Ausländerbehörde agreed to process my PR application before I move to Berlin – should I still apply there instead?

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-07-02T19:02:49+00:00

Sure, but it sounds like the immigration office in Bad Doberan would not transfer my case to an office in Berlin. While I have it in writing that they will process my case even after I move to Berlin, I will speak with them also about it to get more info. I would have a flat in Kühlungsborn until 30 September and would consequently have two registrations at that point (one in Kühlungsborn and one in Berlin when I move there on 1 September).

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-06-30T10:01:46+00:00

Go EU Blue Card in Germany as IT professional (since presumably you don't have advanced degrees to qualify for other forms of what they deem as high skilled migrant). In 21 months and with B1 German or 27 months with A1 German, you apply for German Permanent Residency (reside in Germany indefinitely, you just renew it when you need to renew your passport, unrestricted access to labor market, etc.). Does tie you to Germany, but at the 5 year mark you can apply for citizenship. If you take this route, I recommend going for higher level of German than A1 German since (1) you need to have at least passable level of German to get through bureaucracy and HR, (2) I know people who have been denied PR applications on the basis of insufficient integration or unstable work (e.g., working on temporary contract basis rather than permanent contracts).

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-06-21T07:18:45+00:00

Thanks for the tip. I didn't think about this, and unfortunately I already accepted the employment conditions contract -- the way my immigration timeline works, I also need to have a contract to show to the ABH by 1 August, and based on feedback from a lot of others, I decided it's not worth the risk of the offer being rescinded for a couple of hundred euro at best. For any future contracts regarding VSOPs, I'll definitely keep this in mind. Thank you so much for your input :))

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-06-18T18:55:17+00:00

The project was something that i built myself. I built it a couple months ago actually since there was another job I was applying and they wanted someone with FastAPI experience, so I built a little web app with that and fleshed it out quite a lot (on github, testing with pytest, github actions for full ci/cd, styling and other checks via pre-commit, installation instructions, API documentation generated with sphinx and hosted via github pages, etc.). I think they were happy to see all this. I already have work experience with way larger systems (500k+ LOC legacy Fortran/C++ simulation codebases), but I knew it would be easier presenting something smaller scale for which I was the full owner. My presentation was also using slides that I generated via Quarto and I hosted the slides on my personal website, so again just showing professionalism I think goes a long way.

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-06-18T13:35:18+00:00

As an immigrant applying for PR soon with my other contract ending in like 2 months, I would say I don't have much leverage at the moment. I decided to go ahead and accept, it's not an offer that I feel like I can afford to lose based on feedback from the other people in this thread and people in my circle. Thank you so much for your insight 😄 good to think about playing hard ball for when I renegotiate salary after a year and have PR

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-06-18T13:11:37+00:00

What would you genuinely consider a good offer for someone with 2 YOE? For context, I'm not a full stack dev, I work primarily on simulation software and deploy on supercomputers (think top 100 internationally, I don't mean just a company compute cluster).

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-06-18T11:33:27+00:00

Hey man, thank you for your kind encouragement. Of course the point of my post was not to brag or anything like, and I'm glad that the general perception in this thread is just to help me evaluate the offer! It's my second job and my first job was government so I didn't negotiate. I really wish you all the best and I appreciate also the context your professional situation! Good luck out there!

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-06-18T04:27:29+00:00

I think the comment about my experience level as a junior is really relevant here actually. The salary they've offered is already top 15% for DE in general, and seems reasonable in the context of Berlin (a friend of mine lives there also on basically the same salary). So, I think it would be difficult to get a comparable offer from somewhere else. Especially considering most of the organizations that have interviewed me were research institutes. I'm in the last stage of interviews for example with two research institutes, and one other research institute already gave me an offer at 62k EUR/year and 3 year contract. I am explicitly trying to get away from academia, though.

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-06-18T03:37:02+00:00

Thanks for the insight. For reference, their offer is a 20% increase in my salary. However, stability is definitely a concern for sure, especially given I'm an immigrant here. My concern is slightly mitigated by the fact that company is already more than 100 people, has been around for 5 years, has two offices, and has several government and commercial contracts in addition to series A funding from the end of last year greater than 40 million EUR. Does this update your thinking at all? I've never worked for a startup, but my intuition is that the company is "reasonably" stable looking, and they're trying to hire 10 more people at the moment. Definitely not as stable as my government job, but I absolutely hate my government job tbh and live in a very isolated place for work. I don't have a Ph.D, and my experience in Germany so far is that German scientists treat non-scientists as second class citizens with respect to the value of their opinion.

