I see all these awesome potential job opportunities on HN, but it's never clear whether a H-1B candidate would also be considered, as that is 99% never explicitly stated.
So - anyone hiring that'll sponsor or do H-1B visa transfers?
I also saw it happen at a startup that initially relied heavily on outsourcing, after a couple years they started bringing some of the best Indian guys in-house.
It's not cheap, but it is certainly not that expensive, as those fees will usually be less than 1 month's salary of the hired developer.
In my opinion, timing constraints and uncertainty end up being a bigger deterrent: you can only apply on April, the visa start the following October and it takes a while to know whether the applicant was selected.
It required a lot of documentation, but else the process was fast and pretty painless.
Does anybody with a lot of experience with Visas have a better price quote?
We have other E-3 employees as well.
http://www.puppetlabs.com/company/jobs/
Ultimately you need to make a judgement call when hiring. Is the position important enough to justify the cost of the visa application and processing?
I'd argue that at an early stage for a startup, just about every position is that important. The right person matters a lot.
The bigger problem might be the time it takes to get all these applications done.
The USCIS doesn't exactly operate at startup pace... :)
We are hiring for server(python/redis/mongo/C)/operations/Android/DESIGN.
Please also mail hackernews@ourdomain to get above the noise.
An important caveat: H1B allows ZERO flexibility in the equity/cash mix. You must offer market salary or the visa will be denied. Immigration ignores equity entirely.
Relative to fully-loaded cost, it just doesn't seem to be that big a deal.
Fail to respect the conventions outlined in this website, and your application will be denied.
Level 1 Wage: $20.69 hour - $43,035 year
Level 2 Wage: $28.12 hour - $58,490 year
Level 3 Wage: $35.56 hour - $73,965 year
Level 4 Wage: $42.99 hour - $89,419 year
These are way lower than the real NYC salaries. Right out of the college, I made more than their Level 3. H1B workers however seem to make salaries like that.
The issue for startups happen when you take a permanent residency application into account. For instance, I had a friend who got into two great startups who were willing to sponsor H1-Bs. He really wanted to work at either. However, he also wanted to apply for his permanent residency within 2 years to continue staying in the US. However, a company needs to have certain revenue (besides other minimium requirements) to be able to apply for a green card. Both the companies checked with their lawyers and they did say that it was a big risk factor when it came to applying for a permanent residency. So he actually ended up passing both offers.
In retrospect he would have been fine since both companies ended up getting acquired by Intel and Google, where he would have been fine. But that is part of the risk involved.
In fact I tried your option 2 (get a job at big co and ask relocation), though that was in Canada, but got rejection after onsite interviews.
You relieved my feelings -- most of my friends say it's absurd not to go through the usual university path.
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We help successful candidates relocate to London or Boston including arranging visas where needed. For example, earlier this year we hired an HN reader from Denmark and we moved a Polish employee to Boston.
How about competent beta testers, or sysadmins like someone else said here?
You should be looking at startups with at least a few US employees. Currently, I think you'll find it rare for a startup with < 3-4 US employees to be able to sponsor an h1b. Homeland security has been getting pretty strict about this.
I believe it generally costs about ~$6k to sponsor one. More if you premium process.
It's time consuming applying to places that either won't take H1-B applicants, or who aren't likely to get USCIS to approve the H1-B transfer even if we already have the visa.
We are also looking for DBAs: Oracle, MySQL and even SQL-Server.
You can read my blog post about my experience with the company: http://www.pythian.com/news/16887/learning-on-the-job-some-t...
And apply here: http://candidates.pythian.com/