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With regard to maintaining legal status: If you get a part-time job H1B petition approved, you can use it to maintain your status. With an H1B visa you just n
by winter_blue 11y ago
With regard to maintaining legal status:
If you get a part-time job H1B petition approved, you can use it to maintain your status.
With an H1B visa you just need one job (at all times) to maintain legal status. Part-time H1B petitions allows the employer to specify a range of hours, like 10-20.
If you find an employer willing to hire you for 10-20 hours, and file the H1B petition (which costs including attorney fees, around $3k to $4k), then that should free up enough time to do something on the side.
With regard to working on a startup:
In order to legally work for your YC or non-YC startup, you will need another (concurrent) H1B petition approved. This is actually rather hard. Key points:
1) You must own less than 50% of your startup. Someone (usually the board) must be able to fire you. If there is no one that can fire, your startup H1B petition will most likely be rejected.
2) You'll need investment that is sufficiently high that you can give yourself the "prevailing wage" for the region your startup's office will be in.
Use this tool to find out what the prevailing wage for your region is: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesWizardStart.aspx http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesWizardStart.aspx
For example, in order to be legally employed on an H1B in the "San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA" MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area), you must be getting paid at least $98,342 per year or $47.28 per hour. You'll need to get investment that's high enough to cover that. YC wouldn't cut it. My estimate is that you'd need stable yearly investment (or revenue) in the range of $500k to a million.
- bonobo3000 11y ago>For example, in order to be legally employed on an H1B in the "San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA" MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area), you must be getting paid at least $98,342 per year or $47.28 per hour. Wow, i had no idea the prevailing wage was that high. Does this mean literally everyone on an H1B in the bay area is making at least $100k/year?! I should have negotiated harder...
- vadym909 11y agoNo- you find a job title that has a lower prevailing wage- for example programmer analyst vs application developer or something else. Companies like Infosys and TCS pay $70K/year
- winter_blue 11y agoRegardless of what H1B visa holders are making, if you are a developer and are making less than $120k in the Bay Area, your employer is seriously ripping you off. If you're a good developer, and can prove that by your work, and communicate that across in an interview, you can quite easily make $150,000 or more in the Bay Area. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics collects data on how much people make in each area of the country, for various O⁕NET job titles/classifications. You can find out how much your peers make using this tool: http://data.bls.gov/oes/ http://data.bls.gov/oes/ I've uploaded a screenshot of how much software developers in the Bay Area earn: http://imgur.com/R8E1qdZ http://imgur.com/R8E1qdZ --it reveals that 90% of developers earn over ~$91k, 75% earn over ~$111k, 50% earn over ~$137k, and 25% over ~$166k, in the San Jose area. The minimum wage for an H1B employee is based on O⁕NET job classification. If the person is classified under "Software Developers, Applications", they must be paid at least $98,342 in the San Jose area. My title at my company is "Software Engineer" and they classified me under "Software Developers, Applications" while applying for a visa for me. Unfortunately, the O*NET job title classification system also has other redundant ones like "Computer Programmers" and "Web Developers". The prevailing wages for those are far lower. For example, in the San Jose area, the minimum wage for H1B "Computer Programmers" is ~$51k, and for "Web Developers" it's ~$66k. I can see how unethical companies would exploit that. To be honest, I'm puzzled where the Department of Labor got these prevailing wage numbers from. It almost seems like an error.