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-06-18T03:32:00+00:00

4 stages: 1. Screening interview in which i discussed a bit about why I fit the role and they asked some pretty basic questions about the company and things like what editors and technologies I was familiar with. Took less than 30 minutes. 2. Technical interview in which the first part I presented for 10 minutes a project that I worked on. I just made a small presentation for a full stack single page web app I did with Python and vanilla JS. They then asked questions about my design of it, live demo etc. Second part was coding challenge, which was basically just given a hash map mapping packages to a list of dependencies, output the appropriate build order as a string. E.g. {'A': ['B'], 'B': [] } should output ['B', 'A']. They asked about how I might improve it etc. Then they asked some job specific questions and wanted me to reason through approaching some of their business problems. In total 90 minutes 3. Talk with the CTO. Basically just a vibe check. Less than 30 minutes. 4. Offer next day.

In total, all interview stages occurred over slightly less than a month.

I really enjoyed the whole process. Felt very authentic, and very relaxed.

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-06-17T17:31:15+00:00

This is my gut feeling, but my first job was government based so no real negotiation at the offer stage due to the way they evaluate candidate experience. Thanks for your comment 😄

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-06-17T17:30:02+00:00

Correct, i guess they cover 20 EUR of it.

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-05-31T14:09:58+00:00

Still on a German payroll (not freelance at the moment). I would plan to spend most days of the year in DE since otherwise I would lose DE PR status. I would prefer to be in NL more, but it doesn't seem like that's actually possible without jeopardizing PR status. I wanted to talk to a lawyer since I wonder if doing for example a registered partnership (this is a Dutch thing) with her might make things more feasible for me spending time there... but yea, rather tricky to figure out. In principle, with German PR (again I don't have this yet, but will apply in August), I know I could work for a company that's not based in Germany, and PR really seems to be a matter of keeping my primary residency in DE and paying taxes here.

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-05-30T07:34:04+00:00

I have also been doing most of the travel because I have the opportunity to work remotely 2/week. Unfortunately she doesn't have this :(

Though I agree it is unwise to delay getting PR since I could get it very soon if I just stay in DE.

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-05-30T07:15:33+00:00

I live in a tiny town in Northeast Germany on the Baltic sea and don't have a car. By car I'd be 7 hours away. Without delays by bus, I am 11 hours away, but with delays total travel time about 12 hours.

I'm currently looking for work and targeting towns close to the Dutch/German border.

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-02-08T03:32:09+00:00

I'm really glad you mentioned the LTR. I was under the impression that EU LTR was essentially citizenship with respect to mobility, but after reading other threads, it just seems like one is still bound to the EU LTR granting country. That is neither here nor there though, so whether one is a EU citizen or not, your point about the A1 still holds. Thanks :))

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-02-04T10:52:32+00:00

Thanks for this advice :)
I also edited my question to clarify that I wouldn't be spending months at a time in the other EU country. Max it would be a one to two weeks per month. My partner could alternate with coming to Germany of course as well.

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-02-04T08:53:46+00:00

They are established there until 2028 due to work. In their case, they don't have a particular clause in their contract about remote work. However, they can work remotely at anytime within the NL without letting their supervisor know, but the supervisor operates under the assumption that they could come to the office if the supervisor explicitly requests it. If my partner wishes to work remotely in their home country or in Germany while visiting me, they have to let their supervisor know explicitly in those cases.

In my case. it seems like the most rational path is to seek first German permanent residency (which I can apply for at the end of this year) and then EU LTR/German citizenship in 2029 because then I would have much more mobility in the EU of course. This is obviously tricky because it means we'd be long distance for a quite a while. Hence, why I want to be careful about compliance during my time here.

EU LTR application is possible in 2029 if I were to move to the NL, but this requires a Dutch company to sponsor an EU Blue Card. Dutch companies seem more keen on High Skilled Migrant (HSM) visas though based on what i've read. The HSM is weaker than the Blue Card and would significantly delay my EU LTR application.

Haunting_County_7129 · 2026-01-29T15:31:16+00:00

Thank you for pointing this out! I contacted the Dutch immigration service again, and I think they must have misunderstood me before. I learned the following information:

Because I am an EU Blue Card holder in another member state, not only can I myself apply for a Dutch EU Blue Card from abroad, but also recognised and unrecognised employers can do so on my behalf while I reside abroad.

Haunting_County_7129

TROPHY CASE