The Titan EVO is a little firm for my liking (wife has one), but they do come in various sizes intended for people of different heights, which is nice. I don't know exactly how well that plays out in practice, but

@ave I must have missed something, but did you move to Germany?

@Nzall Yeah

been 2.5 months ish?

oh, didn't know that

It wasn't a huge ceremonious thing. I started the move process all the way last year but due to disagreements of the work agency and consulate on a specific legal clause I couldn't proceed for 7-8 months or so, so I worked for the employer remotely during that time. Reattempted in april, worked out this time, so moved to munich in late april.

tl;dr is that arbeitsagentur was 100% okay with counting freelance work as work, and istanbul consulate wasn't. and I needed to have 3 years of experience for the clause they wanted to use on the work visa.

huge mess, cost me a lot of nerves and money, but at least it worked out in the end.

ugh, visa stuff... how did you eventually resolve it?

@MiG so! basically my visa was to be issued under fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz (introduced in mid 2020), specifically BeschV §6. The requirements are to have 3 years of tech work experience in the last 7 years, sufficient german (CEFR level B1) or a letter from your employer saying that the workplace language is English, and a sufficient amount of salary (60% of Beitragsbemessungsgrenze, so above 50760EUR/yr).

I fulfilled all of these, except some of my work experience was freelance work. The entity issuing pre-approvals, Arbeitsagentur, took no issues with this and issued a pre-approval anyways. When I applied for the actual visa, consulate told me that they only recognize work that is recorded in the social security system, even if if my freelance work was legal and I had paid taxes for it. I pulled back my application.

The employer and I then agreed to go through an "Employer of Record", deel in this case. It was a pain, we've had our fair share of issues with them, but after 6 months with them I got my social security recognized work to above 3 years, we re-applied for a pre-approval, and I re-applied for a visa, and it worked out in the end.

that's a lot of hassle :( glad it worked out though :)

ditto

I applied for my residence permit ~3 weeks ago and expect to get it in 3-5 weeks too.

gf had to go through all this for a Moroccan visa recently... I have an EU passport so I basically just show up, she visited the consulate twice, got different information both times (and differing from what Moroccan embassy helpdesk lady told us and what the website mentioned)... and then they neglected to mention that as of last week they have an electronic visa system, making our several hour train journeys to the consulate unnecessary :/

it wasn't the people, they were quite friendly... but they were keeping different rules from eachother, and apparently also weren't informed what the back office was cooking up until our very last visit

yeahhhhh, irl visa applications for smaller countries are memes

apparently istanbul consulate of egypt literally gives out appointments through facebook

I don't usually use "Kafkaesque", but there :P

@ave omg :D

electronic visa also had some bugs that were actively being fixed while we made our attempts, but in the end it worked AND saved us from having to go to the consulate to later pick up the passport again

I've considered getting a thai visa when we were going there earlier this year but decided against it

it was literally easier to get an extension there than to get a visa

fun stuff

hey, at least there was that possibility :)

I've heard plenty of horror stories from gf about the US and work permits, she was there for a decade and dreaded changing employers

US is a nightmare about that I hear, yeah

DE involves a bunch of paperwork if I want to do it, but at least in my case after 2 years of working here I'll be able to do it with much less paperwork, as my residence permit will stop being tied directly to my employer at that point

it's still a bit of a mess, but it's def better than US

here's berlin's info on it, munich doesn't have them online but it's the same thing effectively service.berlin.de/dienstleistung/326856/en

@ave I can't help it, but when I'm reading that I'm hearing Werner Herzog narrate it :D