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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this analysis is that it doesn’t adjust for h1b etc which tend to be lower-paid while being overwhelmingly male:

https://cis.org/North/H4s-Data-Shows-MirrorLike-Strong-Biase...

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Google doesn't pay h1b workers less. The salaries on h1bdata[1] are minimums for the position, and aren't any lower than other employee salaries.

[1]: https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=GOOGLE+INC&job=SOFTWARE+EN...

You're just saying that the h1b minimum is the same as the domestic minimum. I'd be interested in seeing how actual salaries are actually being paid out. h1b is supposed to only be used when no domestic workers can be found; many tech companies are using it to increase the pool of available workers at a given price point.

No, I'm saying that the h1b numbers are minimums for the person.

The ranges show that they're often higher than the minimum for the role.

Why would it adjust for that? It's ok to pay H1Bs less? H1B isn't supposed to be cheap labor even though it is often abused.

"Isn't supposed to be," but...

https://cis.org/Miano/How-Employers-Game-H1B-Cheap-Labor

Well of course it's abused but I would argue that if H1Bs are paid less, they should raise the rates of H1Bs and discourage their use as cheap labor. We shouldn't be adjusting for it in the data here.

H1Bs at Google do not get paid less.

Google doesn't have an "h1b salary", true. My position is that h1b's tend to lean towards the lower end of a published range for a role, creating a salary marketplace that benefits the employer (which is an abuse of the h1b system; it's to be used to fill roles where domestic talent isn't available, not where it's too expensive)

You have no proof, just your own biases. You WANT to believe this is the case, but it's not true at Google.

Aren't we both doing the same thing, only coming from different ideological perspectives?

I'd love you to prove me wrong. If Google has domestic talent available at $150k, and can pay $110k to an h1b, they are supposed to hire the domestic talent. That's how the system works (or rather, it does if a company doesn't abuse it). I'd love to find out they are instead having to pay the h1b $175k because no domestic talent is available. If Google is doing this, and is the statistical anomaly, then good on them. However, all the evidence I've seen (anecdotally and in writing) suggest otherwise (though at an industry-wide level, not at the Google level)

I know many, many H1Bs around Silicon Valley. Many are making more than me, a "domestic talent". My base salary is over 200k/year. I know one making $300k base at one company and $600k base salary at another. I know many others that are making the same as me, and the only ones that make less are the less talented ones which is right.

Seems like you're conflating Google with other companies. Even if the aggregate data says underpaying does happen on average across the H1-B program, it doesn't necessarily mean Google underpays their H1-B employees.

You can't just use a statistical average to make a conclusion about only one of the data points. That's stats 101.

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