The same problem occurs for a Canadian with no college degree (but tons of freelance dev experience) wishing to move to SV. Anyone here know a good way to get around that?
Some details: I took two years of university so far, but ran out of money to keep going. I'm now living month-to-month (averaging about "feed myself and pay rent for a room") doing severely underpaid web-app development (think ELance rates.) Apparently my skillset (Ruby, Erlang, systems-level/embedded C, Clojure, some Cocoa Touch experience) would be making me at least $100K/yr in SV, but nobody wants it up here in Vancouver; it's all ASP shops and C++ game-dev, and most of the gigs I do get end up being in PHP, even though it's not my forte.
I really don't want to spend however-many more years it would take to pay my way through school at this rate, struggling out in the software "hinterlands", when a better life is just one border-crossing away.
And technically, If I'm asking for a pony, I don't really want to get hired by a Microsoft or a Google and only work in the US for them; I want to go to the US because I want to participate in SV startup culture, which both includes working for a startup, and starting my own. It seems like that possibility is just locked out for anyone but permanent residents of the US, though.
If by diploma you mean a 2 year (which is usually what it means in Canada), it won't be enough on its own.
You can actually get an exemption if you can demonstrate equivalent knowledge and a career progression towards it. What that usually means is having a professor of your field vouch for your knowledge and being able to prove work history for 3 or 4 years of each of the four years of university you didn't take. A two year diploma may cut that amount in half, but I wouldn't necessarily count on it.
If your work history is hard to prove you may want to try other types of visas. TN-1s aren't so difficult, but re-entry can apparently be a pain. You can also get an equivalent to an H-1B by working for a Canadian subsidiary (of, say, MS or Google) for about a year and then getting a transfer to the American head office. I believe these are much easier to get.
And then there's the traditional ways, like being sponsored by family etc. Unfortunately, no matter what, a degree will make it much much easier.
> If by diploma you mean a 2 year (which is usually what it means in Canada), it won't be enough on its own.
I really did mean a four-year; I just said "diploma" because "degree" implies education was involved. The diploma is the piece of paper. :)
> prove work history for 3 or 4 years
Does that mean employment history? I don't have much of that. Completed contracts, certainly, but I've not been "on payroll" anywhere for more than six months at a time.
Well, in Canada it's very unusual to call a bachelors a diploma. The piece of paper is a degree. Diplomas are for two year colleges and high schools.
I think the work history requirements might have relaxed in recent years a bit, but not by much. 10 years seems to be the point where most American employers start to seem optimistic about being able to get you an H-1B without a degree. But if it's not employment experience you'll have to work twice as hard to document it, and that can be very difficult. Most of my work history, for example, is tied up in companies that no longer exist or as contracts, as with you.
I also think there was an article here recently about Facebook setting up a Vancouver office just to bring graduates through the subsidiary employment process. It's a one year thing specifically for that purpose.
EDIT: Bah, too bad they demand proof of secondary education. Sucks for people who couldn't afford college...