2016 H1B Visa Reports: Top 100 H1B Visa Sponsors | Hacker News Reader

2016 H1B Visa Reports: Top 100 H1B Visa Sponsors

myvisajobs.com

74 pointsbing_dai49 comments

     1	Infosys	                        33,289	$79,201
     2	Tata Consultancy Services	16,553	$69,648

If this is really a lottery, how the hell do they end up with this many?

Is the lottery random per applicant and they just submit 100s of 1000s of applications?

Basically. Plus the limits per company to be considered h-1b dependent are AFAIK are on accepted visas, not visa applications. Not that that's a deterrent - I think these companies already are, so they must be paying the fees anyway. Plus I think a big chunk of the fees get refunded when an application is not accepted. So really there is no incentive to not apply as much as you can.

It would be so much fairer if they had a limit on the number of applications a company can file. They have such a limit on the number of greencards each country gets. Let the lottery happen at the company level and not in the common pool.

You know, this is like a game. If you limit applications by a company, they will apply through a subsidiary managed by a private holding company whose owners are not known.

More paperwork, but they will get around the system...

I don't think a company like Infosys will do that. They are a big company and it will be equally painful for them with all the paperwork. Smaller companies may do that, but they are not the ones taking up a chunk of the visas anyway.

This number reflects total number of LCAs, not visas. A single visa holder could have had multiple LCAs filed within an year. A visa holder from previous years' lottery could have had a new LCA filed this year. This number, at best reflects how many job positions were filled by a company within an year using H1b holders from various years' lottery. An H1b holder could have changed job locations/clients and would be counted twice.

e: VISA to visa

"The salary is the average salary of all proffered salary on LCA or Form 9035. Sometimes the visa sponsors(employers) does not enter a specific salary, but a salary range. Our algorithm uses the middle point of the range to calculate the average salary."

Yeah, I'm not quite buying that as a good methodology.

I agree, especially since there is no guarantee that the employees are being paid more than the lower bound.

If I read it correctly, you could have 50 H1Bs at $50K and pay one at $200K, put a salary range down with it being truthful, and this survey would put the salary at $125K. I wonder if a FOIA request is possible?

Says quite a lot when 8 of the top 10 are body shops (with many debates about IBM being possible these days).

Get your math right, 50 H1B's at 50K and 1 H1B at 200K would avg out close to 53K and not 125K.

Read the disclaimer which says "Sometimes the visa sponsors(employers) does not enter a specific salary, but a salary range. Our algorithm uses the middle point of the range to calculate the average salary"

In my example, the form has 50K as the bottom of the range and 200K at the top. Using this site's methodology they take the "middle point of the range" which is 125K.

What your calculating is the example's actual average, not what the site would be reporting. That was the point of my post to show that the methodology likely does not match the truth and likely overestimates the salary.

If the range is $50k - $200k, this survey methodology would put it at the middle -- $125k.

FOIA request won't help since this is exactly the same data as USCIS gets from the company applying for H1B.

Not sure this is true - the LCA should have the range, and that's done en masse, but the actual visa application should have the individual salary for that worker AFAIK.

33K for a single company ?

We want to benefit from ideas from talented architects, doctors, scientists or engineers that contribute a diverse set of approaches to solve our problems.

As it is now, we are only bringing IT professionals from a handful of countries. It is just a source of cheap skilled labor with little synergic value.

As someone who got "rejected" in the H1B random lottery - yes, the system needs an overhaul. Perhaps an auction system would be appropriate, where companies bid on visas, then top N bidders get visas from the pool, paying the lowest winning price. This would also work well with the idea that companies should first seek talent within the United States. The auction final quote would be a clear, publicly available portion of the costs of getting employees abroad. The only caveat I see is potential employment contract clauses forcing employees to stay in the company for a certain number of years. Currently there are no restrictions for switching jobs on an H1B.

Where N becomes a political football that us raised and lowered at the whim of lobbyists ultimately allowing wages to fall below market rates.

There is no labor shortage in a nation of 300 million with the best university system in the history of humanity.

If we need any sort of system, the appropriate one would be to reward companies that train citizens in skills the employer needs in order to fill any sort of skills gap.

While in principle I agree with you, in practice N was most of the time equal to 65k, with the exception of the dot-com bubble (years 1999-2003, so 80% of the time; program was added in 1990). And there probably should be something like H1B in any immigration system. Anyhow, the current political climate in the US does not give many hopes for an upgrade. In the meantime, I've discovered Switzerland, and quite honestly - I'm not looking back.

"Best university system in the history of humanity", which nation are you talking about? What is the metric for "best system"?

>with the best university system in the history of humanity.

While I don't disagree, you can only hire so many HYPSM grads - and many of these H1B's are getting hired from our universities.

I'd rather just eliminate the H-1B (and some other classes of visa) entirely, and just add a new blanket supernumerary visa that works like this:

(1) There's a fixed initial fee and an annual renewal fee for it,

(2) Anyone who doesn't have any of the features which exclude you from immigration regardless of qualification in other categories can apply,

(3) The visa category is issued without numerical limit to qualified applicants,

(4) The visa is a dual-intent non-immigrant visa (that is, you are not prohibited from applying for an immigrant visa, if you are otherwise qualified for one, while present on it),

(5) The visa does permit you to work without restriction while present on it.

I think it's not unreasonable to have an auction system in place. You don't want your labor market to be suddenly flooded by foreign workers - this isn't to say that they're bad, but when it's a singular large number in proportion to the existing workforce, it can be very disruptive short-term.

