A US company has a senior backend role open for five months. There is an engineer in Prague who can do it today. And somewhere in that conversation, someone says the words “well, could we sponsor a visa and bring them over.”
It is worth sitting with how strange that instinct is. The role is remote. The work is remote. The team is already distributed. And the reflex is to reach for the single most expensive, slowest, least certain way of getting the work done that exists.
What sponsorship actually costs
An H-1B is not a form you fax over. In practice it means:
- a lottery, with selection odds that in recent years have sat around one in four
- legal and filing costs that commonly run five to fifteen thousand dollars per petition, before anyone writes a line of code
- a timeline measured in many months, often past a year, tied to fixed filing windows
- relocation, which uproots a person with a family and a life already built somewhere else
- and a real chance that after all of it, the number does not come up and you are back where you started
That is the expensive path. It exists, it is sometimes the right call for a genuinely irreplaceable in-person hire, and it is wildly disproportionate for a remote engineering seat.
The obvious alternative nobody reaches for first
The same engineer, doing the same work, can be engaged as an independent contractor. They invoice the company like any vendor. They pay their own tax at home. There is no lottery, no relocation, no immigration counsel, and the person is working inside two weeks instead of inside a year. The structure is boring and it is decades old. It is how companies pay every foreign supplier they already use.
So why is it the second thought instead of the first? Partly habit. But partly because a lot of people make money keeping it complicated.
Complexity is a business model
There is an entire industry whose revenue depends on cross-border hiring feeling hard. Immigration law firms bill by the petition. Staffing agencies insert themselves as the “safe” middle and take a cut of every hour worked, often twenty-five to fifty percent of the bill rate, for the life of the engagement. Managed-employment platforms charge a monthly fee per head to run what is, mechanically, a contract and a tax form.
None of those actors are villains. But none of them are incentivized to tell a CTO that the simplest version costs almost nothing and takes two weeks. The friction is the product. The confusion is the moat.
You can see the same distortion in the public arguments about layoffs and visas. Large companies cut domestic engineers in one quarter and file for imported labor in the next, and everyone argues about immigration policy, when the quieter truth is that the whole debate assumes hiring across a border has to route through a slow, expensive, gatekept system. It does not. It only has to when someone in the middle is being paid for the gate.
The honest framing
If a role genuinely requires a person physically in a US office, sponsor the visa, it is the right tool. If the role is remote, the visa lottery is a very expensive answer to a question nobody actually asked. The engineer does not need to move. The company does not need to become an expert in immigration law. Both of those costs are optional, and they are usually being paid to solve a problem that a contractor agreement already solved.
If you have a remote senior role open and you are weighing sponsorship or an agency to fill it, see how the contractor structure actually works first. It is simpler, faster, and cheaper than the path most companies reach for by reflex.