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Ask HN: Who's hiring (for H-1B)? | Dec 2010

103 points by agentx ↗ HN
I ask because there are not many startups that I know of (I'm probably looking in the wrong place?) that also take H-1B candidates into consideration.

I see all these awesome potential job opportunities on HN, but it's never clear whether a H-1B candidate would also be considered, as that is 99% never explicitly stated.

So - anyone hiring that'll sponsor or do H-1B visa transfers?

39 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 89.3 ms ] thread
nowarninglabel
Do you know any startups that take H-1B candidates? I looked into it because I very much wanted to hire a particular candidate, but the fees, time, and legal expertise required are nearly insurmountable to a young company, in my opinion.
jacoblyles
A friend of mine owns a startup (2 people) and he is going through the H-1B process to hire a European programmer. If you'd like to get in contact with him, drop me an email and I will see if he is willing to answer questions about it.
guelo
We did it at an early funded startup, I don't completely remember but I think it cost us around $20k including the lawyer we hired to take care of it. The guy was a superstar though, he was more than worth it to us.

I also saw it happen at a startup that initially relied heavily on outsourcing, after a couple years they started bringing some of the best Indian guys in-house.

vitobcn
If I remember correctly from a couple years back, H1-B Homeland security fees are around $3k and if you hire a lawyer for the process you'll have to add at least another $1k.

It's not cheap, but it is certainly not that expensive, as those fees will usually be less than 1 month's salary of the hired developer.

In my opinion, timing constraints and uncertainty end up being a bigger deterrent: you can only apply on April, the visa start the following October and it takes a while to know whether the applicant was selected.

ojbyrne
As far as I know, only applying in April is incorrect. In past years the quotas ran out almost immediately when they started in April, so that was essentially the case. This year the quota hasn't run out yet.
metachris
I'm in the US on a H-1B visa and we applied beginning of October. In November it was granted and I came here beginning of December.

It required a lot of documentation, but else the process was fast and pretty painless.

snissn
As far as I know the $20K figure is 4-5x high what it should be.

Does anybody with a lot of experience with Visas have a better price quote?

tptacek
The price you seem to think it should be is in the range of what we've seen, with lawyers.
alain94040
I have seen closer to $6K, no more than $8K.
tptacek
You are getting wildly overcharged.
nigelk
I'm on an H1B with a startup after being on an E-3 for a few years with a much larger company.

We have other E-3 employees as well.

http://www.puppetlabs.com/company/jobs/

Ultimately you need to make a judgement call when hiring. Is the position important enough to justify the cost of the visa application and processing?

I'd argue that at an early stage for a startup, just about every position is that important. The right person matters a lot.

The bigger problem might be the time it takes to get all these applications done.

The USCIS doesn't exactly operate at startup pace... :)

weel
I interviewed for jobs in California last week, and I got job offers from three startups (two in San Francisco, one in the Valley), one of which was pre-series-A. Each of these reassured me that they knew a good immigration lawyer and offered to pay for them (in one case as part of a lump sump relocation bonus.) I ultimately decided to go work for Facebook instead, but I can confirm that there are certainly startups making job offers in the full understanding that they're going to have to arrange H1Bs.
qtrng
imo.im is hiring.

https://imo.im/jobs.html

qtrng
While our jobs page doesn't specifically say that we sponsor H-1Bs, we do. At least 3 of our current employees have H-1B visas.
squirrel
Boston (US) as well as London (UK) - youDevise, Ltd.

We're a 60-person financial-software firm committed to learning and improvement as well as great web software and agile development. We're hiring developers and other smart folks of many kinds. See http://www.youdevise.com/careers and https://dev.youdevise.com.

We help successful candidates relocate to London or Boston including arranging visas where needed. For example, earlier this year we hired an HN reader from Denmark and we moved a Polish employee to Boston.

alexl
Nice. Gonna brush up the resume a little bit and then apply for Junior IT Support Specialist. I mean, I know this is HN but the guys who know almost everything else besides programming are very often ignored completely here.

How about competent beta testers, or sysadmins like someone else said here?

shivaas
flyRuby (see http://www.flyruby.com) is hiring aggressively and considers H-1B sponsorship on a case to case basis. We also try and leverage the OPT period if possible before transitioning to an H-1B as required.
jlangenauer
You're called flyRuby, but are only hiring Lisp and PHP programmers?
shivaas
Well, having Ruby in the name doesn't mean we have to work in ruby right :) ? We work heavily in Lisp and PHP at the moment, but we're always open to exploring other technologies based on what the requirements are for a particular product. But right now, its all Lisp and PHP!
frodo01
Yes they do. I just got a h1b job. This is my blog post on that - http://sans-voir.livejournal.com/9189.html.
kazuya
Wow, I am trying to do what you did.

In fact I tried your option 2 (get a job at big co and ask relocation), though that was in Canada, but got rejection after onsite interviews.

