Personal experience: as an IT specialist, move to work in the USA, relying only on himself

On Habré published a fairly large number of materials with stories about how developers move to the United States and other countries to work. Most of these articles deal specifically with programmers who tell their stories about finding a job, their experience in interviewing, getting an offer, and then moving.

My experience does not fit into this scheme and therefore, it seems to me, it may be useful for other IT professionals - I moved to the USA on an O1 visa, which is devoid of some of the shortcomings of the traditional American work visa.
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At once I will make a reservation that this method of migration presupposes rather serious monetary expenses, months for the preparation of documents, as well as the presence of common life activity. But with all this, this method assumes that much more depends on the applicant, and not on luck.

Disadvantages of the traditional work visa migration method

To begin with, let's talk about how the “standard” process of moving to work in the US works. Typically, IT specialists — mostly programmers — either find jobs themselves in companies they like, and send resumes, or their resumes are sent to HR services by their acquaintances who already work there (this is a better way), or company recruiters find professional in the right direction and offer him to try to have an interview.

In the future, if we talk about successful development of events, the initial screening by telephone leads to the appointment of a series of interviews - first telephone, then at the company's office. During these interviews, the applicant communicates first with recruiters, and then with potential direct colleagues and managers. If everything is ok, then the candidate receives an offer, accepts it, after which the process of preparing documents begins.

How to look for companies that, in principle, are not afraid to hire specialists from abroad and help them in obtaining an H1B work visa, is well written in this material . For the applicant, everything is fine here - the company assumes all costs, you just have to show yourself well at the interviews and get an offer. But there is one drawback - not everyone who got an offer from an American company will be able to immediately come to work.

There are quotas for H1B visas - for example, the quota for the next year was 85,000 visas , despite the fact that last year there were 236,000 applications for them, and about 200,000 applications were received for 2018.



As a result, those who receive a visa and those who do not, even despite the presence of an employer, are determined in the course of a special lottery - a random sample of candidates is created using an algorithm. Those who did not enter it are forced to wait - sometimes people can play for years in the lottery, having already passed all the circles of interviews.

If you did not get into quota: type L visa

Some large US companies with offices in other countries bypass the restrictions on visas like H1B using L-visas . They are intended for transfer to the head office in the USA of employees from foreign representative offices of the same company. There are L-visa subtypes for management and talented employees (special knowledge worker). In general, in order to be able to move to the United States already without any quotas and lotteries, an employee must work in a foreign office for at least a year.

According to this scheme, talented professionals are transported by companies such as Google, Facebook and Dropbox. I have a friend who works at the Dropbox office in Dublin for this very reason.

As you can see, there is a chance to move to the USA on a work visa, even in case of failure during the H1B lottery, but here you have to ask yourself if I have a valuable enough frame so that the company not only spends from 5 to ten to prepare my work visa in the USA thousand dollars, but then still transported to a foreign office and waited a year until I could join the team at the head office? I think most people who want to move to the United States will be able to honestly answer it negatively, as was the case in my case.

But there is a way that gives a little more control over what is happening to the candidate himself - this is an O1 type visa.

Visa O1: pros, cons, pitfalls

Visa O1 is given to "outstanding specialists" in their fields. It is quite actively used in the field of IT startups - many employees and founders of young projects are trying to move to the USA with its help.

It is often written on the Internet that the degree of exclusivity of an applicant’s talents is determined, for example, by the presence of a Nobel Prize - at this point many people think that this is clearly not their option, and they turn to other options. In fact, in practice, an experienced lawyer can quite well "file" a really good specialist, so that his talents will not cause any special questions.

An important disclaimer: to get this visa you really need to be a strong specialist and meet a number of criteria. If you objectively do not have enough achievements, an attempt to obtain an O-visa will simply be a waste of time and money.

Further, a story about my experience in obtaining this visa (so as not to flood the comments with off-topic material, answers to many questions about life in the USA can be found here in this my article and discussion on it).

I read about the O1 option before, but I always didn’t understand one thing: articles about getting such a visa always said that many entrepreneurs make such a visa for themselves, but you need an employer to get it.

