how should a no degree but experienced foreigner start his career after come to the U.S.?

Question

I'm 25 years old, with 6 years experience in software developer from China, and I'm in to California since 2016.

I was working at a studio back in China since 2012, where I learned C++/C# for desktop application, JS/NodeJS/PHP for backend and frontend.

I came to the U.S. in 2016 to seek asylum and got my employment authorization.

After I came here, I kept working hard with my studio back in China, its been great but after 3 years, the studio is going down even with our efforts to make it profitable again.

I have no degrees, never had a chance due to my childhood, no real employment record that can be recognized by Americans, but I do believe I am experienced software developer, as I been working on it in past 6 years, just like other Chinese goes 996, working hard, solved so many issues and challenges.

My question is what should I do, what's next to continue my career in this nation?

Answer 1

Most companies looking for a developer are already used to employees that don't have a degree. It is something quite commom in this area, so most companies will take experience over education.

Simply apply to jobs, detail your 6 years of experience and good luck!

Answer 2

Do what anyone without a degree does to show potential employers your skills.

First, you do still have a resume with work experience - I don't know why you think you have "no real employment record that can be recognized by Americans." We do in fact realize other countries exist and people have work experience from there. Ideally we can confirm it with references, but we also understand that in some cases companies go out of business, etc. and it's hard to do that. Perhaps some of your former coworkers or managers would still agree to being contacted as references, or at least you could get them to write you up a recommendation on LinkedIn.

Second, you will of course need to compensate by coming up with other things you can show people. Can you point them at work you've done? Software, client sites, open source projects, github repos... Even if there's not "hard proof" you worked on them, in an interview we'll ask you some questions to see if it seems like you know what you're talking about. In the end, in any interview you have some degree of trust that the applicant has done the things they've said, there's no effective way to validate every detail.

Third, prepare for the technical interviews - if you can go in and talk to other engineers and reasonably convince them via whiteboard, coding project, or whatever that you can develop in those languages, you'll get job offers.

Everyone is hungry for development talent. Just this week I hired someone who has a degree in a completely non-computing field but decided to teach themselves coding and switch careers. They have some contract experience, we talked to them and determined that we think they know what they're talking about, and that's good enough.