Editor’s note: This post was originally published in 2019. The visa rules discussed here have been annotated to reflect the situation as of October 2026. This post shares personal experience, not legal advice. For an actual application, please consult an immigration attorney and follow the latest official rules.
Several readers have asked me similar questions recently, so I picked one to share. I discussed the details with her first, and some background details have been adjusted to protect her privacy. From the last reader reply I posted, I learned how powerful collective wisdom is. There were so many angles I would never have thought of on my own. So please, share your advice and help her out.
The Reader’s Letter
Hi Brian. Thank you for always sharing information on your Facebook page. I recently saw the job-hunting plan form in your post about apprenticeship programs, and I have already filled it out. I am writing in the hope that I can share my background with you and get some advice.
I currently work at Amazon in Europe as a Cloud Support Engineer, and I want to move into something like a technical program or project manager role. I have been trying to transfer internally and applying to other companies, but I do not have much project management experience, so none of the interviews worked out. My current manager also does not want to lose headcount, so he has not been very willing to help me transfer within Amazon.
I have been admitted to the Global Business Program at the University of Washington. I want to build up my project management and business experience there, which should help my career switch, and I plan to pick up Python, Java, JavaScript, and SQL again in my spare time.
I start this September and graduate next June (2020), after which I get one year of OPT. But it is only one year. Unlike STEM programs, it cannot be extended to three years, so I worry that companies will hesitate to hire me.
My biggest concern is the US visa. Do you have any recommended strategy for these nine months? Thank you so much for taking the time to read my background.
My Reply
Thank you for writing in. How to find a job in the US and successfully get a work visa is always a popular topic. If any reader is not familiar with the details, you can start with my earlier post, “How to Get a Tech Job in the US.”
Looking at your situation: you already work at a US tech company (Amazon). You want to change fields, but neither internal transfers nor outside applications have worked out. So you plan to study in the US, which legally gives you one year of work authorization after graduation to enter the H-1B lottery, which has 85,000 slots a year.
The H-1B is an external factor you cannot control, and there is one thing I want to flag first: confirm whether your program is actually a degree program, and whether it is STEM-designated, because those two facts drive your entire visa strategy. If it is a master’s degree, you also get to enter the separate pool of 20,000 advanced-degree slots on top of the regular pool. If the program is STEM-designated, your OPT can be extended by another 24 months, which means more chances at the lottery. But if the program is not a formal degree and not on the STEM list, you have only the one year of OPT and the regular pool, and the strategy looks completely different. Please confirm this with the school before you enroll. As for the lottery itself, I have seen a colleague miss three years in a row and have to transfer to London first, and another colleague who was selected on the very first try right out of college. Against the total number of people entering the lottery every year, these are just individual stories with no statistical meaning. Anything can happen.
2026 update: When this post was written in 2019, the H-1B lottery was purely random. The rules have changed substantially since. Starting in 2026, selection is weighted by wage level: one entry at Level I, two at Level II, three at Level III, and four at Level IV. In its rulemaking, DHS estimated selection odds of roughly 15 percent at Level I and 61 percent at Level IV. Those are model estimates, not observed results. The separate pool of 20,000 advanced-degree slots still exists. Registering the same person through multiple employers no longer improves the odds, and the lowest wage level among the registrations is the one that counts. Separately, a $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions was announced in September 2025 and briefly took effect, but courts blocked it in 2026, with judges split and the government appealing. As implemented, the fee mainly targeted applicants outside the US; people already in the US changing status from F-1 were not its target. The situation is still in flux, so check the latest rules before you file anything.
In my previous reader reply, I deliberately avoided giving my opinion directly. Instead, I asked questions back, to help the reader think about what she really wanted and what alternatives existed. But since you seem to have already made the big decisions, this time I will just give you my suggestions and thoughts directly.
From our email exchange, I know your biggest goal one year from now is to stay in Seattle. If that is the goal, why did you not first come to the US as a Cloud Support Engineer on an L-1 visa? Then you would not have been rejected from internal transfers for lack of experience. Given AWS’s market share, Amazon surely needs engineers like you in the US as well. Solve the hardest problem, the visa, first, and switch fields after you are here. (A quick note on the L-1 basics: within the three years before applying, you need at least one continuous year working abroad for a related company, in a managerial role or one that requires specialized knowledge.)
But you said you are coming to study in September, which is about a week away. Deciding to start this program must have taken a lot of determination.
If I were you, I would check whether the school has a similar master’s degree where you can take similar courses but that is STEM-designated. If there is one, do everything you can to switch into it, so your OPT can be extended and you get more chances at the H-1B lottery in the future.
(2026 note: The STEM OPT extension still exists. In October 2026, however, DHS put forward a proposal under which schools would have to pay a $70,000 fee when recommending a student for OPT, with later recommendations, including the STEM extension, charged separately. This is still a proposal, open for public comment and not in effect. Follow the official announcements.)
Whether or not you can change programs, you should start job hunting aggressively as soon as school starts. Use the school’s resources as much as you can: resume reviews, career fairs, job referrals, all of it.
Seattle is home to Amazon’s and Microsoft’s headquarters, and Google and Facebook are also expanding their Seattle offices. In 2017 I wrote a post asking whether Seattle would overtake Silicon Valley. On top of the growing job demand, living costs there are lower than in the Bay Area, which keeps attracting talent away from the Bay Area. It is a great job market outside of the San Francisco Bay Area.
(2026 note: The paragraph above was written in 2019, when Google and Facebook were still expanding in Seattle. The tech industry went through several rounds of layoffs after 2022, and the scale and hiring appetite of these companies in Seattle look very different now. Seattle is still a major US tech hub, but competition is much tougher than it was in 2019.)
If you see meetups hosted by big companies, attend them, and attend prepared. What does prepared mean? Say Amazon hosts an AWS meetup. Look up the topic and the speakers beforehand. At the event, talk to the speakers, introduce your own background as an AWS engineer, share your thoughts and questions about the technology, and ask whether there is anything you could contribute. You might land an internship or a job from exactly this kind of occasion. It has happened to me. See my post “The People Who Gave Me a Chance in America.”
You might wonder why I keep coming back to your engineering experience for the job hunt. This is all under the assumption that I am in your shoes. Speaking for myself, my English is not good enough to do a project management job at a US company without a related degree or background.
My blog’s motto is “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.” But in my years working in the US, I have never seen someone switch directly into PM with no related experience. People usually work as software engineers for a few years and then move over inside the same company once they have experience. Or they were educated in the US, with English and communication skills that can handle anything, and land a PM job right after graduation. Or they start in a PM-adjacent role and work their way into PM over time. Have you seen my livestream interview with Jackie, “From Google to Facebook: How an Engineer Becomes a Top Silicon Valley PM”? She has both a bachelor’s and a master’s in CS from MIT. Even she became a PM gradually: she started making suggestions as an engineer, carved out PM work from her own time bit by bit, and only moved over fully after that work was recognized. Her PM is product management, while you are aiming for project management, but I think a lot of it translates.
Coming back to your goal: your biggest goal a year from now is to find a job in Seattle, not to become a PM. So I think staying in the US matters more to you than the career-switch dream. And what will convince a US company to hire you is not a degree you have not finished yet. It is your years of engineering experience at Amazon and other companies.
Of course, this is quite different from your original plan, but I believe it is the path with the highest chance of landing a job. Readers, if you have other suggestions for her, please share. And Seattle friends, please chime in with events and resources she can use.
This post was originally published on my old blog (August 24, 2019). The site is now offline, and the full text is preserved by the Wayback Machine. It was lightly edited when moved here, and the visa rules were annotated with 2026 updates.
