
Ask HN: How did you get your “O-1” visa as a software engineer? - sheoked
So I&#x27;ve just graduated from school, landed an awesome job with an epic startup in Europe. They have offices in the US and are looking to relocate permanently there.<p>The L visas are out of the question as they require at least a year of working for the company abroad. It&#x27;s too late for H1Bs petitions for 2017. Which leaves the potential for E visas or some way to write a story that makes me an &quot;alien of extraordinary ability&quot;.<p>I fulfil 2 out of the 8 criteria for the O1 visa and can maybe scrape into another 2, with the experience I have and things I&#x27;ve accomplished so far.<p>So how did you get your O-1 visa and what made you an &quot;alien of extraordinary ability&quot;? How &quot;extraordinary&quot; does one need to be, or need to be able to demonstrate?
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patio11
(I am not a lawyer, and I am not your lawyer, but during previous and current
jobs I've helped people through this process.)

Approximately 25% of engineers I know would qualify for O-1 (counterfactually,
for Americans) given 1 to 3 months of worksmanlike effort towards checking off
boxes that they don't already have. People think I'm joking when I say:

"Participation on a panel, or individually, as a judge of the work of others
in the same or in a field of specialization allied to that field for which
classification is sought"

can be satisfied by judging a hackathon. I really am not joking when I say
that.

The engineers I know who actually hold O-1s in their hand generally sound much
closer to "Bright guy; founded a YC-backed company; clearly an asset to a
development team" than "Nobel prize winner" in terms of career
accomplishments.

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marymkearney
Congratulations on the job! I wrote a blog post on this topic that you might
find helpful.

[http://visabuilder.com/blog/escape-from-h1b-hell-5-things-
im...](http://visabuilder.com/blog/escape-from-h1b-hell-5-things-immigrant-
entrepreneurs-can-do-right-now-to-hack-their-own-o1-visas/)

HTH and good luck.

