required the presence of a profile diploma, so this option disappeared. As a result, we came to the conclusion that the sister needs to receive the so-called “language visa” - this makes it possible to live a year in Germany legally and learn the language. It is very difficult to get such a visa, but it’s quite possible: it was good for us that my sister had a certificate from the Goethe Institute confirming German ownership at A2 level (although in my opinion, she really knew the B1 language then), plus there was an opportunity pay intensive language courses in advance for the entire period of study (pleasure is not cheap, but without this condition, a language visa is not issued). For a year of such courses, and even in the language environment, it is quite possible from the level that the sister had thenreach at least C1, or even C2 - which opens up much more room for further steps.
My sister applied for a visa a week after me (this was because of the education documents), and our plan smacked of adventure: since October I had to go to work in Frankfurt and the time was running out, and considering the application for a language visa it is not a quick deal (1-3 months), we decided that my sister would travel with me on a valid Schengen visa, which gives you the right to stay in Germany for 3 months. And when the national visa is approved, it flies to St. Petersburg and goes after it to the German consulate. Here only the language visa is issued "at the discretion of the official", each case is considered individually and no one guarantees a positive decision. Of course, we had plans for what to do in case of refusal - but, looking ahead, the sister was given a visa in the end in just three weeks,however, we found out about it on the night before departure and did not have time to get it.
Then the events rushed straight off. We decided to go by car to transport the cat and as many things as possible. Sister took it aboutMost of the worries in organizing the move and finding housing in Germany for the first time, but I also had a headache. It was necessary to have time to do everything: dismissal from work, termination of an apartment rental contract, trips to the dentist and other doctors - so as not to get into trouble with health upon arrival in Germany, car diagnostics and repair - according to the principle “change everything that is suspicious,” because we had to overcome more than two thousand kilometers. Buying an extra trunk on the roof of the car, planning a route, booking accommodation on the way. Sale of unnecessary things, sorting necessary on those that we take with us, and those that we leave, transportation of the latter for storage. Transfer all savings to euros and withdraw them from a bank account. Fees, packing things in boxes, trying to cram into a new one, anger, denial, bargaining, humility,sending the storage of things that did not fit into the car and, finally, returning the keys to the apartment to the owners ...
It was early morning on September 22. We last exited the entrance of the house where we lived for a year. In the parking lot, there was a car loaded at the most nowhere, in the carry we carried a cat, not yet suspecting what test it was waiting for. Our feelings were complicated: the past life was over, the new one had not yet begun, there were 2,200 kilometers ahead and three days to go.
Our road to Germany has begun. But this should be told in a separate story.
Continuation can be read here .
Sites where I was looking for work:
www.monster.de
www.stepstone.de
www.indeed.com
www.xing.de
www.linkedin.com
Sites where I drew information about the nuances of immigrant life in Germany:
toytowngermany.com is in English A website with active discussions of many topics that are important for a novice immigrant or who is just about to move to Germany. The people there are mostly adequate and says the case,
tupa-germania.ru - a very interesting site. There are many articles about everyday issues and their solutions, an active forum with a lot of useful information,
surfin-birds.ru is also a lot of useful articles, but the activity on the forum tends to zero,
foren.germany.ru- from this resource I have a difficult impression. There is enough useful information, but even more flooding, stupid (and even harmful) tips and topics in the spirit of "how to marry a German", "how to get a benefit", "how to break the law and not get caught" and the like. On the fan.
ru-geld.de - a description of the German tax classes and how the net salary is calculated (the amount you get in your hands after taxes).
The ANABIN website, where I checked whether my diploma is recognized in Germany: anabin.kmk.org - unfortunately, only in German. If your university is listed in the ANABIN base with H + rating, and your specialty is there (in the general list of specialties, not necessarily for a particular university), such a diploma in Germany is considered equivalent to German higher education. If the university's rating is not H +, or your specialty is not on the lists, then you will most likely have to go through the procedure of recognizing a diploma through ZAB (costs about 200 euros and takes 2-3 weeks).
