Thank you, stimarco. I have read your previous post 3 times, and I thank you again, all of you. I think I will go with options 2 and 3 together. I'm feeling much better now - after all, there seems to be hope still. I will soon finish putting together my showreel in a presentable form and post it and see what people think about it, and then probably refine it even more. For some reason, I have a good feeling about this. Still, if you have anything else you'd like to say, please, it's much appreciated.

Quote: Original post by Palidine
All the big publishers: EA, THQ, Activision, Lucas Arts, etc have no problem hiring and relocating foreigners. Probably 10% of the people at my office are here on foreign work visas. The games industry right now is _starving_ for engineers (well technically starving for experienced engineers).

Close. It isn't that they are "starving for experienced engineers". They are starving for experienced engineers who will work for the pay they are offering.

Also, I find it interesting that so many of your workmates are on foreign work visas.

We have one foreign worker right now, from the UK, and in the past I've worked with several people from the UK, Australia, and South Africa. When hiring, I help go through a stack of resumes that is several inches tall. Even after the first pass of unqualified or unrealistic resumes (probably 2/3 of the stack), the stack of 'probably good' people is still quite big. Saying that we are starving for engineers generally is a joke.

Experienced engineers can find great paying jobs when they shop around, or become consultants where they can try to negotiate better pay. Others will start up their own studios or leave the industry for better paying jobs in fields like medical imaging, corporate data simulations, or military simulation systems. (Raytheon takes a lot of former game programmers.)

There are loopholes in the visa laws allowing foreign programmers to make less. The biggest one is giving them a lesser job title, although there are many other ways too. I've also heard (but not directly seen) that the companies who do the proverbial 80-hour required work weeks also have the most foreign (specifically Indian) workers. Since those same companies are the source of complaints about hard work hours, and have a hard time cultivating experienced local and European workers for the same positions that the visa holders have, I strongly suspect them to be accurate.

The gamasutra salary surveys don't include the pay rates based on nationality of visa workers, although it has been suggested many times.

Some news articles, just for fun reading:

Quote: News article from C|net
In 2003, 39 percent of H-1B visas approved were for workers in computer-related occupations.
The median annual wage paid in the United States to workers in computer and math occupations was $62,620 in May 2004, according to the Department of Labor. Among companies seeking at least 100 H-1B visas last year, many employers planned to pay substantially less than that amount, according to the Programmers Guild report.
Of 100 employers in the category that planned to pay the lowest salaries, the report said, none intended to offer more than an average of $48,355 a year. Seventy-four of these companies pledged to pay an average salary of less than $45,820--a figure in the 25th percentile for U.S. math and computer workers.
The Programmers Guild does not accuse the companies of violating H-1B wage rules. Instead, the guild's findings point to a flaw in the program that benefits employers, Programmers Guild President Kim Berry said. "The law lets them use so many sources to determine prevailing wage."
"There's a clear connection between the Indian diaspora in the United States, the use of H-1B and offshore outsourcing," said Hira, who is of Indian descent. Like the Programmers Guild, he, too, has found evidence that some large India-based tech companies seeking H-1B visas proposed to pay lower wages than their U.S. counterparts.
Puri agreed. "I don't think it's an Indian issue," he said. "Ultimately, it's an issue of economics."

Quote: News article from Washington Post
According to the Washington Post, Senate and House testimony by Dot.Com and high tech executives pleaded that there was a desperate shortage of qualified American high tech workers. However, two separate Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) inquiries showed that the provided testimony selectively omitted one crucial point: high tech firms who use imported non-citizens under H-1B are, in fact, paying their H-1B immigrant workers $10,000 less per year than comparable U.S. college graduates with similar qualifications. While there is a law requiring that foreign workers imported under H-1B be paid the "prevailing wage" in the U.S., the law is full of loopholes that allow high tech companies to realize enormous labor savings by hiring foreign non-citizens instead of U.S. citizens for high tech jobs.
"Contrary to the industry claims of a programmer shortage, employers freely admit that they are inundated with resumes. These supposedly "desperate" employers reject the vast majority of their applicants without even interviewing them.