It turned out that the situation is solved this way - you can register a company in the USA, which will hire a talented specialist, that is, you. It is desirable that your share in the company does not exceed 50%, then it turns out that you do not have full control over the company and you can be fired in principle. It is also possible that the company is managed by a board of directors, which theoretically could dismiss an employee.

The scheme is not the easiest, so it is important to choose good lawyers. A case helped me here - one of my acquaintances issued such a visa for himself and gave me the contact of lawyers involved in opening companies and preparing petitions.

If we talk about me, then I’m at least by education and a developer; in recent years I have been professionally engaged in the creation of IT content and marketing in the field of technology. So I needed to show talents in this particular area. So I opened an agency that created English-language content to promote IT companies, but the direction could be, in general, anything from business management to system administration.

The main difficulty in obtaining a visa is the collection of all the necessary documents, about which the designer wrote well, a couple of years ago settled in the recently closed Pebble startup. I needed to provide (from what I remember):

• Letters of recommendation from marketing professionals, the opinions of journalists are also quoted. Here it is important to find colleagues in the workshop, and from the very beginning I was planning to collect letters from the general directors and the chairmen of the board of companies with whom I once worked, but my lawyer rejected this idea. I had to spend time searching and negotiating. In general, the letter is the most difficult thing: you need to persuade people, then agree with the text of the letter — lawyers help it to prepare and use a very specific language — and some are embarrassed by such laudatory odes.
  
  
• Publications in the media. I have many publications on work in Russian and English, so this was the simplest point. The only difficulty is that all Russian-language documents need to be translated, and this is time and money.
  
  
• Membership in professional associations. It is important here that the community is rather old and respected, and that it is accepted not just for money, but on the recommendation of the members. I managed to join the Russian marketers guild, so this question was also closed.
  
  
• Public performance. With this, I didn’t have much, I had to try and organize several seminars, including at the journalism department and the PR faculty of Moscow State University.
  
  
• The presence of awards. As an example, everyone here cites the Nobel Prize, but as it turned out, as a reward, a good lawyer can present, for example, getting my article in the selection of the best on any site.
  
  
• Jury membership of professional contests. Already during the work on collecting documents, I was really invited to become a member of the jury in one small online contest among content editors.

The lawyer told me that, overall, my case is more or less promising, but not directly “wow,” so any result could be expected. As a result, in April I was approved by O1 visa. Thin moment - I got exactly the authorization to work in the United States in my company for three years.

I do not have a visa in my passport - I have already drawn up documents already in the United States. To get it, you need to travel outside the country and go to the consulate, which, in theory, can begin to request additional documents and refuse to issue a visa in general (the story about this is in the publication by reference). And the visa is given for a period of two years, not three, which are indicated in approval notice from the migration service.

Some of my American acquaintances with such a visa decide not to take risks and do not leave the country, but my family and I need to return to Russia in the summer, so there is a certain risk in this, although it is not great.

The whole process of preparing the documents and processing the visa took about seven months, despite the fact that we paid $ 1,225 for accelerated consideration of the petition (premium processing) for 15 days. But I had a hitch with the preparation of documents and other force majeure circumstances, which all delayed. Usually, the preparation of the entire case takes several months, and then it is reviewed by the migration service.

As they say on the Internet, the O1 visa allows you to change jobs, but for this you need a new employer to submit a new petition - and the migration service will again consider it. Another option is to remain in your company as a contractor worker to another firm.

The total costs for visa processing, transfers, and payment for an expedited review along with the opening of a company in the USA in my case amounted to a little over $ 10,000.

Conclusion

Summarizing: having spent more than $ 10 thousand, a lot of energy and six months of time at the initial stage, you will get the opportunity to work in the USA in your company. Then you can either develop this business, or look for employment options by contract or on a full-fledged basis. To do this already being in the country is much easier than from Russia.

This option is slow, not cheap and, in general, not easy, so it is not suitable for everyone. But it opens up active people who have achieved some success in their profession - which is important, not necessarily related to programming - the opportunity to work in a new country. Earn money to pay lawyers, collect documents and then look for clients and have to work independently. However, this is a plus - the ultimate success of an enterprise largely depends on the candidate himself.