And, of course, the most reliable source of information on visa issues is the website of the German Embassy in Russia: germania.diplo.de .
PS In total, it took less than half a year from the decision to leave before going to work in Germany. During this time, about 50 resumes were sent, about half of them were refused, several invited an interview by phone / Skype, and the rest were not answered at all. It took 2.5 months from sending a resume to my current company to getting to work.
I decided to publish the history of my move to work in Germany, describing as much as possible all the stages - from making a decision to start looking for a job abroad to actually moving, finding housing and solving many issues on the spot. It led me to this, firstly, a very small number of stories of successful job search in Germany by the sysadmin (and in this area has its own specifics, different from programming), and secondly - some non-standardness of my case. Usually, people either go abroad alone or with their wife and children, but I left with my sister, which added a lot of nuances to visa issues.
It will be a long story in three parts, where I will try to highlight as much as possible all the rakes I had to go through.
Initial data
First, probably worth a little talk about us. In the spring of 2017, I was 28 years old, and my sister was 30. We both worked in IT: I was mainly working on Linux (web, DevOps), some AWS and, incidentally, Windows infrastructure, my sister specialized in heavy enterprise solutions from MS, storage and virtualization . By that time, for about half a year, we studied German together at the wonderful Deutsch-Klub language school in the city of St. Petersburg, where we lived most of our lives. My sister "got sick" with Germany several years ago, and I first went to learn the language with her for the company, but then I discovered German musicals and I also got carried away. Then one day we sat by the panoramic windows of our rented apartment, looked at the sea of ​​St. Petersburg lights below, shared different thoughts ... We both had no real estate, no relationship, nothing kept us anywhere. That evening we decided: this spring should be our last in St. Petersburg and in general in Russia, in the fall we should move to Germany.
')
Then we did not have any clear plans or at least a rough understanding of what difficulties await us. There was only a common goal, to which we agreed to go together, helping each other. Now I am writing these lines from the town of Heusenshtamm, in the suburbs of Frankfurt. I have this text on one monitor, the console of one of the working servers is open on the second. The sister is sitting at the table opposite, leaning over a German textbook from the Frankfurt language school. We have succeeded; more than two months have passed since we moved to Germany. However, let's get better in order :)
Germany and how to move here
You can get to Germany in different ways. The easiest way for a tourist is to get a Schengen visa and herzlich willkommen! But we wanted to stay in this country to live, so the tourist option fell away immediately. You can find German or Jewish roots and come along with preferential programs for immigrants - it also fell away: although we had some roots, it was possible to wait for a decision on this option for years, and without a guarantee of success. We didn’t even consider exotic options like residence permits for freelancers and other businessmen - we need to live in something new in the new country, and we are far from millionaires. Oh yeah, you can still marry a German or marry a German. It’s not for me to judge those who make such marriages of convenience, but for us this was absolutely unacceptable. There was only one option - work. There is a lot of it in Germany, it’s just what and for whom: EU citizens can work almost without restrictions, and it’s very difficult for a foreigner from Russia to get a work permit. However, there is an exception to this rule - the Blaue Karte program: in essence, this is a simplified issuance of a work visa for highly qualified specialists of certain professions. IT specialists, doctors, engineers ... The list is long. A specialist who has arrived under this program, after 1 year and 9 months of work in Germany, has the right to receive an indefinite residence permit (subject to knowledge of German at a level not lower than B1), and after 6 years - citizenship (subject to social adaptation etc).
The most interesting thing about this program is that the Blaue Karte visa is issued without fail if three conditions are met:
1. Higher education recognized in Germany
2. A working contract with a German company for the profile of your education (there are some loosening here: for example, a diploma in non-IT, but a technical specialty - physics, mathematics etc) is quite suitable for an IT specialist,
3. Annual salary, amounting to at least € 50,800 per year before taxes (for a separate list of essential specialties, which include IT specialists, at least € 39,624 per year). These numbers change upwards every year.
