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Comment by 666b20753a29 | Hacker News Reader

666b20753a29

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.

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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.

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