[gaadd33]

It's interesting that the bar is so high for engineers yet seemingly much lower for musicians, models and businesspeople. Perhaps the solution is to equalize that discrepancy. Or perhaps the bar is much lower in the NYC area for those 3 fields and it isn't evenly applied everywhere.

[LetBinding]

It is simply because the contribution of a musician, a model, and an athlete is more easily understood by peers in other fields. The value of a 10X engineer is not that well understood by "outsiders" and in many instances by "insiders" either.

Most folks think developers are interchangeable cogs in a machine. They don't think the same of musicians or models or athletes. This is exacerbated by the body shoppers and overseas outsources who indeed consider their developers as mere warm bodies or "resources", and who indeed abuse the H-1B visas. Startups are the losers.

The O-1 visa was introduced before the era of startups and wasn't really geared towards the use case of a startup, i.e., a good developer slogging away in a basement to make the next Google.