What is good compulsory procedure for issuing a visa? The fact is that most German visas are issued at discretion . This means that your application will be considered for quite a long time (from a month or longer) in Germany by an official from the Ausländerbehörde - Office for Foreigners, and the decision is made in each case based on the discretion of the official himself, so that the issuance of a visa can be refused without giving reasons . Or with the explanation that you ... did not convince the official of the honesty of their intentions, and it will be difficult for you to prove the opposite. But a Blaue Karte visa, if you meet the above conditions, you are required to issue.
It was in this direction that it was decided to move. My German frankly did not reach the level that allowed it to work, but I had good English, and in many German IT companies, English is the language of internal communications - so I evaluated my chances as good.
Job Search in Germany
First of all, I wrote a detailed summary in English, which took me about two days. After reading this resume by several familiar IT specialists, friendly HR and an English teacher, it was mercilessly shortened and corrected: there were two of three pages left with the most brief and detailed “squeeze” of key skills and experience. After registering on monster.de, indeed.com, xing.com, stepstone.de and similar sites for job search, as well as subscribing to work groups for IT people on Facebook, I began to send this resume to suitable vacancies for me, where either there was no explicit demand for German, or it was explicitly stated that only English was needed. I always attached a cover letter to my responses, the template of which was written and checked simultaneously with the resume, and which I slightly changed for each specific job - to focus on the skills I needed there. At the same time, it was necessary to carefully read the job description - often there it was stated that the salary expectations and possible date of return to work should be reflected in the covering letter, or asked to send certificates or a copy of the diploma (in German) along with the resume. If no additional information or documents were clearly required, I was limited to a covering letter.
Separately, it is worth writing about the salary. In 90% of German IT jobs, the salary is not indicated, and the applicant will be asked the question how much he wants to receive - which puts many compatriots at a dead end, like me at that time. How much to ask, not to sell cheap, but also not to seem inadequate? I looked at salary statistics in my industry for a specific federal state and average housing prices in a city where a vacancy was offered, and then correlated it with the tax class relying on me (it depends on how much you will get in your hands). Based on all this, I called the amount. She, of course, among other things, must fit into the aforementioned Blaue Karte minima.
In short, the job search was in full swing. My sister did about the same, with the only difference that her resume was in German - she had very little English, and she did German much longer and harder than me, which had a very positive effect on her vocabulary and conversational skills.
I received the first answers already after a few days, but these were either automatic remarks, or formal replies like "your resume has been received, we will contact you if it suits us." The yard was the end of April 2017.
Remote Interviews
The first real answer came about a week later: Daniel, a recruiter from a recruitment agency, wrote to me and offered to talk on the phone. To say that I was worried means to say nothing :) However, everything went well: we understood each other perfectly. Daniel asked me in details about my experience, said that he had several suitable vacancies, and with my consent sent my resume there with his comments. After a couple of weeks, he called back: I was very interested in one company from Frankfurt, who was looking for an DevOps engineer, and I was asked to go through online proficiency testing. Testing consisted of several problems of medium complexity on codigity, which could be solved in Python or Java, to choose from. I chose Python and coped without any problems, after which I was invited to an interview by phone, which was to take place in two weeks (this was explained by the high workload of the team leader). And a couple of days later I received a response from a company from Berlin, where I sent a resume to the vacancy of the system administrator: I was asked to fill out a questionnaire with an assessment of my professional skills, after which they appointed a Skype interview (after three weeks). Already knowing about German slowness, I was not particularly surprised.
Here you need to make a lyrical digression. From the very beginning of my job search, I was learning English skype with a teacher from the USA. For some reason, many people buy into the magic phrase “native speaker”, without thinking that knowing two languages ​​and teaching a language are two big differences. I initially looked for (and found) a teacher , and with experience in preparing people for the job interview, and he helped me a lot - we talked on a variety of topics, corrected jambs in my pronunciation and building phrases, lost a lot of possible situations and questions could be asked at the interview. As homework, first there were tests for fixing grammar and tenses, and then audio and video, which had to be heard and re-told in our own words without errors. I prepared a voluminous text with typical “HR-Style” questions and variants of my answers, which we “lost” with the teacher several times. By the time of the first interview, I was ready for all (well, almost) possible tricks and knew how to answer them.
