Slashdot Mirror
A Tool For Analyzing H-1B Visa Applications Reveals Tech Salary Secrets
Tekla Perry writes: The golden age of engineers is not over,' says a French software engineer who developed a tool for mining U.S. Department of Labor visa application data, but, he says, salaries appear to be leveling off. Indeed, salary inflation for software engineers and other technical professionals at Google and Facebook has slowed dramatically, according to his database, and Airbnb and Dropbox pay is down a little, though Netflix pay is through the roof. The data also shows that some large companies appear to be playing games with titles to deflate salaries, and Microsoft is finally offering technology professionals comparable salaries to Apple and Google. There's a lot more to be discovered in this interactive database, and researchers are getting ready to mine it.
Looks like there are a lot of highly skilled and highly paid people in the companies I looked... the opposite of the Slashdot narrative of indentured servants working on minimum wage.
These are all companies based in cities with astronomically high costs of living.
You can clearly see the way the companies are manipulating the system. Don't hire them as 'engineers', but as 'technology leads' then make up a low salary for them. No, the salary is not minimum wage as posted above, but it is half of what you would have to pay a standard software engineer, and you have their loyalty as it is a hassle to switch jobs. Yes, some companies appear to be above board, but is Google really only paying their software developers 123,000 in Silicon Valley? That seems low for that place. And yes, these salaries look big until you consider where they are. They are pulling salaries from the biggest companies in the most expensive places. Anyone looked into the data yet and see what the consulting sweat shops are paying/claiming? Again, tax the heck out of H1Bs and if there really aren't any engineers available in the US these companies will be happy to pay the penalty. Or better yet, untie H1Bs from a company, make it a 2 year visa, and let them go wherever they want. My guess is the companies will not be so hot on using H1B labor at that point.
They pay the new guys double what the founders are getting.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I know something about H-1B wages. Follow this federal prevailing wage link (http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesWizardStart.aspx) and you'll see that they are geographically-specific, and every H-1B wage comes in 4 levels, from entry-level to highly skilled. H-1B employers have to pay at least as much as shown in this federal prevailing wage database and possibly more, if they ordinarily pay people with the same duties in the same location higher than the minimums shown at the above link. BTW, that website can be useful when negotiating your own salary.
Like it or not, programming can be done anywhere. That puts you into competition with the whole world, whether you want to be or not. Very few software jobs can't be shipped to China or India if that makes more economic sense.
You aren't special, and it isn't anyone else's job to ensure that your business model succeeds. That's usually the slashdot groupthink when it applies to OTHER industries like truckers being put out of jobs by automation. "If their business model isn't working, find a new one" - repeated endlessly on here. Well, guess what, you can't have it both ways. If your job can be done cheaper or automated away, it will be. If your business model isn't working, find a new one.
The article infers a major drop year-over-year on average IBM salaries. A quick look through the data shows one anomalous entry which skews the lot:
Senior Software Engineer $7,278,870,000
I suppose, it might be real.... but I don't think IBM would pay a SW Engineer 7.2 Billion
There's a simple solution to the H1B problem. Add an additional 50% employement tax on H1B's. That will grossly level the playing field, by increasing the costs of an H1B, but still making it accessible to those companies that can't find US talent.
The suppression in wages is not about "one year only" it is about lifetime wages. They aren't going to quit today.
That generation of girl-coders, they are being staged to make half of what their counterparts make today. Tell her, you are "too late" so you get 58% less, welcome to your future, or just fix the "wage war against employees" mindset that google, IBM, and facebook have.
Code.org is not benevolent, it is about money. Isn't everything?
The averages reported for Microsoft, Google, and Apple ($121k, $124k, and $123k, respectively) seem to be more or less in line with what folks at my Westchester County, NY based company are making (arguably as expensive a place to live as those famous West Coast places). I do agree with the assessment that the H1B folks are treated like indentured servants, the management knows they can't easily move to another company and dangles the Greencard like an almost unobtainable carrot, even when the Greencard is company sponsored. This also affects things like workload and yearly salary increases adversely, I've seen it happen firsthand.
How do the wages grow over time? Is it $121k + $12k/year or $121k + 1.2k/year? What do those different values say about lifetime earning potential of the h1b "indentured servant" versus the typically employed citizen engineer?
Looking up my company, and checking this year's data for my particular site, I think I now know how much a few of my co-workers are getting paid (H1B pool at my office is pretty small...). I wasn't even really looking for this info, just curious what was on this website. Feel sort of weird now...
Hey Guys, I built this tool.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask!
Pretty much anything can be done globally, including management, but we don't see that so much do we?
Beyond that, there are some things that you don't intelligently outsource, such as things dealing with breakthrough technologies, military secrets, medical/financial systems, etc. Why, because foreign countries don't necessarily follow the same laws and domestic, and even if they do ... good luck putting the genie back in the bottle when they've leaked out and the worked is out-of-country. At least domestically if you catch somebody spying etc you can charge them and/or lock them up.
"I do agree with the assessment that the H1B folks are treated like indentured servants, the management knows they can't easily move to another company and dangles the Greencard like an almost unobtainable carrot, even when the Greencard is company sponsored. This also affects things like workload and yearly salary increases adversely, I've seen it happen firsthand."
I've seen foreign workers come in at 11 AM and leave at 4 PM to counter balance the... injustice?
Netflix numbers don't tell it all. The big difference is justified by the fact that the pay includes bonuses/stocks and all their jobs are in the Bay Area where cost of living is way above avg. A Goog/MS Senior Engineer making 150-160K + bonus + stock will end up with a similar total compensation package.
True, Netflix base pay is pretty much your entire compensation. However, you do get an additional $15k stipend for health insurance costs, $5k of which you can keep if you don't spend. As well, as of this year, they offer 5% of your compensation as "free" options granted once per month at current market value. They definitely bumped salaries a lot last year; I already felt I was very well compensated, and my pay was bumped up 16%. I guess it really comes down to how much they want to keep you. Rather than dealing with people getting better offers elsewhere and having to counter if they can, they just ensure they're paying you so much you won't consider leaving unless you're taking the ballsy move of hitting a startup.
I've seen domestic workers sleeping at their desks, what's your point? Any group you chose will have outliers (bell curve and all that). Are you suggesting there's systemic slacking off among the H1B crowd?
Closer to $1.2k/year, but that's also true of the domestic workers. I think you have to negotiate a salary well when you start a job, otherwise you're at the company's mercy once you join in terms of salary increase. Over the course of a few years, you either have to demonstrate capacity to be promoted, or at least function at a level well above your peers to get decent increases, in my experience.