Hey, what's up?
John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com.
I got a question.
I've been getting this question a lot and I figured I'd finally answer this question.
Some of you aren’t going to like the answer, but, you know, this is what the answer is
here, is this question about how to get a programming job in the US, for those of you
that are outside of the US that want to come to the US and get a programming job.
The name—the question asker, in this case, is The Swedish Guy.
I like that.
The Swedish Guy.
Did your parents name you the Swedish Guy?
All right.
"I would really like to live and work as a programmer in the US.
I know there are numerous ways to get there, but to apply for an H-1B visa seems to be
the most common.
Although, being tied to your employer through the H-1B visa doesn’t really put you in
a good place when negotiating salary.
Would you recommend any alternative?
Also, how to market yourself specifically to US employers from outside the US?"
I've got a couple things to say here.
First of all, it's going to become harder.
It probably already has become harder to get an H-1B visa because I think a lot of companies
were abusing that, and they were abusing it in the sense that like you said here in this
question, it became really difficult—it becomes difficult to negotiate when you've—they're
your ticket over here to the US and so I think a lot of companies, what they're doing, I
know this from experience because I talked to a lot of people that had H-1B visas, is
they would get someone over, especially from places like India and they would pay them
a very, very low wage and they'd have them—it's almost like a prisoner, almost like indentured
servitude and then they couldn’t leave because they were sponsoring their visas.
I agree.
That's not the best way.
It's also really hard to do at this point.
I think that trying to get an H-1B visa is difficult because you're going to have to
prove that this company needs to hire you when they've got other candidates that they
could possibly hire that they wouldn’t have to pay the money and go through the whole
process.
Some companies will do that and you can try that, but I went through all of the—I want
to talk about the actual ways that you could get over here and then I want to talk about
some alternatives.
First of all, obviously we talked about H-1B visa, it requires an advanced degree or 6
years' experience.
Okay?
I'm not a lawyer so don’t count this as legal advice.
This is my general understanding.
You have an EB1 visa which requires extraordinary abilities.
If you win the Nobel Peace Prize, you can get an EB1 and you can self-sponsor yourself
so you can apply for yourself.
Chances of this: Very, very slim.
There's like this list of—you get like publish something that changes the world.
There's a whole list of different things you have to do.
I mean if you are of that caliber, then sure you could do that.
Okay?
EB2 requires an advanced degree and I believe it requires someone else to sponsor you but
it's kind of a lottery system, very difficult to get in as well.
Advanced degree, I mean something like a Master's degree or higher.
EB3 is less stringent, but it's much longer, especially in China and India.
It could take like 10 years to get this.
I don’t think any of those are really, really good choices.
This is difficult to do.
When researching this, I realized that it's quite difficult.
Here's the thing.
We're becoming more and more of a global economy.
There's not really—I mean maybe you want to get to the US and maybe you can get there,
but you can work for a US company and somewhat be paid a US salary outside of the United
States, right?
I mean I have employees at Simple Programmer that work outside of the US.
Maybe you might not be able to get as high of a salary, but if you want to work for US,
then that would be a good way, is to work where you're at or work remotely and then
apply for a company or apply for jobs at US companies.
Another possible thing would be to get a student visa.
Maybe come over here and apply for college.
Student visas are really easy to get.
Then you can be in the US and you can be going to school and you can start interviewing for
companies and see if you can get—it will be much easier, I think, to get an H-1B visa
if you're already in the US and you can talk to companies and you can go on interviews
and you can do that kind of stuff.
That would make sense, plus you can network a lot.
Maybe you go to school for a couple of years and your whole goal of going to school is
that you're in the US and you can network with people, you can network with companies,
and you can eventually get that connection.
These are just some ways outside of the box kind of thinking ways to do that.
Aside from that, if you apply for some remote jobs, if you can become a freelancer, that's
the other possibility, is one thing you could do is you could just be a freelancer.
You don’t necessarily have to work in the US.
You can work for US companies and if you have good communication skills, especially if you
can bridge the communication gap so that you can be a person that can translate from another
language in your area.
You could think about culturally, linguistically what kind of assets can you provide to the
US company, then you could work as a freelancer for them and you could do client work, especially
like I said, if you have good communication skills.
There's a lot of other alternatives, but I mean this is hard.
This is not an easy thing and I know from doing the research and just from the many
questions that I get.
A lot of people want to get to the US and become a programmer in the US.
I think there're plenty of alternatives today.
If they were up to me, if I were trying to do this, I would be getting a student visa.
That's what I would be doing, is I'll be going to school and I would be using that time to
really just network and to try and meet as many people as possible, as many companies
as possible, do interviews and do everything like that in order to get here.
Again, I'm no expert in this but that's just my tips and my advice and just for those of
you that were wondering about this.
Like I said, I did a little bit of the research and gave you the answer of the kind of visas
or residency permits that you can get.
None of them are really super attractive.
It's not just an easy thing to do at all.
That's it.
Hopefully, that answers the question.
If you got some comments, if you got some other information, again, I'm not an expert
on this but I thought I'd try and tackle this question since so many people have asked about
this.
Part of the reason why I do this question also is I want your comments.
Let me know.
Is there some other way, some better idea?
If you got it, leave it below.
If you've done it before, then let me know how did you do it.
I'd be curious and maybe even interview someone that's gone through this process and maybe
is an expert of this.
All right, that's all I got to say about that.
I got one quick thing for you before I go here.
If you like the shirt that I'm wearing, if you're like, "Man, this is an awesome shirt,
I want to trust the process, what's that all about?”
First of all, I got a playlist for you that you can check out about trusting the process.
I'm not going to go over it in this video, but you can check that out.
This shirt is to remind you to trust the process, not to focus on the results.
Click on me if you want to buy one of these shirts and look cool like me.
I'll talk to you next time.
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