Readit NewsStill worth thinking through the application, it's a great way to think critically about your business.
When we first applied with Howdy.com, we didn't get in, but the process of filling out our application gave us some insights and clarity.
Second time we applied, we got in.
Previously you have to file a full petition with a serious job offer which costs thousands of dollars but now you just pay some entry fee and you're in. Obviously this was ripe to be gamed by shady staffing companies taking money from applicants for filing a petition and THEN finding a job later based on whichever staffing agency gets picked. It's not even illegal for multiple companies to submit a petition for the same person.
USCIS can fix this by just selecting the lottery based on passport numbers and making sure the full paperwork is filed before the lottery like a few years ago, but of course they'll just lazily blame others for taking advantage of something that is so easily gamed.
The real losers here are the students who studied in the US, worked hard to find a job and only submit a single petition through their employers. It's now way less likely they will get picked in the lottery.
My opinion - USCIS can't legally reduce H1B visas so they intentionally wreck the lottery system to invite bogus applications, who they can later reject, or they simply won't file a full petition, and they don't have to issue all the 85K H1B visas Congress has allowed.
What’s telling is that we haven’t seen those offers since.
In fact we’ve seen rates negotiated down unfortunately.
- Local Latam companies are having an easier time retaining talent
- Devs in Latam have lowered their salary expectations and often are putting regular salary increases on pause
- There's less job hopping between firms now
Here's the kicker: My co-founder and I both have kids, family, mortgages. Here's how I did it in the years leading up to and during:
- I saved for years with the idea that I was going to use that money for entrepreneurship
- I was upfront with my spouse and kids about the amount of effort, risk and potential rewards; i could point to a successful dev/PM career as evidence that I could succeed
- Keeping the same standard of living was impossible, we had to budget for a new level of comfort
- We had runway timetable in mind to show some progress
- Our business approach had to be profitable from the start
Your business failure rate doesn't need to be 90% if you're flexible about the problem you're pursuing. We chose an idea that allowed us to bring in at least a little money to lengthen our personal runway. Once we had a sustainable business, it was easier to approach investors and pivot slightly to the market dominating, high risk/high reward version of our idea.
Hope this helps! Happy to chat about this with anyone who's interested in doing the same! f at howdy.com
While the others seem to care about cost-cutting to catering to their customers, you seem to also care about the developers, and this is a breath of fresh air. I hope many of my friends in Colombia will benefit from your initiative.
The idea of extending Silicon Valley level perks is the one that works in the long term. I wish you and the developers all the success.
We found really great teammates, who spoke great english. We also loved the US timezones, it was possible to be more responsive to our US customers.
And finally, I was surprised at how much overlap in culture we had as software deveopers. For example pop culture like movies, shows, video games, anime, music, etc.
It was a really good fit!
I imagine a future world where 100% of coding and debugging is done by prompt not by editing code.