I write guides for immigrants. It's eye-opening to see the sort of problems they face in a system that doesn't account for them.
People are often missing a lot of inherited context, like what the steps of the process are (for buying, insuring and registering a car), what the terms mean (all the different numbers and IDs).
Then it gets messier. Immigrants have to get everything at once: papers, permits, certificates, IDs, accounts. All of them depend on each other, and most of them take weeks to get. People need an income now. A big part of my work was to disentangle a few catch-22 situations around residence permits, bank accounts, apartments and health insurance.
I've talked to a few employees at the immigration office, and since all of them are native to this country, they seemed surprised that a whole Facebook community was dedicated to navigating their office and its requirements.
The same problems apply to tech, but it's worsened by the fact that the builders are well-paid people in developed Western countries, but the users can be anyone, anywhere.
I moved from Ireland to the UK - both ~are~ were members of the EU, and there was no visa requirement to move. The only thing I had to do when I got here was get a bank account and a national insurance number (think SSN) for tax calculations. I tried 6 high street banks (RBS, TSB, Santander, Barclays, Halifax and Nationwide) who would not give me a bank account without a utility bill for proof of address, and would not accept my tenancy agreement, however I couldn't get a utility bill without a direct debit. In the end, someone told me HSBC would give me a "passport" account, and I used that to bootstrap the rest of the process. It was an absolutely infuriating process full of "computer says no", and absolutely nobody willing to help.
I had a similar experience, and I had a passport to prove my UK citizenship. It's a giant knot where everything relies on something else and you need to keep at it until one thing let's you in. It felt impossible and I feel like I had the best case scenario; I can't imagine how people without a support network can do it.
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I write guides for immigrants. It's eye-opening to see the sort of problems they face in a system that doesn't account for them.
People are often missing a lot of inherited context, like what the steps of the process are (for buying, insuring and registering a car), what the terms mean (all the different numbers and IDs).
Then it gets messier. Immigrants have to get everything at once: papers, permits, certificates, IDs, accounts. All of them depend on each other, and most of them take weeks to get. People need an income now. A big part of my work was to disentangle a few catch-22 situations around residence permits, bank accounts, apartments and health insurance.
I've talked to a few employees at the immigration office, and since all of them are native to this country, they seemed surprised that a whole Facebook community was dedicated to navigating their office and its requirements.
The same problems apply to tech, but it's worsened by the fact that the builders are well-paid people in developed Western countries, but the users can be anyone, anywhere.
I moved from Ireland to the UK - both ~are~ were members of the EU, and there was no visa requirement to move. The only thing I had to do when I got here was get a bank account and a national insurance number (think SSN) for tax calculations. I tried 6 high street banks (RBS, TSB, Santander, Barclays, Halifax and Nationwide) who would not give me a bank account without a utility bill for proof of address, and would not accept my tenancy agreement, however I couldn't get a utility bill without a direct debit. In the end, someone told me HSBC would give me a "passport" account, and I used that to bootstrap the rest of the process. It was an absolutely infuriating process full of "computer says no", and absolutely nobody willing to help.
I had a similar experience, and I had a passport to prove my UK citizenship. It's a giant knot where everything relies on something else and you need to keep at it until one thing let's you in. It felt impossible and I feel like I had the best case scenario; I can't imagine how people without a support network can do it.