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Did Gates Fib About H1-B Salaries?
netbuzz writes "While in Washington last year lobbying for higher H1-B visa limits, Bill Gates told David Broder of the Washington Post that Microsoft starts such workers at about $100,000. An analysis by one offshoring critic suggests that's not true. If his analysis is correct, it would undermine part of the case for lifting H1-B ceilings.
Are you telling me that Bill Gates lied to the population about their situation? And we gobbled it up?
... politician?
Bill Gates: computer scientist, marketer, business man, philanthropist
Who would have thought the term Renaissance Man could have such negative connotations?
Wouldn't it be easier for microsft to move to India than to move India here?
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Face facts: To Bill Gates, 10K a year IS pretty close to 100K. Sheerest poverty.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Of course Bill wants to import workers so he can pay them the same money he'd have to pay native-born workers. Duh!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
He meets politicians and tells them whatever his acolytes ask him to tell them. He would go to India and tell exactly the opposite story. Go look at Indian websites oooohing aaahhing his compliments and how much he is going to invest in India and how important R&D done in India is to Microsoft.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What's not said in the article is that market rates change. Typically market rates go up (and I'd argue that they are up quite a bit right now). The greencard application process takes some time, and rates likely change in that time. If the greencard takes 2 years to apply for, and it's in process, then those H1-Bs don't want to change jobs and restart the application process. These aren't typical highly-mobile employees: they don't want to change jobs because the application process starts all over again. So, salaries of H1-B employees are likely to be considerably lower than current market rates.
From another perspective, Gates is saying that current market rates are ~100k. This is about right for mid-level software engineers with 2-4 years of experience, in that area.
It's not the same as looking at H1-B applications and trying to figure current rates, as they will reflect market conditions from 1-4 years ago (depending on when the H1-B process started for that individual).
Business Week is running a story about how the H1-B visa is ACTUALLY being used, and it seems it is used much more often than not to act as a conduit to offshore outsourcing, ie get the Indians or whoever over to the US, train them at a crappy salary(comparatively) and then send them home. While some firms certainly are using the visas to get foreign talent to the US, they are being crowded out by body dumpers. One suggestion proffered by the article is to only let US companies get H1Bs.
Monstar L
Also, TFA cites green card applications, not green card grants.
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I know it's completely against the bizarro-world mentality you folks have to even consider this, but wasn't the original quote related by a third party? I know...crazy.
When I first read that, I was as outraged as the rest of you, but if you think about it from his perpective, he's probably right.
When he says $100K, he's probably thinking salary+ health care + 401K + taxes. When you add that up on an average individual employee, you get to $100K pretty easily.
The difference is that when we read $100K, we assume salary only. I know lots of people working at MSFT, none of whom are making that much even after 5+ years there. Unless they are paying their H1-B's more, he's either thinking in terms of total compensation package or...he's just plain lying.
Honestly though, he may not actually know -- why would he care about an operational detail like that at this point in his career?
Bill Gates told David Broder of the Washington Post that Microsoft starts such workers at about $100,000
/year. The agency then takes 60% of this as commission, and the H1-B applicant gets the remaining $40,000.
The supply agency charges a company like Microsoft an hourly rate equivalent of $100,000
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So, as hard as it might be for some of you to stomach, Gates is telling the truth. These are not Janitors Microsoft is hiring, but highly trained, highly sought after individuals, regardless of country of origin.
Deal with it.
Those MCSE commercials I hear all the time...
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
It must depend on your definition of the word "about". Is $70 about $100? Is $70k about $100k?
I am not defending Bill Gates, that's just wrong...ewwwww. But, did he state that ALL H-1B's start at about $100k? If some start in a $90k - $100k range, some start in the $80k to $90k range, and the rest are below $80k is it a lie to say they start at about $100k? I dunno. I'm back to, "It depends on your definition of 'about'."
Bill Gates responded by saying, "I always tell the truth... even when I lie."
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To Bill Gates' point - H1B's that get hired by U.S. companies are required to pay the prevailing wage for the profession the H1B is being hired in, for the region they reside in. I immigrated into the U.S. via the H1B route (I'm a citizen now and I also did my undergraduate in CS here), and have been able to verify that the prevailing wage was indeed paid to me while I was an H1B.
;) (for now).
There is also another law that states that no more than 15% of your workforce can be H1-B based. This law is meant to protect U.S. citizens from being displaced by H1-B's and to assure that only really critical roles can be filled with H1-B workers. No one is going to hire an HR person on an H-1B (well unless they are super critical in an HR-kind of way to the company).
Another noteworthy thing to mention is, prevailing wage != FMV (fair market value) wage, at least in my experience. This difference between the two may amount to _some_ savings, but I doubt it is as significant as, let's say, hiring a foreign Indian worker in India at 1/2 or less the salary.
Speaking of hiring offshore - this may or may not prove to be a value added proposition - if you have some seriously senior, super-technical project managers who can divvy up a project into many well-defined/well-bounded specific tasks (e.g. write code for login/logout procedures for a webapp based on Tomcat, using JAAS as the authentication/mechanism, task #2, integrate JAAS with Active Directory on Windows Server, etc.), delegating these tasks to off-shore people, it could work. But this only works in a mature environment like Microsoft probably. It could work in smaller companies too, but it's much riskier, and it could inhibit the company's growth.