In mid-May, it was time for the first telephone interview. The team leader of the development company from Frankfurt, who called me, turned out to be Russian, and also to some extent my colleague twice (he graduated from St. Petersburg University with a degree in radio-electronic equipment and high-frequency education). We communicated with it, however, exclusively in English. Having asked me about my experience in development automation, he gave me a “homework” (as I later found out from some German programming contest) and a week to implement it. I coped in 5 days, sent the decision, and we had a discussion by e-mail, because our results were somewhat different. As a result, Timlid had to agree that he himself solved this task erroneously, after which I received an invitation to the next stage - a videoconference with him and a lady from HR. At the videoconference, which took place in mid-June, I was asked standard “HR-Style” questions (in response to which I gave out my homework without hesitation), told a little about the company, and a couple of days later they sent an invitation to come for the final interview to them. office. The company paid me plane tickets to Frankfurt and back, plus hotel accommodation.
The Skype interview with a company from Berlin was at the end of May. For about an hour, I spoke with their Senior HR, who was also very savvy about IT. After a conversation on IT and universal themes, HR gave me a test task (write an average difficulty playbook for ansible subject to certain conditions). I coped with the task, and after a couple of weeks there was another Skype-interview, where in addition to the recent HR there was a team leader and one of the senior administrators. They have long and corrosively figured out why I wrote this playbook well and not otherwise, and how I would change it for such and such conditions. They asked a lot about the general principles of infrastructure services - AD, Exchange, Sharepoint, SCCM, plus there were quite a lot of questions about Linux. These topics were familiar to me through, so I kept quite confidently. At the end of June I was offered to come to Berlin for the final interview. He was appointed on Monday, and, to my surprise, the company invited me to fly in on a Saturday and two days to walk around the city. And the tickets and hotel for the entire stay - also at their expense. Suddenly, but nice.
Visits to face-to-face interviews and what came of it
Frankly, I was somewhat uncomfortable. I have never been to Germany before, although I knew a lot about this country. And then the plans of emigration through the work of something speculative for the first time began to look real. It all seemed very strange to me - is it that in Germany there are so few qualified IT specialists that serious companies are ready to solve many problems in importing a specialist from abroad? I was skeptical, but there was no time for reflexing: the gap in time between the two final interviews - in Frankfurt and in Berlin - was only three days. I had a valid Schengen, so, fortunately, I didn’t have to issue a visa at the fire tempo, but before the trip I had to solve many issues, buy tickets (I had to pay for them, but I had to look for suitable flights myself), motivate my absence work, study maps of cities on the subject of habitat, offices, attractions ... Plus, I did not stop sending out resumes for suitable vacancies, which also took some time. But now, finally, I was sitting on a plane that carried me to Frankfurt. So I saw this city for the first time - from the airplane window, in the early July morning:
A company from Frankfurt, who invited me through a recruitment agency, was looking for an employee to the position of DevOps Engineer. In all telephone interviews there was a great emphasis on coding, and I did not get tired of repeating that I was not a programmer. I was told that "this is not a problem" and "we are satisfied." I still doubted, but the experience of an in-person interview in Germany would be clearly not superfluous for me, and who would refuse to fly overseas for someone else? Arriving on the eve of the interview, I walked around Frankfurt all day. It was the beginning of July, the sun was shining in a cloudless sky, the city was buried in verdure. Gaining courage, I even tried to speak German, and they even understood me. My sister, in order to expand language practice, wrote me WhatsApp quests - to go there, ask the local population this and that, and so on :) I really liked Frankfurt - a beautiful modern city interspersed with antiquities.
