

Ask YN: Any chance to get a work permit in the US and work for a web startup? - rmoriz

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:<p>To join an innovative start-up in the US like e.g. squareup.com<p>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.<p>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.<p>Ideas? Thanks.
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huherto
You probably mean "extraordinary abilities".
[http://www.messersmithlaw.com/green-
card/eb1-extraordinary-a...](http://www.messersmithlaw.com/green-
card/eb1-extraordinary-ability.html) 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
"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."

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YuriNiyazov
Does 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
At 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.

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ig1
Why the US in specific ? - why not find an innovative startup in Europe to
join ?

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rmoriz
There 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
There 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.

