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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.
These are all companies based in cities with astronomically high costs of living.
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.
And then there's this from TFA:
In Négri’s opinion, that could be a trick to bring in a technically skilled worker at a lower cost: “If the title says software engineer, you pay a lot” to stay in compliance with the H-1B laws that require immigrants to be paid the prevailing wage, he says. “If the title says ‘consultant’, instead of $130,000 you might pay $60,000, the gap is that big.” He pointed to a “technology lead” for Infosys in Sunnyvale, Calif., listed in the database as having a salary of $87,000. “That’s not much for Silicon Valley,” Négri says.
While it may not be minimum wage or indentured servitude, the point about wage suppression still has merit.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)