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Comment by apohn | Hacker News Reader

I may come off as an a-hole, but are you trolling in this thread? In all your time applying for jobs, did you really not take 30 seconds to google "Is a degree required for H1-B" or "H1-B visa requirements."

A 4 year bachelors degree or equivalent is required. Exceptions are made for people with a lot of experience or if you are an extraordinary person (e.g. You have no degree, but you are Euler).

If you google, The basics of the H1-B process is well discussed and explained by lawyers on multiple websites. Since there are a lot of immigrants who have gone through the H1-B process, there are a lot of forums where lots of nuances have been discussed by people on all types of visas, people applying for green cards, etc.

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You're crass, but not an asshole. And no, I'm not trolling. Like I've explained throughout the replies, it appears as though I've been grossly misinformed.

You're right; I did way too little research, but again, I was told by recruiters working for the bootcamp not to worry about visas, and that the visa requirements were 'malleable enough', to the point where the degree requirement for H1-B's could be exchanged with literally 0 years of experience. (At the time of graduation)

I was even told of someone a few cohorts before me that was in a similar position. They took the bootcamp after high school, graduated at 18, then got hired at Google soon after. I don't believe this happened anymore, and again, I think this was told to me due to the bootcamp's incentives being where they were. I do feel slightly cheated, but I undestand that I'm responsible for my own due diligence.

I'm sorry the recruiters lied to you. The H1-B and Green Card process is terrible enough without people BSing you about the reality of getting the visa in the first place.

Yes, I've been reading about people's experiences with visas all afternoon now, it does indeed seem quite different from what I've known.

To be honest though, I kind of wanted to believe. Breifly reading the visa requirements and being told the direct contrary was definitely concerning but I think I just put faith in the possibility of being an exception. Still possible, but now I know the likelihood. <1%.

I think there was an experimental phase where people hired anyone regardless of qualifications, as long as they passed the interviews. Perhaps this was done in the spirit of TDD.

So in the same spirit, bootcamps would optimize just to pass those interviews. Bootcamp people certainly got some awesome jobs, then everyone realized they weren't cut out for the job.

At college, I was given the code for an operating system and asked to implement multithreading and a file system into it. There was little advice, you just had to learn to hack large codebases to pass. This kind of thing doesn't make it into interviews and thus, doesn't make it into bootcamps, but it's a vital work skill.

There's no way a Bootcamp grad with no degree and no experience got an H1-B visa. Companies have no flexibility with the legal requirements for visa. Even if a company said they would hire every single person from a bootcamp, they can't get around the legal visa requirements.

The recruiters did was sales people do - spoke confidently about something with zero knowledge of the situation. Or they lied. Most people have zero knowledge of the visa process, so most likely they just BSed the OP.

If bootcamp recruiters told you that you could spend six months in their program and not only get a FAANG job but a work permit/visa they lied. The US visa requirements are not malleable for bootcamp grads with no significant experience. If someone told you they went from high school to boot camp to Google I would check into that, sounds more like a shill from the boot camp.

I hope you learned some useful programming skills and met some people you can keep in touch with at the bootcamp. Those places are getting a reputation as scams, and several of them have been caught flat out lying to applicants and students, padding their placement numbers, and making promises they can't possibly keep.

I think OP's Ask HN here is better than Googling around. What better place than HN to get relevant, up to date information about working in the technology sector?

Furthermore, sometimes the question to ask or the place to look for information is obvious to the people who have the answers, but people in problematic situations sometimes don't even know the very question to ask, or where to look for. They naturally turn to friends or, in this situation, to people they trust and respect.

People here ask about what laptop to buy or how to get children inteterested in things, or how to cope with grief and sorrow; why on earth wouldn't they ask about how to get a job?

The point is: people here being vulnerable and candid asking seemingly trivial questions says more about the respect, estime, and trust they have in this community than it says about them trolling. Anyone who reads these questions is in a position of privilege.

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