The next day, at 8:30 am, I went for an interview. They drove me through Java and Python for a long time, after which they said that I was no match for the post of DevOps due to insufficient programming skills, but they have a vacant admin post. Then I spoke very positively with the head of the admin team, answered all his questions and made, as it seemed to me, a good impression. The final was a conversation with HR Manager - a stern lady under 50 years old, with a military bearing and a suspicious squint. She asked me a bunch of unpleasant questions, which boiled down to the idea that I wanted to get a residence permit through a company by deception and immediately run across to my competitors. At the end I was promised to give an answer within a week. I walked a few more hours around Frankfurt, ate the Bretzel, and flew home. A few days later I was refused without explanation.
The second company, located in Berlin, was looking for a system administrator, and this was one of the first vacancies where I sent my resume. We discussed all possible issues with them via Skype, and on Saturday morning I flew to Berlin - the company gave me the opportunity to get to know the city I was supposed to move to, for which I was paid for the flight and the hotel (even with breakfast) from Saturday to Tuesday. Having walked around Berlin all weekend, on Monday I spent a full-fledged working day in the company's office, I passed a couple of interviews with top management and performed a rather extensive test task - entirely on the subject of Linux, since I fully demonstrated my skills on Windows in previous interviews. The task began with the fact that it was required to crack the admin password on the machine, for which I had to perform it :) I coped successfully, we parted in a positive way, and promised to give an answer in four days. In the evening after the interview, I climbed up to the Berlin TV tower, wandered around the night city and flew back to St. Petersburg in the morning.
Four days later, I was called by the HR company and said that they apologize very much, but still cannot agree on me in any way, so they need a few more days to think. Realizing that it smells like kerosene, I sat down the same evening and rolled out a large motivation letter, in which I wrote how I liked Berlin, how I appreciate the company's generosity and how happy I will be working there, which I sent to all those interested. Whether the letter took effect, or the stars came together, but early next week they called me and said two magic words: “job offer”.
On the same day they sent me a draft contract. The next day I wrote down that the contract was fine for me, and another week left the company for its internal approval, during which I had to urgently shake my former management regarding the recommendations requested by the company at this stage. Moreover, HR, having received a written recommendation, was not too lazy to call and inquire in detail what kind of employee I was (and I then heard a lot of interesting things about myself from the former boss, whom they began to call at the height of the rally). Finally, they sent me a formal job offer and a contract, I signed it and sent it back. Now they had to sign a contract on their part and send me the original by express mail, after which they could go to the consulate and apply for a German national visa.
Everything that happened seemed unreal to me - and, as it turned out, for good reason. When I was already registered at the consulate of Germany, I was suddenly called personally by the CEO of a Berlin office. He apologized profoundly and said that they were forced to withdraw the contract, as the company's investors suddenly spoke out strongly against hiring a person from outside the EU as a system administrator (for security reasons). Then I wrote to HR, who also apologized a lot and explained that they had done everything possible to convince investors, but nothing happened. And, since they understood that withdrawing an already signed contract was extremely ugly, I was offered monetary compensation for the inconvenience ... Which, of course, was very nice, but the fact of the collapse of all who had already begun to translate into action plans for the move could not be fixed.The yard was the end of July.
New Hope
To say that I was upset is to say nothing. Not to give up after such a deafening failure was difficult, but my sister strongly supported and motivated me. In the meantime, three more responses appeared on my resume: from Cologne, Neustadt and Frankfurt. In the first company (a major system integrator, Linux direction), I passed all the technical interviews, but was refused due to the fact that I ... didn’t smile much and therefore “will not fit into their corporate culture”. The second company, also a system integrator, the Windows direction, wrote that I was very interested in them, but I transferred the date of the interview many times (either they got HR sick, they were on a business trip,
Finally, the third company ... Let's start with the fact that for some reason their response got into my spam, and I saw it there purely by chance. I was invited to a telephone interview. The head of the department and the senior administrator talked with me, and told me that they were a small government office that was looking for a specialist to administer the WEB infrastructure under Linux, with skills in related fields. I was asked a lot of questions on my experience, the decisions applied, their rationale and reasons, on the projects in which I participated, on relationships with colleagues. At the same time, they didn’t ask a single “HR-Style” question in the spirit of “tell me about your shortcomings,” which I immediately liked very much. That same evening, they sent me a test task - a rather extensive one, which includes writing a detailed plan for deploying a fault-tolerant infrastructure for the given introductory ones.On its performance was given a week. I coped in two days, trying to paint everything in detail, using all the solutions that I knew (and even those I had heard about, having read a bunch of specialized websites for this and in consultation with colleagues). Having sent the resulting document to a potential employer, I waited.
