Unpaid work at a startup is possible if you have an equity stake or some other arrangement. Plenty of startups would never exist if a couple people hadn't gotten together and worked for free (and additionally invested their own money) to bootstrap. But it doesn't sound like that applies to GP's situation.
I'm not sure what GP is doing wrong, but it sounds like they're only applying to places out of their league and/or only FAANG. The vast, vast majority of paid software job interviews don't involve ANY algorithm whiteboarding or online test-taking. That happens at a minority subset of companies, and there's a huge range of jobs in between "working for free" and FAANG that are trivial to get with any qualifications.
[0]: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...
As someone who took over a year to get a job in software after graduating C.S. from a local university, I hate this myth. I was applying absolutely everywhere. It's easy to get a job if you have some kind of name recognition, but if you've graduated with a mediocre GPA, no internship, and no "real-world" experience, it can be very, very hard.
In the time after graduating, I took online courses that taught me things actually relevant to the job postings I was seeing, applied to tons of jobs, learned git, worked on personal projects, and attempted to network through user groups and tech conferences.
Finally, 9 months after graduating from CS and loads of rejections later (I think I only got 2 or 3 interviews in that time), I was able to get an internship with someone I met at a conference who took pity on me, which paid $15/hr (and with very limited work available).
Finally, after doing this for a bit, and continuing the self-education, I was able to get another job (which paid about the same), and then another (which paid a little bit more), and finally an actual full-time job in QA/support which was salaried with benefits. The salary was still low (like $42,000), but improved quickly within the company as I put in a couple of years and proved myself.
Before looking for work in my field, I did have very good references as a waiter in several restaurants. I had a CS degree, and was able do basic programming (fizzbuzz and similar-difficulty problems were trivial). And everyone said it's so easy to get a job. But this wasn't my experience, and if I didn't have help from family I wouldn't have been able to put the time and effort in to actually learn the things I needed to find work in tech.
> The vast, vast majority of paid software job interviews don't involve ANY algorithm whiteboarding or online test-taking.
Not my experience in the least.
Good luck in your ivory tower, and piss off.
If it’s F-1 OPT or J-1 I get it.
Even a TN would put you in the same place as the H-1B.