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Ask YN: Any chance to get a work permit in the US and work for a web startup?
I'm a 28y old sw-developer and native German citizen. After 10 years in the German IT biz I've one big dream left:
To join an innovative start-up in the US like e.g. squareup.com
Unfortunately I've no university degree because I quit junior high school when I was 17 to join a startup (1999) and later moved on as an employee at Amazon.de where I was involved in the european Marketplace (and Payments) launch. Since 2005 I'm a freelancer/contractor building mid/large scale web-applications for companies like Yahoo.de (FIFA Worldcup 2006 offical Website core-team), Allianz SE (insurance) and two leading publishing companies in Germany using Ruby, (Rails, Sinatra, ...), Perl and PHP.
I've neither an university degree nor "exeptional skills" (like in terms of getting an US work permit): Is my dream really impossible? I'm really depressed with the work here which is kind of 18th century (crap technolgy pared with managers that have no clue of webapps/social media things) — and copycats.
Ideas? Thanks.
- YuriNiyazov 17y agoDoes Amazon.de or Yahoo.de allow international transfers of their employees? I would be surprised if they didn't - I used to work in the financial industry (GS), where international employee transfers (US, Tokyo, London) were the norm.
- rmoriz 17y agoAt Amazon this was not an option. They closed the branch in 2004. At Yahoo i was only a contractor and, to be honest, I was glad not to be an employee there... they closed development in early 2009. I must really confess, that I don't want to work in old-economy blown enterprises ever again. Also the european dev-branches of US IT companies are usually doing localization only, nothing really innovative or game changing. This might not be the case at Google but I surely do not qualify to work at Google anyway.
- huherto 17y agoYou probably mean "extraordinary abilities". http://www.messersmithlaw.com/green-card/eb1-extraordinary-ability.html http://www.messersmithlaw.com/green-card/eb1-extraordinary-a... It does look like you have to be a world class athlete, artist or scientist to use this visa. Good luck with this! It shouldn't be this hard for motivated people like you to be able to work in the US.
- ez77 17y ago"In order to qualify for the EB1-EA, the applicant must have won a Nobel Prize [...]" I remember when, during my years in the US, I looked up my options to apply for some merit-based residence permit. When I found this I literally laughed out loud. I thought, "OK guys, if I were a Nobel Prize laureate you would be looking me up, not the other way around."
- ig1 17y agoWhy the US in specific ? - why not find an innovative startup in Europe to join ?
- rmoriz 17y agoThere are so few innovative web-startups in Europe. Most business are copycats: At the moment we have round about 10 clones of groupon.com in Germany. They usually hire cheap offshore php guys to clone it 1:1. Cloning does neither need skilled on-site developers and architects nor better technolgy and processes (think of agile/bdd, ruby, python, younameit instead of php4-ish php). Also in Germany bootstrapping is not really accepted in the public opinion. Neither is entrepreneurship. Nearly everyone thinks you do this because you're not qualified or hard enough working to get a 'real' job. This tends to change however small business are still avoided. This is one reason SaaS does not work here yet: most US SaaS apps are focussing small businesses or freelancers and don't care about the enterprise (right way imho). On the other side everybody wants web-related things as cheap as possible. Usually it's okay to redo it in a couple of years. There's no visible premium segment except some banking corps or offical corps but they're still doing either cobol or JEE with the most available amount of abstraction and bloat (sorry, been there, done that).
- ig1 17y agoThere are plenty of innovative startups in Europe especially in the mobile space. Try having a look at techcrunch's european job board. Where are you in Germany ? - from what I've seen bootstrapping is considered far more acceptable in Berlin than other parts of Germany.