Offshoring is overrated. Hiring local, U.S. talent as well as H1B is much better value. Well, that's my opinion anyway, and I'm sticking to it
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
Started with a major software company out of college, five months ago. Salary: $95000. No, I'm not a genius, and no I'm not an exception. Five CS people (out of 10) in my graudating class were hired at the same rate by comparable companies. And before you ask, the other five aren't unemployed: they're in grad school. Not because they couldn't find anything else, but because they wanted to go.
My advice to unemployed US programmers: quit whining. If you aren't getting these jobs, you aren't qualified for them. Get your qualifications, get the experience, and compete with the best. It's what I had to do, and after watching the H1-B flamewar for the last five years, I still don't see why Americans think the global economy-- yes, it's global, accept it-- should go any easier on them than anyone else.
I'm a fresh university graduate working for a Seattle area software development company on a TN visa. My salary +signing bonus+stock options doesn't get me to $100k but it's close enough that I believe Gates. Considering that Microsoft is bringing in people with several years experience (and therefore paid more) under their belts that number could easily get to $100k.
Oh, a lesson in history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa.
I and other H-1B's get paid exactly the same, if not better, than my American citizen counterparts.
While the base salary isn't breaking $100k a lot of the time, Microsoft gives everyone (H-1B or otherwise) a bucketload of benefits that would easily push the cost to MS well over $100k.
Add into the mix the fact that Microsoft has to pay shiteloads of money for legal services, filing fees, premium processing, etc. just to keep us in the country, and you realize that it costs MS a decent amount more to keep H-1Bs in the country. Plus, the stupid Americans like to randomly tear up your visas from time to time if you come from a "suspicious" country, and let me tell you, those are expensive battles.
And here's how this works, folks. They go to Eastern Europe and elsewhere and hire cream of the crop to entry level positions. You see, Microsoft has a system of "levels" according to which salaries and benefits are allocated. Typical starting level is 59. You can hire an average US college grad to that level (good ones go to Google these days), or you can go to, say, Moscow and hire a highly qualified, top notch software engineer with a few years of experience who has no opportunity to interview with Google first and whose negotiation skills equate to those of a squirrel. Who would you rather hire for your $70K? And you can keep L59 foreigner at 59 for much longer than a native, because his H1B process will only _start_ a year after he begins his employment and will take a few years (6 years and counting for some folks), during which moves are risky.
Now the thing is, both US college grad and experienced H1-B will be at the same starting level and will be paid the same wage. This DOES NOT mean they'll be doing the same job. There's a shortage of experienced folks, so the guy with experience will be doing things that require experience, when college grad will be doing something else. H1-B is therefore paid below the market wage for what he's doing (but not for his level). This, coupled with slower promotion rate puts him at a huge disadvantage. Given that promotion velocity is capped no matter how hard you bust your ass, you may never reach higher levels because you started lower and were promoted slower.
This is fully within the constraints of law, and not everyone ends up like this. I was in this situation and so were many of my H1-B coworkers.
As a hiring manager/Software Engineer, I can find plenty of coders. I can even get them cheap (less than $15/hour in India and less then $20/hour in Argentina). However I can't find a good Engineer. I typically have to work the social networks to find someone who knows someone good to steal from another company.
Have you tried offering 4-year scholarships to the winners of high science fairs? Seems to me that would be a heck of a lot more reliable than social networks, where other managers lie to you to offload their deadwood.
I've met plenty of folks that can code an algorithm when given one, but couldn't for the life of them come up with the algorithm on their own. Abstract things like design and problem decomposition require people that can think abstractly. That is a talent. Even if you got the talent, you have to want to use it.
Funny- I wasn't hired out of college by Microsoft for exactly that talent. The interviewer told me to code Mod 2 in assembly, and expected the textbook answer of Logical Shift Right- a single instruction. I coded Mod N using an algorithim I made up in the 8th grade- with an additional instruction moving 2 into a register for N- and failed the interview because I didn't use the textbook algorithm. I failed the interview, naturally- but certainly demonstrated that exact talent and a willingness to use it.
You can't teach talent or desire.
But far more people have that talent, AND the desire, than you seem to be giving credit for.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Well, to me the interesting thing about Bill Gates is how pathetic his goals seem to be; or how limited the execution is compared to his apparent resources and abilities.
If I had Bill's money, I'd be funding a mission to Mars, building supercolliders, or something like that that would actually go down in history. Bill, on the other hand... he built himself a big house, lent money to people, and then gave the interest they paid back to charity; plus he made a few tiny (1% of net worth scale) donations himself.
Meanwhile Paul Allen is financing Burt Rutan's spaceflights; and Ted Turner has set up over a dozen "ranch" nature preserves with an area larger than the two smallest states put together, and created the Goodwill Games. Bill's sending checks to AIDS researchers seems very pedestrian and uninspired by comparison.
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No. You wasn't hired by Microsoft because the guy that interviewed you should not have been interviewing you.
.com crash.
It's who they sent to campus- from that moment on I have not believed that Microsoft wants people who can make up their own algorithims.
Where are all of these talented people then?
The majority of them retrained to drive trucks after being evicted out of their homes in the
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.