H-1B Visas Proving Lucrative For Engineers, Dev Leads

Nerval's Lobster (2598977) writes Ever wanted to know how much H-1B holders make per year? Developer Swizec Teller, who is about to apply for an H-1B visa, took data from the U.S. Department of Labor and visualized it in a series of graphs that break down H-1B salaries on a state-by-state basis. Teller found that the average engineer with an H-1B makes $87,000 a year, a good deal higher than developers ($74,000) and programmers ($61,000) with the same visa. ("Don't call yourself a programmer," he half-joked on Twitter.) Architects, consultants, managers, administrators, and leads with H-1Bs can likewise expect six-figure annual salaries, depending on the state and company. Teller's site is well worth checking out for the interactive graphs, which he built with React and D3.js. The debate over H-1Bs is an emotional one for many tech pros, and research into the visa's true impact on the U.S. labor market wasn't helped by the U.S. Department of Labor's recent decision to destroy H-1B records after five years. "These are the only publicly available records for researchers to analyze on the demand by employers for H-1B visas with detail information on work locations," Neil Ruiz, who researches visa issues for The Brookings Institution, told Computerworld after the new policy was announced in late 2014.

Comments

Re:I have an H1-B employee

[jedidiah]

No. The H1B debate is about creating an easy to exploit underclass. Even the "talented types" get abused by corporations. Corporations get a free pass to rape pillage and plunder because that's just (Ayn Rand) trendy these days.

Corporations want people that are easy to exploit. People with full legal status are harder to abuse. They also have higher expecations and higher overhead.

So Cal Edison Reduces Local Headcount w/ Tata, etc

[operator_error]

Here, let me back up your point with last week's news from the LA Times:

"Michael Hiltzik of The Los Angeles Times reports that Southern California Edison, the local electrical utility, has let go of 500 IT employees by outsourcing jobs to Tata and Infosys who are top users/abusers of the U.S. H1-B visa process; 400 So Cal employees were laid off and 100 'left voluntarily', many with decades of experience. As indicative of a trend this has now become, last year Minnesota-based agribusiness behemoth Cargill said it would outsource as many as 900 IT jobs to Tata.
 
These employees perform the crucial work of installing, maintaining and managing Edison's computer hardware and software for functions as varied as payroll and billing, dispatching and electrical load management across Edison's vast power generating and electric transmission network. The workers I interviewed are in their 50s or 60s and have spent decades serving as loyal Edison employees.
 
"They told us they could replace one of us with three, four, or five Indian personnel and still save money," one laid-off Edison worker told me, recounting a group meeting with supervisors last year. "They said, 'We can get four Indian guys for cheaper than the price of you.' You could hear a pin drop in the room."
 
They're not the sort of uniquely creative engineering aces that high-tech companies say they need H-1B visas to hire from abroad, or foreign students with master's degrees or doctorates from U.S. universities who also can be employed under the H-1B program. They're experienced systems analysts and technicians for whom these jobs have been stairways from the working class to five- or six-figure middle-class incomes. Many got their training at technical institutes or from Edison itself.
 
This worker and the half-dozen others I interviewed asked to remain anonymous because their severance packages forbid them to speak disparagingly about the company."

Re:H-1B Visas Proving Awful For Americans

[Anonymous Coward]

Me and my friends all have either H1-B or TN visas, we all have six figure incomes. The H1-B workers who have a low salary have it because they don't have the motivation to improve or the skills to stand out, the same as people who are not using a work visa.

I've switched jobs 3 times, and it really is no problem with the visa, in my case I just fill out a 'change of employer' form and that is it, I don't even need to leave the country.