Hi folks, I left the US around 7 years ago to build something with a woman in Europe. Didn't work out, so I've already started LCing and preparing for interviews. Remote from the EU I don't think I can go over $150k TC and the lack of mentors/peers is definitely detrimental to my career. Plan is to start mock interviews as soon as I get to around 80 LC problems. I don't mind spending 1 or 2k in mock interviews. I plan on applying to general posts like SWE II or III at Google as my ML experience is too limited. I suppose it's best to start interviewing around September/October? I don't think I will be even called for interviews needing an H1B in June/July, even if I could be parked in London/Zurich/Dublin for a while. MSCS from Georgia Tech in ML so I should have slightly higher chances at the lottery (I hope it helps with recruiters/hiring managers too) YoE: 7, ~1y in the US on OPT TC ~$140k List of companies I will apply to: Palantir Splunk Snap Twilio Facebook Twitch Instagram Affirm Spotify Doordash Netflix Paypal Google Ebay Microsoft Roku Amazon Waymo Stripe Bytedance Coinbase Coursera Dropbox Nuro Twitter Quora Uber Loon Lyft Asana Adobe Linkedin Apple Auth0 Nvidia Bloomberg Tesla SpaceX AMD Instacart Github Etsy Reddit Pinterest Two Sigma Airbnb Databricks Postmates Robinhood Riot Discord Slack Wealthfront Scribd Upstart Affirm Netlify Fastly Mozilla DigitalOcean #workvisa #h1b #interviews #machinelearning #swe #google #softwareengineer
Good luck!
Your best bet is to come to US on a L1 and then switch to H1B. Going to be hard to convince employers to do your H1B from outside US unless you’re absolutely critical to the project.
I know a few people who were hired straight from EU on H1B even as new grads. I wonder, if you apply to US based positions, would the manager or recruiter still offer you to spend 1y in EU for L1? Or they would normally just discard the application?
Depends on the role, manager and company. But highly improbable for US positions.
Personally I think it’s best to apply in December. That way most companies know their hiring plan for the upcoming year and it allows you plenty of time to interview and decide before companies lock down full h1b applications. Usually offers need to be accepted by mid to late feb for most companies now
So apply / referrals in late October to be sure?
I’d do 1st week of December, so that it gets traction before the holidays. I suppose could do November.
If your only reason to move back to the US is that you can't go over 150 TC in Europe, you're just looking in the wrong places: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/
I wonder how it turned out for the OP. Did you apply in 2021? Did you get your visa?
This is no different than somebody sitting in Philippines and wants to come to US. University doesn’t make a difference in your chances.
Not true. master's degree from american universities have 20k reserved spots at h1b
In terms of timing no different. regarding masters, one from harvard doesn’t have greater probability than one from any other. Most applications will have a question”ate you authorized to work in the country where the job is located”—and will be filtered.