Comment by eralps | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eralps | Hacker News Reader

As unfortunate as this is, I think this only applies to Indians and Chinese. I was surprised to see Yoluk did not want to bother applying to jobs in the US.

I am a foreign person from ROW (Rest of the World) in the US studying with F1 visa and trying to immigrate here via employment based options.

I have friends who also immigrated to Germany and Britain. The process is definitely easier and guaranteed there but for us ROW, the process does not look so bad to me right now. Maybe I just don't know how it should be.

After I graduate with F1, I can work up to 3 years with my OPT, companies apply to H1-B in that period. Some start the H1-B process even before you graduate if you have a bachelor's degree already. You have 4 chances in H1-B in the end.

EB-2 green card is also an option for us, as far as I know I can get that in less than 2 years. I've read about people who applied to EB-2 directly without H1-B and got that in their STEM OPT extension duration.

Finally, even though it is a slim chance, there is also diversity visa lottery. I have friends who got picked from DV lottery while studying here with F1. Everything became easier for them.

The US is still attractive to people like me, I don't think how this article portrays the immigration is true.

I keep being head hunted to work on SF/SV. And my reply is basically automatic and always the same:

"Due to US external policy and cost of life I can't see it being financially practical to move. Although, I would gladly consider any remote position."

I think the immigration complexity is the lesser problem there. My research based on housing, school, transport and food tells me it looks like absurdly expensive. To be able to even consider to move there I would need a salary bump of 3x-5x. No way this will ever happen.

The bay is a great area if you are a young, healthy person without kids.

My colleges take their SV salaries and retreat to somewhere else when they want a family.

I think Canada is a better place to raise a family. Or, many other countries are probably comparable (or better).

>To be able to even consider to move there I would need a salary bump of 3x-5x. No way this will ever happen.

You'd be surprised. Granted it was over a period of 4 years, but I did hit that 5x.

I could work 4 years remotely until the bump is enough to move, but I doubt that would ever be acceptable. :)

May I ask what you do to attract SV recruiters? I can't catch me any of them. :)

No joke. My team has three branches:

  *  Sunnyvale, CA 
  *  Bentonville, AR  
  *  Bangalore, India

We regularly will gossip about best/worst aspects of each of them. My mind is blown at how much they have to pay to live in the greater SF area. 3-4k for rent on an apartment for a small family. My mortgage is 800 a month. A mortgage with a yard big enough for gardens, a bee hive, compost, a couple of trees, basketball goal, fenced in yard, etc....

Of course they get to poke fun at how they cross two timezones and go back 3 decades culturally in time when they fly out to visit. ;-)

The Bangalore folk poke fun at the US based ones at how cold/wet/expensive/boring we all are. It's all in good fun but it really does hammer in how home is where you currently are.

Edit - I

Did you "gossip" about pay? Despite my sky-high rent (although 1-bedroom apartments can certainly be had for much less than $3k) I'm financially better off in the bay area than I would be with any outside the bay area job offer I've gotten. My net-after-housing pay is higher here than any offer or salary range I've seen in places I'd want to move to like Oregon or Reno.

are you gonna have kids? if so that equation is going to change a huge amount. Just see what it does to your spreadsheet once you factor in 3k/month child care, and the cost of living in a place big enough for a small family, etc. did you look at the massive difference cost in eating out and groceries? housing and taxes?

Yes, I budget down to the penny every month so I am factoring in all of it. I don't have any interest in having kids, so that's an angle I hadn't considered.

It doesn’t happen via salary, it happens via stock. Work at a big co over the last decade or so and you’ve seen salary increase at 10% year or so and stock increase much faster. It’s very common for senior engineers in the Bay Area to be earning 175k salary, ~30k bonus, and another 150+ in stock vesting per year. High performers and/or workers at FAANGs do better than that. See levels.fyi for concrete examples.

The whole thing here is stock, which takes a couple years to really stack up, but once it does, you’re making a lot of money.

This is the problem, stock from a few years doesn't house my family or feed my kids. Stock to me is almost as fairly tales as it can be, the few times I received stock as part of my salary it basically evaporated. In the real life, to people that need money each month to survive, stock is a bad joke.

What do you mean? Unless you are living paycheck to paycheck stock is just as real as cash.

Or almost paycheck to paycheck, which is not as uncommon as one may think. And normally stock come with restrictions on when you can liquidate. This is basically money I don't have now and a promise in the future that may very well go wrong.

Normal valley vesting schedule is:

- A grant of a specific number of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)

- Vesting over 4 years

- You get nothing for 12 months

- On the 12th month you get 25%. You can sell this immediately for cash if you choose

One of the following:

A. Each month you vest 1/36th of the remaining stock

B. Each quarter you vest 1/12th of the remaining stock You can sell this immediately for cash if you choose

Some terrible companies like Amazon have abusive vesting schedules such as 5% the first year, 15% the second year, then 40% the final two years.

My stock vests monthly and I have it set to autosell at vest so I get cold hard cash direct deposited into my account every month.

If you are living "almost" paycheck to paycheck as a engineer with 200k+ total comp you are doing something seriously wrong.

I am in a similar position. Yes, you can work with OPT but apart from the very top companies and a few consulting shops, it has become much harder to get employment on it.

And from H-1B to greencard, you again need company sponsorship.

Canada looks good now because with Express Entry, you can become a PR relatively fast and from there within 5 years, you get citizenship. From there, getting work in the US as a tech worker can be much easier through a TN visa.

F1 makes things easier, but if you didn't come in as a student, things get much trickier. Most of the workflows you mention don't apply because it assumes you're already here to get your EB-2 or H1-B.

Even getting H1-B is challenging, especially as someone freshly graduated ("entry level positions do not qualify as skilled labour" is what the USCIS told me).

you seem to be naive. I'm actually on STEM OPT. you've read about people who got EB-2, but do you know those people ? EB-2 or O-1 visa usually require people with 10 years of experience and exceptional talent. e.g DHH shipping Ruby on Rails. But for the rest of us, your chances are with h1b, which is more luck than merit. And remember, with an H1B once a company sponsors you, you've difficulty transferring the h1b. It's almost as starting the whole process again. with h1b your salary is capped to pretty much what your company wants to pay you, not the market as you're pretty much their property. I'm one of the few people that has actually managed to get employed at 3 different places, while on STEM-OPT. And got my market rate pay, due to the fact I refused sponsorship. The US does have a point based immigration policy like Canada | Aus. they call it 'Marriage'. The government doesn't have to screen, you that much, their citizens do. That's why getting a green card via marriage is easiest out of everything. So yeah, my advise, find a gal | boy you want to marry while in college and get on with it. Otherwise, H1B is a non-starter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com