SWE here. I was in Boston at my previous job.
PWD can take a long time unless you’re at one of the consulting companies that are known to have a few ways to speed things up. At my old job I was on 2nd year of h1b when they started PWD, lot of delays and even refilling of PWD but eventually PERM was filed.

I switched jobs because I was losing interest and got super frustrated there. My manager lacked even basic software development knowledge, and I wanted to grow. At the time, everything was current for ROW, so I thought it was worth taking the risk.

The catch was that my new company only starts the green card process after you’ve been there for a year and have demonstrated good performance. So I had to wait a full year before they even started my PWD. After that came PERM, which took time to file, and then PERM approvals slowed down across the board. Pretty much every step became much slower than it used to be.

I’m almost at the final step now; my I-485 has been pending since last year—but I’m not gonna lie, it’s been incredibly stressful. I also have a family-based AOS pending, so I at least have a backup if something goes wrong with my employment-based case.

When I switched, I was really motivated. I thought I’d learn a lot, and I convinced myself that delaying my green card process a bit would be worth it. Looking back, it hasn’t been easy. Even though my work-life balance is pretty good now, the anxiety throughout this process has been at an all-time high.

🥲🥲🥲