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Comment by ashwinaj | Hacker News Reader

> "What is the minimum wage required for a H1B software developer in California [2]? What is the actual mean pay?"

How many years of experience (0,5,10,15,20?)? What is the education level required (PhD vs bachelors/masters)? It's not as simple as "H1B software developer in California" nor are the salaries. They vary between companies (eg., Netflix pays more than Google)

In any case, here you go: http://h1bdata.info/ You can check what your H1B colleagues make based on their job title.

Edit: To x0x0, I'm not going to parse out data for each and every company, I have a day job you see :) I've worked for four companies (public and private), and I see that the wages are comparable to local workers (of those who chose to share their wages) and the established market rate by the state dept. of labor for the said job title. Somewhat anecdotal? Yes. It is definitely better than a blanket "H1B drives down wages".

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iow, you continue to assert without proof that h1b immigration doesn't constrain or reduce wages.

See my EDIT above. I am no economist to parse all this information, but in my experience and people I know the wage argument for "genuine" H1B applicants is hyperbole.

So you claim, absent any supporting data, that adding 500k skilled employees (85k times 6 years), not even including other types of visas doesn't affect labor markets? That requires either solid proof or, well, motivated reasoning.

3.6m software engineers in the US; if even half of h1b holders are devs that's a sizeable increase. Even under modest demand elasticity assumptions you can back of napkin estimate a large influence

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/indi...

Replying to x0x0:

Wait a minute, I re-read my initial statement, this is what I said:

> "I am replying to those who make claims that H1B workers are being paid below market rate, hence driving down salaries."

I mention specifically about H1B workers are not being paid below market rate. So the salaries of H1B workers is not the cause of the driving down the wages.

To your argument, will an abundant supply of labor cause the salaries to go down or stagnate? Yes.

You admit you arent an expert and you dont have time to understand the data. Yet you have already drawn a conclusion.

I am not an expert. I also do not have time to understand the data. That is why all I am comfortable saying is, my gut instinct is that H1B visa's dont drive down salaries (more than adding more workers affects salaries) but I dont know for certain.

The next best thing we can do is look in the literature for someone who has done this analysis. I like scholar.google.com.

If we dont even have time for that, I guess its just not that important and we just go through life not knowing, hopeful that the day will come when we will see a reddit link to a blog post about a behind-paywall news article summarizing an academic analysis.

C'est la vie.

The reality is that these numbers don't prove anything. If H1B visas are constraining wages (and they most certainly are), everybody's wages will be constrained. The line of reasoning is so silly that basic supply-demand argument will prove it wrong: if there are more workers, there will certainly be a downward pressure in salaries, it doesn't matter the origin of the work force. Saying otherwise is just unreasonable without proof.

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