Imagine now my surprise and joy when the very next day I received a letter with an offer, the conditions of which were even better than I could have expected! So, without personal acquaintance and a trip to their office, after one telephone conversation, the company decided to hire me (I learned about the reasons for such efficiency later, on the spot). Of course, I agreed, and the next day they sent me a contract. He got to me not without incident (hello to the Post of Russia), but this is already particular. It was in the middle of August.
Visa issues
It is time to prepare documents for a national visa. It was necessary to collect everything, translate it into German, fill out questionnaires, decompose in a certain way ... I even had to go to the consulate once again to find out if I needed to send my diploma to confirm its compliance with German higher education. It turned out - no need, otherwise it would have resulted in an additional 200 euros and 2 weeks of waiting.
Here is a list of documents that I submitted to the consulate:
1. Application form for issuing a national visa
2. Statement of responsibility for providing false information
3. Passport with two copies
4. Regular passport with two copies
5. Employment agreement with two copies
6. Autobiography on German with two copies
7. Diploma with a translation into German and two copies (no need for an apostille)
8. A printout from ANABIN recognizing my specialty as equivalent to German
9. An employment record with a translation into German and two copies
10. Help from a German language about language courses with two copies
11. "Schengen" medical insurance with two copies
At the St. Petersburg consulate of Germany, I accepted the documents right away, although they were cursing because the contract was in English (the company where I got a job was international). They promised to make the visa not earlier than in a week, but in fact she was ready in a day - on August 23. Departure, we have planned for September 22.
The funny thing is that in a couple of days after going to the consulate, the office from Neustadt “woke up”. Bearing in mind that in Berlin I was eventually sent even with a signed contract, I agreed to talk with them. Since I already had, in general, all the same, I didn’t bother too much about what and how I said it - I was joking, I went into lyrical digressions on general website topics, pursued provider bikes, a couple of times passed from English to German in those phrases where I felt confident ... An hour later, after completing the interview, I received a job offer with a postscript from HR in the spirit of "we are shocked by such a quick decision, but you are so impressed with the head of the department that he does not want to see other candidates."
However, all this was already the lyrics, and the question before us was serious enough: how to get an opportunity to leave with me for my sister, who hadn’t yet found anything. She is a very good specialist, in some areas much better than me, but ... she didn’t have a profile diploma, which meant that she wouldn’t even accept documents for a visa, since having a higher technical education is a prerequisite for issuing Blaue Karte under an IT contract . Of course, the sister did not conceal this fact in her resume. The possibility of obtaining a visa for a standard (not Blaue Karte) “working” paragraph without a profile diploma is there, but it can take months and creates a verymany problems for a company that decides to hire a specialist in this paragraph from outside the EU. Therefore, German companies are primarily considering those who meet Blaue Karte conditions - there the procedure is not much faster and simpler.
However, at first everything seemed quite simple: according to German law, specialists moving to Germany according to Blaue Karte have the right to take with them close relatives, who are automatically issued a “working” residence permit. But when we read this law carefully, it turned out that only spouses and minor children are considered “close relatives” there. Parents, brothers, sisters and children who have reached the age of majority are not included in this category and they are not entitled to a residence permit.
We began to consider other options that give the right to obtain a residence permit for the sister. Visa for job search also required the presence of a profile diploma, so this option disappeared. As a result, we came to the conclusion that the sister needs to receive the so-called “language visa” - this makes it possible to live a year in Germany legally and learn the language. It is very difficult to get such a visa, but it’s quite possible: it was good for us that my sister had a certificate from the Goethe Institute confirming German ownership at A2 level (although in my opinion, she really knew the B1 language then), plus there was an opportunity pay intensive language courses in advance for the entire period of study (pleasure is not cheap, but without this condition, a language visa is not issued). For a year of such courses, and even in the language environment, it is quite possible from the level that the sister had thenreach at least C1, or even C2 - which opens up much more room for further steps.
