H-1B Fees Just Went Batshit Insane

I'm still trying to figure out what exactly happened. From what I can piece together, Trump signed something late Friday night - maybe around midnight? Nobody I talked to saw this coming. Not the lawyers, not the companies, nobody.

By Saturday morning my inbox was full of forwarded emails from Microsoft and JPMorgan telling employees to avoid international travel. I've been doing this for like 15 years and I've never seen anything like it. When was the last time your company told you not to visit your family?

The timing is what pisses me off the most. They waited until Friday night to drop this, right before people were supposed to fly home for holidays. My teammate Ravi has been planning his trip to Delhi for months - his grandmother is sick. Now he doesn't know if he should risk it.

I'm hearing the fees jumped from around $4,500 to something insane - maybe $80k, maybe $120k, nobody seems to know the exact number yet. It's like if your AWS bill suddenly went from $200 to $15,000 a month because they decided to charge per line of code. You'd think someone fat-fingered a database update, right?

The thing is, companies aren't going to eat that cost. My old CTO is already looking at opening an office in Vancouver. Another startup I know is talking about moving their whole engineering team to Dublin. So much for keeping jobs in America - all Trump did was give everyone a reason to leave.

So immigration lawyers are scrambling to pitch alternatives. L1 visas, O1 visas, whatever. But come on - L1s only work if your company already has offices abroad, and O1s are for "extraordinary ability." Like, what am I supposed to tell the officer? "This guy writes really clean React components?"

I was in a Zoom call yesterday with a couple startup founders - everyone's doing the math. Why pay whatever insane fee this is when you can just hire the same talent in Bangalore or Berlin for way less? One CEO I know is already reaching out to recruiters in Toronto.

This whole thing is so backwards. Trump thinks he's protecting American jobs, but what's actually going to happen is companies will just move their entire engineering teams offshore. I've worked at places that had teams split between SF and India - guess which office survived the budget cuts?

The worst part is all these senior engineers who've been here for years, learning how Silicon Valley actually works - they're all going to take that knowledge back to Mumbai or Hyderabad. We're basically training our competition and then kicking them out.

Meanwhile, everyone I know is looking at Canada. Their visa process takes like a month instead of three years, and doesn't cost more than a house down payment. Makes you wonder what the fuck we're doing here.