In September 1999 I flew to Los Angeles on a tourist visa and never left. I spent the first week at my uncle’s house in Bell Canyon and the rest of the year carrying other people’s furniture around Los Angeles, until I got my first software job in this country.
I came because I wanted to race motorcycles. Israel didn’t have a single racetrack, and racing there was illegal. It stayed that way long after I left. The Knesset didn’t legalize motorsport until December 2005, and writing the regulations took years more. Until they existed, merely owning a racing vehicle in Israel was against the law, and the police were technically obliged to seize any they found.
So I picked up the phone and called my uncle, a distant relative in California, and asked if I could stay at his place for a while until I figured out my next move. He said yes.
Nobody Sponsors a Cold Call
My uncle was a partner at an accounting firm called Provident Financial Management, at 10355 West Olympic Boulevard in Century City. That first week I rode in to the office with him, grabbed a copy of the Los Angeles Times classifieds, and dialed every ad I could find.
There was no shortage of ads. American newspapers took in $19.6 billion from classified advertising in 2000, and help-wanted was 44 percent of it. Nobody wanted to sponsor an alien for an H-1B, though, especially one who’d picked up the phone out of the blue and called them. Sponsoring one meant filings with both the Labor Department and the INS, and since December 1, 1998, it also meant paying the INS $610 per petition, $500 of it a surcharge Congress had just added.
The calendar didn’t help. New H-1Bs were capped at 115,000 a year. In June 1999 the INS announced that the cap would be reached on June 15, three months before I landed, and the next 115,000 didn’t open up until October 1. On March 21, 2000, the INS stopped taking petitions because those were spoken for too, and from then on nobody newly sponsored could start work before October 1, 2000. The Nasdaq had peaked eleven days earlier.
Employers wanted foreign tech workers badly enough to file for a full year’s supply of visas in under six months. None of that demand reached a stranger calling cold from somebody else’s office.
The Moving Company Said Come Over
A week went by, and my uncle dropped me off in Northridge at the house of his partner’s brother, Bob. If you keep up with this Substack, you probably know who Bob was. Bob Glass was a card counter who’d been barred from every casino, and he rented me a room with a couch and a desk.
That’s when I started calling any ad I could find, software or not. US1 Moving and Storage on San Fernando Road was the only company that said yes. “Yes, we can hire you,” they said. “Come over.”
I got a crappy little 1988 Nissan Sentra for $500, insured it on my international driver’s license, and drove over. It was probably that cheap because it was a stick shift with no starter, so I push-started it everywhere. I got so good at it that I could push-start it backwards without leaving the driver’s seat, just by sending one leg out the door.
US1 paid me $8 an hour, in cash, and only while we were moving. Driving out to the job and back didn’t count. The customer paid for that drive anyway, because drive time on the bill was always double. California’s moving tariff has charged hourly customers double the driving time between the two addresses since at least 1975, when the Public Utilities Commission explained that the extra was there to pay for getting the van and the carrier’s employees from the terminal to the job. I was one of the carrier’s employees.
The owner’s brother, Udi Cohen, was one of the dispatchers, and back in Israel he was a movie star. He’d played the lead in Koko Is 19, a 1985 film about a rocker from working-class Jerusalem who watches another band turn his song into a hit and gets nothing for it. The movie was a huge hit itself, and for a while there was graffiti about it all over Israel. Udi had come to Los Angeles to hide from his success. He still played guitar in small clubs all over town, mostly Jimi Hendrix, and we all went to see him at a bar on Reseda Boulevard at Oxnard Street. He was great.
I spent the next year as a mover, looking for a software job the whole time. I moved people all over Los Angeles, celebrities included. That year gave me a lot of stories.
Jesus Paid My Rent
One time we got called to an apartment in Hollywood because the man there needed help putting together an entertainment center. When we were done, he went into the other room and came back with a huge stack of cash and a gun.
He told me he was Jesus. Then he asked how much my rent was.
I told him $500.
He gave me $600, thanked me, and sent me on my way.
Thank you, Jesus, for paying my rent.
I Sold the Sentra
Tourists are usually admitted for six months. I got an extension for six more, and when my year was up I sold the Sentra and got ready to go back to Israel.
Then I met Jerry Kaner at Gold’s Gym in Northridge. He was Israeli too, Yair back home, and he owned a company in Chatsworth called Logicube that was just getting started. These days he owns Ciphertex, a Chatsworth company that builds encrypted storage systems. Back then, the man in the office unit next to Logicube ran a software consulting firm, and Jerry said he’d see if he could get me in.
That man turned out to be Jason Stavitsky. Regular readers already know he paid me $20 a day in cash, and that I couldn’t afford a computer on it, so I used Bob’s. California’s minimum wage at the time was $5.75 an hour.
It was a pretty good deal for Jason. Jerry used his connections to let Jason place two developers at Deloitte & Touche in Warner Center, and in exchange, Jason hired me. He came out of it with two developers inside a Big Five accounting firm and one more at $20 a day, writing the ASP behind usetheexperts.com, a directory that connected people with local businesses.
That’s how I got my first software job in the United States.
I Just Smile
Every time I hear a student complain that they got out of school and had to apply to 500 jobs to get an interview, I just smile.
I’m not going to pretend the market they’re graduating into is good. I wrote a whole piece in May about how the job boards make it look better than it is. The New York Fed has unemployment for recent college graduates at about 5.6 percent, and 42 percent of the ones who are working hold jobs that don’t require a degree. The New York Times reported last year that LinkedIn was taking in 11,000 applications a minute, a 45 percent jump from the year before, with generative AI helping push the number up.
But most of those 500 applications went out from someone with a degree, a résumé, and the legal right to take the job if they got it. I was looking for work at the top of the dot-com boom, and it made no difference. I had a phone and a tourist visa. The job I finally got came through Jerry, a guy I’d met at the gym, and a side deal that put two of Jason’s developers inside Deloitte. It paid $20 a day. At US1 that was two and a half hours of carrying furniture.
You have no idea, son. No idea.
About the Author
Gal Ratner came to Los Angeles from Israel in 1999 wanting to race motorcycles, and his first American job was on a moving truck. He has spent nearly thirty years building and shipping production software on the Microsoft and .NET stack, for clients including Microsoft, Sony, Rockstar Games, 2K Games, Best Buy, and Allegiant Air. He is Chief Architect at Prana Entertainment, a Las Vegas enterprise software and AI consultancy, and the founder and CTO of Inverted Software and WhiteStar Labs. He was the sixth employee at Break.com during its run as one of the largest entertainment sites on the web, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Business Journal’s CTO of the Year.
His current work is agentic AI in production: MCP servers, the Microsoft Agent Framework, SQL Server 2025 vector search, and the open-source diagnostics tooling behind PLogger. An Israeli-American and IDF veteran, he co-hosts Edge Grip Podcast, a motorcycle podcast, and is the author of the novel The Archive of Lost Suns.
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