H1B Visa Salary Database | Hacker News Reader

H1B Visa Salary Database

h1bdata.info

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Two things seem worth mentioning:

1. The usual suspects that petition Congress for more H1-B visas seem to be paying their employees at or above market.

2. Several Indian IT body shops are spamming the process, vastly reducing the effective slots available for the group above. Infosys, for example filed several applications for "Systems Engineers", whatever that means, in San Francisco, paying 74k$[1]

Searching by title, Infosys seems to be the only company hiring people for the role, I wonder prevailing wage determination works in these cases :-) [2]

[1] http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=INFOSYS+LIMITED&job=SYSTEMS...

[2] http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=SYSTEMS+ENGINEER+-+US&...

FWIW, Systems Engineer is the designation for entry level engineers at Infosys. Since it's a service company with engineers working on all sorts of techs it doesn't really make sense calling those positions Java Dev or Web Dev or whatever.

On point 1 - you have to pay at or above market or you don't get the H1B. So part of the game that companies play is defining the role properly to overpay the title but underpay the experience you are getting. (And defining the job description in a way that is tough to find locally) There was a time on Wall Street that you could identify the false postings based on where the resumes were to be sent.

Interesting after looking at prior employers.

Two comments:

1 - It's only base salaries. No equity and bonus are included.

2 - People work the job titles to justify comp. (Moving up, or down) And the title for the government doesn't always match the one used by the employee or company. So it's tough to infer too much for one or two data points.

This is an amazing source of salary information. This must be a great when job hunting (especially as H1B) to see what ranges companies you apply to hire at.

Or to compare salaries with those one works with. I just found out how much my colleague makes.

Is it significantly less than you? In other words does it really justify shipping someone from across the world and going through the admin cost? I wonder if H1B worker is indeed cheaper, when is the break even point to justify the extra admin? Is it 12 months, 18 months? Is he still there after that period? If not, then obviously there's no point.

I was under the initial impression he made more than me, based on the amount of money he spent on house/cars/furnishings when arriving in this country. In my opinion, he should be making quite a bit less. I have significantly more skill and reputation in the field where we work. I'm also the project lead. In reality, he's only slightly lower paid than I am (<5% difference).

I've personally used it while job hunting to help negotiating salary. In some companies/industries you can almost narrow down the title + visa to one or two people.

This is amazing, from the businesses I've worked with, it's about what I expected. What I'm wondering is if these salaries are what those of us who don't need a visa should be expecting? I'm paid in line with these salaries and seems pretty bog standard. As a result, they certainly aren't getting much of a discount.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. If me being paid the same as H1B visa employees is not right, I'll probably get in gear to find another place to work soon. If I am right and these are accurate for native and H1B's, then there's probably at least a 5-10K premium increase for citizens. Maybe more.

Nope... that's the law. You being paid the same as the H1B is absolutely in alignment with it. The USCIS won't grant an approval if the H1B is paid below market rate...

But there is a trick, they can make a senior employee(who desperately want h1b visa) accept lower pay with a junior title.

Yeah - there's folks who game the system. Have you seen it happen often though? The one thing I've had against the h1b is that its tied to the employer. If they free it from the employer then there will be much less incentive to do something like that.

This is not true at all, there is a well-defined H1-B transfer process that I've used myself. Your new employer petitions USCIS for a transfer (similar to filing a new petition, but cheaper), and you can switch jobs once it's approved.

The problem for people in my position is there is no legally available downtime. If you get fired, or quit so you can search for a new job, you no longer have a right to remain in the US. There is no way to fix this without entirely redefining what the visa is supposed to be for: a particular employer being unable to find local employees to fill a position.

don't you have 30 days to find another job?

The most stressful 30 days of your life, where you have find the new job, pass the interviews, negotiate for H1B, and make sure the new employer files the paperwork.

Doable, but extremely hard and you have to be lucky.

Legally that is a gray area. You are supposed to leave the country if you are unemployed. But USCIS usually ignores it if you file for a visa transfer in less than month from losing your job. (Alternative is that you have to leave US and get a new visa stamped and return)

That's what I was leaning towards. If the meaning of the visa changes so that people can move freely the scope for abuse is very limited.

One thing you should remember, is that if Infosys and the like are paying $74K to a person, they are charging about 1.5-2x that from the client.

50-100% markup in corporate consulting is a steal. 200-250% of salary is routinely charged, sometimes much more.

But, of course, salaries are only part of the expenses. Sales and marketing, operations, IT, management, HR — all of it costs money.

I'm definitely aware of that, I produce 6X the value of my salary yearly for my current company. I'm fairly low paid though and need to make my next move.

$5-$10k is about the amount of money employer spends for H1B paperwork processing, so that's about right.

"Cheap H1B temporary workers" is mostly a myth. The system is designed that more or less equal salaries are paid regardless of where the worker comes from, and this is a right thing.

There's also Green Card PERM Salary data available on sites like http://visadoor.com.

H1B's typically have less years of experience compared to Green Card applications, even through both their titles might say Senior Software Engineer for example. If you are researching salaries, I would definitely look into PERM Salaries as well.

Glassdoor groups all the salaries reported for a title over the years in one bucket. Hence, I find the PERM and Labor data very helpful because you can see how salaries have changed over years.

Eg. http://visadoor.com/companies/facebook-inc

http://visadoor.com/h1b/index?company=Facebook%2C+Inc.&year=...

http://visadoor.com/greencards/index?company=Facebook%2C+Inc...

Nice, but the data needs cleanup / clustering (all the variants on "NEW YORK CITY", "NEW YORK, NY" etc).

I wonder if a bulk data download is available. Some NLP and data analysis could produce some incredible results here.

Where is it coming from?

https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm on the Disclosure Data tab.

Serious question: how would one go about doing that? Any pointers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_linkage

There are no rules or regulations to issuing a labor clearance for a h1. I know many cases where the companies used the lowest possible salary and it job description that has nothing to do with the actual job itself. But the labor office has no way to know that and enforce. I don't know how that can be fixed.

Here's how: Auction the visas with a high reserve. That way the R&D slots that pay above market get nicked for a bit extra, that the employers will find a little inconvenient but nothing compared to the product not getting done. But for an outsourcing shop that wants a seatwarmer at the lowest price possible, a competitive aution is 90% unsupportable. They won't be able to tolerate negative margins for a year or two.

This is actually somewhat misleading, because it's listing labor certification data; not actually granted visas. Given the H1B lottery that means it contains a lot of certifications for jobs that could never be filled.

At least it means an employer had tried to apply a visa for its employee. Those salary numbers still useful.

An analysis of game industry H-1B data: https://orcahq.com/blog/game-industry-salary-explorer

And a tool to instantly search and view salary distributions: https://orcahq.com/salaries

These are the lower bounds. The actual salaries can actually be higher.

How I wish I had this information during my job hunt! Knowing what the employer (who picked you for interview) plans to pay you up front is an important bargaining advantage.

I keep coming back to this site. I'm seriously going to use this in a salary negotiation if someone ever tries to lowball me again.

IBM: http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=IBM*&job=&city=&year=All

Facebook http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Facebook

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