My sister applied for a visa a week after me (this was because of the education documents), and our plan smacked of adventure: since October I had to go to work in Frankfurt and the time was running out, and considering the application for a language visa it is not a quick deal (1-3 months), we decided that my sister would travel with me on a valid Schengen visa, which gives you the right to stay in Germany for 3 months. And when the national visa is approved, it flies to St. Petersburg and goes after it to the German consulate. Here only the language visa is issued "at the discretion of the official", each case is considered individually and no one guarantees a positive decision. Of course, we had plans for what to do in case of refusal - but, looking ahead, the sister was given a visa in the end in just three weeks,however, we found out about it on the night before departure and did not have time to get it.
Preparing for the move
Then the events rushed straight off. We decided to go by car to transport the cat and as many things as possible. Sister took it aboutMost of the worries in organizing the move and finding housing in Germany for the first time, but I also had a headache. It was necessary to have time to do everything: dismissal from work, termination of an apartment rental contract, trips to the dentist and other doctors - so as not to get into trouble with health upon arrival in Germany, car diagnostics and repair - according to the principle “change everything that is suspicious,” because we had to overcome more than two thousand kilometers. Buying an extra trunk on the roof of the car, planning a route, booking accommodation on the way. Sale of unnecessary things, sorting necessary on those that we take with us, and those that we leave, transportation of the latter for storage. Transfer all savings to euros and withdraw them from a bank account. Fees, packing things in boxes, trying to cram into a new one, anger, denial, bargaining, humility,sending the storage of things that did not fit into the car and, finally, returning the keys to the apartment to the owners ...
It was early morning on September 22. We last exited the entrance of the house where we lived for a year. In the parking lot, there was a car loaded at the most nowhere, in the carry we carried a cat, not yet suspecting what test it was waiting for. Our feelings were complicated: the past life was over, the new one had not yet begun, there were 2,200 kilometers ahead and three days to go.
Our road to Germany has begun. But this should be told in a separate story.
Continuation can be read here .
useful links
Sites where I was looking for work:
www.monster.de
www.stepstone.de
www.indeed.com
www.xing.de
www.linkedin.com
Sites where I drew information about the nuances of immigrant life in Germany:
toytowngermany.com is in English A website with active discussions of many topics that are important for a novice immigrant or who is just about to move to Germany. The people there are mostly adequate and says the case,
tupa-germania.ru - a very interesting site. There are many articles about everyday issues and their solutions, an active forum with a lot of useful information,
surfin-birds.ru is also a lot of useful articles, but the activity on the forum tends to zero,
foren.germany.ru- from this resource I have a difficult impression. There is enough useful information, but even more flooding, stupid (and even harmful) tips and topics in the spirit of "how to marry a German", "how to get a benefit", "how to break the law and not get caught" and the like. On the fan.
ru-geld.de - a description of the German tax classes and how the net salary is calculated (the amount you get in your hands after taxes).
The ANABIN website, where I checked whether my diploma is recognized in Germany: anabin.kmk.org - unfortunately, only in German. If your university is listed in the ANABIN base with H + rating, and your specialty is there (in the general list of specialties, not necessarily for a particular university), such a diploma in Germany is considered equivalent to German higher education. If the university's rating is not H +, or your specialty is not on the lists, then you will most likely have to go through the procedure of recognizing a diploma through ZAB (costs about 200 euros and takes 2-3 weeks).
And, of course, the most reliable source of information on visa issues is the website of the German Embassy in Russia: germania.diplo.de .
PS In total, it took less than half a year from the decision to leave before going to work in Germany. During this time, about 50 resumes were sent, about half of them were refused, several invited an interview by phone / Skype, and the rest were not answered at all. It took 2.5 months from sending a resume to my current company to getting to work.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/343914/
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