This doesn't necessarily have to come with a hard cap - you can just increase the bar slightly for every new application that is filed, and let the market figure out where the profitability bar is.

eh the VISA BS from Washington keeps our tech salaries high

look at what engineers in Europe - especially Berlin and London - earn solely because of free trade, I wouldn't be in this field if I was over there

I had a friend who got rejected twice, had to leave the country. He's a good software engineer for one of the big companies.

Fortunately they kept him on and I guess they will try to get him an L1 once he meets the requirements.

Well these are applications not granted visas. If a company wants to spend the application fee for that many applications then it is their choice. However it does not mean it will be granted a majority of the visas.

However in light of the fact that now a lottery is in place maybe this is tantamount to buying more lottery tickets to increase your chances of winning.

> Well these are applications not granted visas.

From the data it looks like those are granted visas.

Those are visas classified as "Certified". I'm not sure what that means, but the categories are "Certified", "Certified-Withdrawn", "Withdrawn", or "Denied".

http://www.myvisajobs.com/Certified-2016ST.htm

But, if you look at the fine print on the site, you'll find this:

Infosys Limited has applied for 113,445 LC and LCA from fiscal year 2013 to 2015. But this does not mean they really hired 113,445 foreign workers during this period. The visa applications might have been denied. When an employee renews or transfers his H1B visa or change work location under some circumstances, he will also file a new LCA application.

Department of Labor(DOL) typically certifies more than 3 times the number of foreign work requests than the number of H1B visas issued by USCIS. So there is no one to one relationship between the number of workers certified by the DOL and the number of H1B work visas issued by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Well google average salary is 127k. I don't think that includes rsu, bonus, etc. So I would say the salary is on par with what they are paying Americans. If you compare the H1-B to GC ratio its pretty close.

Google is clearly not the problem. They have 4k H1B but they also have 60k USA employees.

Most large software companies are not the problem - they actually do use H1B the way it's intended, i.e. to supplement their work force when local talent is unavailable on short notice; and they offer equal pay for equal work. They also normally sponsor their H1B employees for green cards as soon as they're eligible, so we're not talking temp workers here, so much so as a skilled immigration stream.

(Disclosure: I was an H1B worker before, so this is based on personal and anecdotal experience.)

Places like Infosys and Tata are the problem. That's where H1B is milked for cheap labor, and where all those legal schemes to lower the salary as much as possible are heavily used. So far as I know, most workers that they hire do not get green cards, either.

Problem is, the latter group is responsible for most H1B applications.

I think Google would pay more than they do now if the H1B program did not exist or if visas were given to people with the highest salaries rather than randomly assigned.

Apple is 136k, Facebook above 140k, Google 127k, Microsoft is above 120k..

so, these companies and many others which are paying in above ranges aren't violators.

> Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

With full stack trace, file name and a few lines of source code.

Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.m...

If people are concerned with imported labor undecutting or putting downward pressure on salaries, I'd suggest taxing imported labor so as to make it no cheaper than the locally produced labor pool. Then we'd get companies hiring imported labor when they actually could not find a local candidate.

Tax it at the median recorded for the locale where the sponsoree is hired. Tax so that there is no cost advantage in seeking labor cost arbitrage.

You could simply tax the difference. If the median is 150, and someone is hired for 100, tax is 50. If they are hired at 130, tax is 20, etc.

"System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding."

Looks like someone didn't cache it's data!

Or didn't turn off development sorry page, exposing the stack trace

> Looks like someone didn't cache it's data!

"its data"

(also it might not be a caching problem)

>Infosys & Tata Consultancy

....Yeah right, they're coming in with unique skills. Whatever those skills are, it's a mystery to me. Unless you count bumbling projects and adding technical debt at an astronomical rate.

Interesting to see University of Michigan in there. wonder what's the impetus there.

University employed H-1Bs are exempt from the cap. It is a loop hole that is becoming more common where private companies set up partnerships with universities to employ H-1Bs on their behalf in order to skirt the cap.

The company sponsors a position at the university, the employee does work for the company, the university takes a percentage.

oh my. That's interesting. The jobs I see are:

Medical Scientists, Except Epidemiologists(274); Biochemists and Biophysicists(187); Health Specialties Teachers, Postsecondary(100); Biological Technicians(60); Molecular And Cellular Biologists(59);

Yup, the thing that is even MORE interesting is that these positions can be classified as more relating to research which has much lower wage requirements. So the employee may be writing software for your business but she is paid like an academic researcher.

Some of them are doing it out in the open[0]

[0] http://www.diyatvusa.com/2016/07/07/us-universities-use-h1b-...

Some companies use Universities to hire foreign Software engineer with the title of "Research Associate", lower wage, same job. Then claiming that they are recruiting the best in the world while providing a very low wage (research associate prevailing wage instead of SE). It can get worse, I have a friend that has been under a J1 for years, while he is not a student anymore. The company pays a student salary (2k/month) instead of a H1B prevailing wage.

Based on my knowledge of some folks in research science, I'd wager a guess that they don't want to hire US Citizens because they are more expensive, even if they got their degree from the same institution hiring H1Bs. It's...a twisted situation from my experience.

look to ones_and_zeros's reply

Instead of being randomly selected, why not allocate H1-B visas to the highest paying positions first? (If there's a tie at the end then the selection can be random.)

So no startup, or company in a lowcost area, can higher people from other countries anymore? Don't see how that's a good solution either.

If the objective is to pay 70kYr for a person might just as well open an office outside of the US, unless they're located in a medium or small city

(ah yes, the site just blew up on me as well, probably done by an underpaid H1B from one of the abusers of the systems)

Edit: I'm not against the people that want a chance to work in the US, I'm against the companies that abuse the system

Ideally we could set get this on a % of company employees

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