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Comment by cplanas | Hacker News Reader

> There's also a talent gap. From my experience, a lot of tech workers in Vancouver simply couldn't meet the bar for the stricter US immigration.

Really? It doesn't seem to be this way to me. The academic requirements are, I believe, the same: a degree. I think in the US you also need a job offer (for H1B), but that hasn't been hard to get for a software engineer in the last 10 years.

The real "bar" for US immigration is a hard limit on visas, which are resolved via lottery. Your "ability" on winning a lottery doesn't say much about your talent for engineering.

Note: I moved from Europe to the Bay Area, I'm a bit familiar with the process.

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The job requirement makes all the difference. In Canada, the point based immigration system will reward anyone with a STEM degree with points, irrelevant of the actual market value of the degree. My friends in those market tell me it's not uncommon to have senior foreign graduates incapable of passing a fizzbuzz interview. They often have multi year gaps in their resume where they couldn't land a job upon arriving in Canada. Contrast this to the US where for an application to even get to the lottery it has to be vetted by a business that's willing to spend multiple thousands of dollars to maybe get a visa for the worker.

There's also a lot of workers that simply can't pass the bar due to the Requests For Evidences required by the US government. As an European from, what I assume, a legitimate university you wouldn't experience those issues. Most of the folks who fail at this step will have back-up petitions filled at one of the satellite locations in Canada.

Can’t most senior developers get an exceptional ability visa?

No. As far as I know, exceptional ability is really exceptional. Being a very senior engineer in, say, Google Zurich doesn't really qualify. For an O-1 you need to have received nationally/internationally recognized prizes; published media in major publications...

https://www.wegreened.com/o1-visa

> published media in major publications...

Right but I think many people just publish one paper at an international conference (they're all international) and then say 'look I'm an internationally published and peer-recognised expert'.

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