Waterloo Alum, Ryan, emailed recently asking about how I transferred my H1B from Microsoft (a very big company) to Redfin (a very small company).
His questions:
When you were thinking about switching employers, did you feel the need to consult a lawyer, to get information on the H-1B transfer process? Or did you just go ahead and do it?
I felt the need to consult a lawyer but was scared off by $200/hour fees. Instead, I just went for it. Fortunately it worked out!
Did you have to work for your new employer a certain length of time before they agreed to begin the Labor Certification process? (The first stage of the green card process.) Or, were you even intending to aim for a green card?
I waited about six months before asking Redfin to start my Green Card Labor Cert process. Microsoft’s rule of thumb is that they’ll get started on your Green Card after you’ve been there a year.
Was it hard to “prove” that the new job was similar to the old job? (Since that is a requirement for an H-1B transfer.)
I was carefully to keep the same job title at my new job as at my old job. In my case “program manager”.
Did the transfer process take what seemed to you to be a long time?
To me it was seamless. HR at Redfin worked with Redfin’s lawyer to do it all.
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Re: Microsoft’s rule of thumb is that they’ll get started on your Green Card after you’ve been there a year.
It was true a few years ago but not now. These days they tend to start it ASAP. In my case (2005), we got it started slightly before a year. Also, don’t take policies as is, sometimes you can get policies changed or get an exception. A lot of things esp like these are negotiable.
The most important thing here, that Matt already pointed out, is to preserve your job title. I know many people in software companies who switched from dev/test disciplines to Program Management discipline but preserved their previous job title (SDE/SDET etc) to avoid any issues with their Green Card process.
All in all, US government and immigration needs to fix their Green Card process but that’s going to take some time.