You relieved my feelings -- most of my friends say it's absurd not to go through the usual university path.

fsniper
Do you know any startups that take H-1B candidates for system administration jobs? I know this is HackerNews but our species (of sysadmins) must be still needed for some :)
ora600
Not exactly a startup (but less than 100 employees), but the company I work for is hiring sysadmins (both internal and as consultants for remote work). We are taking H-1B candidates and I'd love to stop being the only H-1B employee in the company :)

We are also looking for DBAs: Oracle, MySQL and even SQL-Server.

You can read my blog post about my experience with the company: http://www.pythian.com/news/16887/learning-on-the-job-some-t...

And apply here: http://candidates.pythian.com/

shykes
We just hired 2 engineers on an H1B. It's expensive and complicated, but for important hires it's worth it. And in a startup every hire can mean life or death.

An important caveat: H1B allows ZERO flexibility in the equity/cash mix. You must offer market salary or the visa will be denied. Immigration ignores equity entirely.

tptacek
How expensive is "expensive"? For us, it seems to be in the neighborhood of what you'd pay for relo; in other words, international candidates just cost double relo.

Relative to fully-loaded cost, it just doesn't seem to be that big a deal.

shykes
Yes, that's our experience as well. For a qualified candidate it's a no-brainer.
rorrr
Well, market salary is not clearly defined. The spread is huge, even in one area (often in the same company even). That's why H1B workers usually make less on average.
shykes
You are mistaken. Market salary is clearly defined, right here: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/

Fail to respect the conventions outlined in this website, and your application will be denied.

rorrr
Ok, you're correct. What I'm trying to say is that it doesn't reflect real salaries. For example, "web developer" in NYC gives us this:

Level 1 Wage: $20.69 hour - $43,035 year

Level 2 Wage: $28.12 hour - $58,490 year

Level 3 Wage: $35.56 hour - $73,965 year

Level 4 Wage: $42.99 hour - $89,419 year

These are way lower than the real NYC salaries. Right out of the college, I made more than their Level 3. H1B workers however seem to make salaries like that.

cloudhead
Just make sure you have enough years of combined education and work experience. I wasn't able to get an H1-B for that reason, even though the company told me they could obtain it no problem.
iworkforthem
Er... Not sure if you guys know, there is also H1B1, it's a variation of H1B. More for both Chile and Singapore citizen to work in USA for short term. I am not sure about the fees though.
meattle
Compete.com does H1B's. But Compete's not a startup anymore.

You should be looking at startups with at least a few US employees. Currently, I think you'll find it rare for a startup with < 3-4 US employees to be able to sponsor an h1b. Homeland security has been getting pretty strict about this.

I believe it generally costs about ~$6k to sponsor one. More if you premium process.

tptacek
We'll talk to H1-B candidates. Please, let's not fragment the hiring threads even further than they already are.
ahuibers
Bump is hiring and will definitely do H1B sponsorship. I believe visa difficulty can vary by country though e.g. India may be more difficult.

We are hiring for server(python/redis/mongo/C)/operations/Android/DESIGN.

http://bu.mp/jobs

Please also mail hackernews@ourdomain to get above the noise.

jlees
An interesting question and if there's one takeaway from this: startups, please could you mention on your jobs pages (not just this thread!) whether you will look at non-US candidates?

It's time consuming applying to places that either won't take H1-B applicants, or who aren't likely to get USCIS to approve the H1-B transfer even if we already have the visa.

fxm4139
There are plenty startups that sponsor H1-Bs. Sponsoring an H1-B is not the bottleneck sometimes when it comes to hiring. Even small consultant shops with less than 5 people do H1-Bs. But many applicants will want to think twice about it in case they plan on applying for employment based permanent residency. An H1-B is valid for three years and can be extended for another three for a total of 6 years. After that you can continue to extend it IF you have a permanent residency application that is pending.

The issue for startups happen when you take a permanent residency application into account. For instance, I had a friend who got into two great startups who were willing to sponsor H1-Bs. He really wanted to work at either. However, he also wanted to apply for his permanent residency within 2 years to continue staying in the US. However, a company needs to have certain revenue (besides other minimium requirements) to be able to apply for a green card. Both the companies checked with their lawyers and they did say that it was a big risk factor when it came to applying for a permanent residency. So he actually ended up passing both offers.

In retrospect he would have been fine since both companies ended up getting acquired by Intel and Google, where he would have been fine. But that is part of the risk involved.

RichardPrice
Academia.edu hires H-1b candidates. We just did two H-1b applications for two of our employees. Whether someone needs a visa for the US doesn't enter into our hiring decision-making process at all. We're exclusively focused on hiring the best software engineers.

Academia.edu's jobs page is here http://academia.edu/hiring, and a description of our engineering culture is here http://academia.edu/hiring/software_engineer. We're a team of 7, are backed by leading VCs and angels, and are based in downtown San Francisco. We're growing fast right now and are looking to hire smart engineers!