

Moving from London to San Francisco - dylancollins
http://corp.fightmymonster.com/?p=176

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petercooper
Interesting enough but it misses perhaps the hardest and most onerous portion
of this move for most people and companies: the visas/immigration process.

The three people on the "Who We Are" page seem qualified enough to get O-1
(Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement) visas, perhaps.. but
that's the interesting part of the story that's missing. Or is it in another
post?

 _Converting to Sterling, you’ll probably pay about 20% more than what you’d
expect for similar quality engineers in London._

I'm sure many in London would be intrigued where all the typical full-time
software engineer salaries of £62k-£78k are to be had ;-) Maybe I talk to the
wrong people or we're just more secretive in the UK but it's not often I hear
salaries like that being thrown about.

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pmjordan
With $2.1m in funding, I suspect it might not be too hard to get E2 visas.
(non-resident visa for the purpose of managing an investment in the US) They
also recently relaxed the rules on self sponsoring H1Bs if the company has
enough cash. Not that I can speak from experience.

I'd love to know what kind of requirements for the O-1 visa apply in the
context of our industry, as that seems the strongest visa of them all by far.
I assume nobody can talk about their experiences publicly as the whole process
goes through immigration lawyers and I guess immigration aren't going to be
too pleased with publicly available "instructions" on how to legally enter the
country, either.

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excuse-me
The height of the goalposts seem to change with the market. In the last dot-
com bubble my UK PhD supervisor was offered head of physics dept at an IVY
league school.

He couldn't get an O-1, he was told that "a Nobel prize would help"

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pmjordan
Those are some pretty high goal posts. That would mean a quota of 10-15 per
year. Aside from the celebrities-du-jour who of course never seem to have
trouble getting them.

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seanmccann
What visa did they use? That's the hardest part.

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cjrp
I don't really understand why you'd move a tech business to somewhere where
there's famously a shortage of tech talent? Sure the pool of engineers in
London may be smaller, but so's the demand surely?

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Mamady
For all the hackers in London... the last line of this article is why you
should be moving to SF :)

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rurounijones
The US government does a pretty good job of discouraging that sort of thing
these days.

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chris123
Good tips. Will be interesting to see how much longer this cycle runs.

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twinturbo
Leaving London for San Francisco. That's too bad. San Francisco is a dump.

