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Comment by omouse | Hacker News Reader

The fixation on Silicon Valley isn't dumb when wages were deliberately suppressed by Google, Apple, Adobe and others. The big tech companies really do want to keep salaries low and H1Bs can help them with that, along with paying for the really smart people that they can bring in too.

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Except that Google, Facebook, Cisco would gladly sponsor you for green card - if they're gaming the system they would surely try to string you along until you've used up your H1B renewal before doing that?

If you start out making much less than other candidates, even after many years of CoL raises you will still be making less.

Source: drastically underpaid for my experience because I was an idiot.

At one of the big Silicon Valley tech companies? Google at least has a policy that promotions & annual raises normalize to level-defined salary bands, i.e. if you have a higher salary coming in relative to your coworkers of equal skill, you will get smaller raises until your salaries equalize.

Google also had artificially lower salary bands by colluding with other tech companies to not fight for talent.

Well, true, and I'm not exactly happy about that...but that cartel was eventually broken when Facebook refused to play ball.

The point is that Google purposefully tried to keep the wages low. If not for FB, they would have never changed the practice. I have zero trust in Google for doing the right thing regarding salaries.

You don't have to trust in Google, only in self-interest. The reason FB broke the cartel is because they felt they could pick up some talented people by paying more. The reason Google normalizes salaries is because it negatively affects morale (and hence productivity & retention) when you have people paid dramatically different amounts for equal work. The reason big tech companies sponsor green cards is so they don't have to use up their H1B quota on you, and can instead get new H1Bs. They may not be doing it for your benefit, but that doesn't mean that you don't benefit from it.

The fun thing is that it also probably reveals a bunch of other problems, like the issue of admission of wrongdoing in settlements.

No, never moved to California. I'll defend that one as not a mistake, though.

Yes, everyone wants to keep their costs low. Especially software companies because most of their expenditure is on personnel. However, in meat-space companies like pharma, chemicals, etc. plant, hard goods, etc. cost more than personnel. A senior-level manager often cannot pay $30k extra just to match Si valley salaries in an auction because they don't have so much room on personnel.

These norms are not set by individuals, but by a system of financial analysts, shareholders (think large pension funds, etc.), etc.

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