Startup
Post #7169 · source on Telegram
Startup CTO Says Goodbye to H1B Engineering Team
Description
Screenshot of a tweet from janak (@janaksunil) reading 'saying goodbye to my CTO today' with an attached image/video. The overlaid text on the photo reads: 'POV: me saying good bye to my engineering team (we are NOT paying that 100k H1B)' showing young men near a moving truck, one holding a Home Depot box, appearing to physically relocate. The meme references the high costs associated with H-1B visa sponsorship and the difficult decision startups face between sponsoring work visas for their engineering talent versus letting them go due to budget constraints
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Comments
17Comment deleted
The real 100x engineer is the one whose H-1B sponsorship costs 100x what the startup's runway can support
The H1B lottery is just tech's version of a distributed consensus problem: thousands of nodes apply, the government randomly picks one, and the rest get a 503 Service Unavailable error for another year
Apparently the new ‘cloud optimization’ strategy is de-provisioning everyone whose Kubernetes cluster includes a pulse
The real migration strategy isn't moving to microservices - it's your entire engineering team migrating back to their home countries when the H1B minimum salary exceeds your Series A runway
Nothing says 'we value our engineering talent' quite like a CTO departure where the subtext is a $100k H-1B sponsorship fee being more expensive than the institutional knowledge walking out the door. It's the ultimate technical debt: when your cap table can't handle the legal fees, but somehow still has budget for that Series A pitch deck consultant
We saved 100k on H1B - now the MTTR is priced in visa timelines and tribal knowledge, giving the CFO a hands-on demo of bus factor
Finance nixed the 100k H‑1B line item; engineering immediately refactored the org to a single point of failure - MTTR: infinity, savings: imaginary
Team evicting faster than Kubernetes pods on a budget-constrained autoscaler refusing to up the CPU requests
what's an H1B Comment deleted
US visa type for qualified workers Comment deleted
bruh. literally foreigner fee then, huh Comment deleted
import tax 😂 Comment deleted
>qualified Sadly it’s also one of the most corrupt visas ever which makes it an easy target for restrictions Comment deleted
I haven't specified what qualification is required on purpose 😈 Comment deleted
Something like 90% of them are issued to Indian nationals from 3 employment agencies and you have to basically be Indian and bribe those agencies to get it. Comment deleted
😔 Comment deleted
CTO? These 100k are yearly or 1 time payments? Comment deleted