Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public | Hacker News Reader

Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public

flcdatacenter.com

Anecdotally, I've found that there is a "visa discount". H1B workers are paid a lot less than you'd think by looking at these public numbers or the salaries paid to citizens.

When you can't quit without being deported, you tend not to negotiate too hard or complain when you don't get a raise.

This only applies if deportation is a threat to you. I am a H-1B employee and I have absolutely no problems going back to my home country in an instant.

I don't know if that is the reason but my salary is definitely not discounted compared to my American co-workers.

You're right. Negotiating from strength requires being willing and able to walk away.

Exactly - the issue is that "walking away" has a very literal interpretation in the context of losing visa sponsorship. You'll be "walking away" to the airport, and leaving behind an established life, your friends, colleagues and potentially even family members.

But a lot of people from really screwed up places don't have that privilege ... there are many that would rather take a 3-$5k salary haircut than go back to their home country for any reason, because there is nothing but hard living there.

I've heard this many times but have yet to see it.

An H1-B holder is free to leave their employer at anytime and move company, providing that new company agree to file the change with USCIS. This can be done an unlimited number of times and is straightforward because it's not a "new" visa. Many companies will not employ a foreign national without a visa, but will happily take ones with existing H1-B's.

These transfers are common in the tech industry, at least in my experience on the west coast. Thankfully I'm now green carded and no longer have to worry about these things though :)

An H1-B holder is free to leave their employer at anytime and move company, providing that new company agree to file the change with USCIS

------------------------------

I think you oversimplify ... that company has to pay about $1.5 - 3k just to file for that transfer ... and you bet they factor it in in salary negotiations, sometimes in unfair ways. They also have to think about the fact that they have to do it again in 3 years, then theres fact that if they decide to invest in you for longer than 6 years they have to pay even more money to get you a green card.

A lot of companies (smaller firms, almost all startups) will not touch H1b's with a ten foot pole ... so when a h1b applicant gets a gig, they tend to not cause ripples unless they absolutely have to, and that includes being slightly underpaid.

Long story short ... its not easy.

I don't think H1-B visa holders are as desperate as you think. My company got me one, but I never moved, for a bunch of reasons. Salary was 90K a few years ago, and I only had a couple of years experience. Bigger blocker though was lack of vacation days, which was tied to seniority and not really negotiable. IOW I could have negotiated higher salary, but not what I wanted. So I didn't jump.

As a class, perhaps not. All I know is from my what I observed with friends and family, mostly from Latin America, and many not in technology.

Addendum for new grads interviewing at Microsoft: when you go to the welcome center on the morning of your interview, the H1-B filings for all recently hired foreign employees are posted near the candidate waiting area. These have salaries.

These are especially helpful for answering that eternal first HR question about salary expectations. The best answer is to dodge the question entirely, but if you're not good at negotiating with skilled recruiters (and if you're a new CS grad, you probably aren't) pick a number that's somewhere in the middle of the posted H1-B range.

Do you know what the middle of the posted range is, just out of curiosity? If I was interviewing at Microsoft, I don't think I'd want to go look at the salary postings before going in :S

The last time I saw the numbers (several years ago), they varied between ~$80k and ~$150k, depending on job title. I would imagine that they've gone up some since then.

Couldn't you pick a number over the top and have them bring you down? Or are the recruiters likely to not even consider you if you do that?

Employees who have unrealistic expectations from the start generally keep that same level of expectation, even across other topics; beginning with an unrealistic figure is not necessarily a good idea, as it may dissuade the HR rep. Alot of the time this is a first question too - first impressions count! </cliche>

Nb - this may be different for engineering; I work in an unrelated field.

I guess the issue could be though, if the employee is fresh out of college or moving into an unrelated position, that they may have no idea what a good salary for this position is going to be. I guess the danger of being to reasonable is that you will end up with the job, just underpaid compared to your peers because you didn't know what that market rate was.

Depends on the recruiter, but that can be true.

I based my remark on the knowledge that the range of H1B salaries covered everything from new grad to very senior positions. New grads are nearly all going to fall into the low end of the range at a company like MS, and there's no point in trying to negotiate into a higher pay grade until you've got experience.

Since this is a hot topic lately, I thought I'd share my goto site for wage negotiation. Note that this includes the company, date of approval, the exact salary (in most cases - sometimes they get ranges/maximums approved), and job title.

It only applies to foreign workers in the US on a visa, but it is probably the best data source you are going to find.

Take the H1-B salary and increase that by 30%-50% to get what you should be shooting for.

I remember when my university applied for H1-B on my behalf back in 2001, their prevailing wage for software engineers was <$30K/annum.

That is primarily because the prevailing wage is calculated by agencies like erieri and Cal EDD (in the case of California) surveys which are usually nine months to a year old. So ymmv. If the survey was taken during a boom year and is used in a bust year, the prevailing wages are usually higher than market. The reverse is also true. There is also a selection bias in the data as they only have data from organizations which are willing to share this. There is no mandated requirement for this.

Another thing to keep in mind is that (in theory) prevailing wage data reflects market wages (i.e. all types of engineers) not just those on a visa. Whether or not this is actually what happens is something I have not idea about.

So in theory the LCA data should be a good datum to start your salary negotiations on. However it should be tempered by current market conditions, location and most importantly your own position in the negotiations. Its always easier to negotiate from a position of strength. When you are looking to provide for your family, insurance, rent/mortgage etc and are unemployed, negotiating may or may not work depending on how desperate you are.

No, this has nothing to do with the prevailing wage. You'll notice that each row indicates the "prevailing wage", as well as the wage that the company is actually asking to pay someone.

The prevailing wage is always way lower (and a joke, basically), satisfying their obligation to pay greater than or equal to, but that is not the interesting part of this data.

To be clear - this isn't a link to the LCA data (although each application includes it). This is actual individual salaries that were approved to a worker.

I'm not saying you should look at prevailing wage to see how much you should get paid. I'm saying that prevailing wage (listed on each application) is an indication of how much the employers' estimates of salaries for purposes of low-balling their foreign staff are out of touch with reality. I was too embarrassed to share my actual salary, which was higher than their 'prevailing' wage, but still pitifully small.

http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=107

Christer Ericsson, a tech director at Sony Santa Monica (God of War) has pulled out all the figures for game developers a few times. As a point of reference, in my experience, game developer salaries tend to be ~10% higher than a similar role at Microsoft/Google/Apple but with poorer benefits.

As a sidenote, it's pretty useful sometimes to check if an employer does hire H1-B (like if you're doing your OPT and curious about what lies in the future) especially with smaller companies, so you can check here:

http://www.immihelp.com/h1b-sponsoring-companies-database/

This also includes salaries.

For you Jedi out there, the headache you are feeling right now is thousands of copies of Excel 2008 on Macs crashing as people try to make pivot tables from this data.

My 2009 Mac Pro with 8 GB of RAM was defeated by the 2010 file.

in case this helps, this is for the year 2010 data create table visa_status (

LCA_CASE_NUMBER text, STATUS text, LCA_CASE_SUBMIT text, VISA_CLASS text, LCA_CASE_EMPLOYMENT_START_DATE text, LCA_CASE_EMPLOYMENT_END_DATE text, LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_NAME text,

LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_ADDRESS text,

LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_CITY text,

LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_STATE text,

LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_POSTAL_CODE text,

LCA_CASE_SOC_CODE text,

LCA_CASE_SOC_NAME text,

LCA_CASE_JOB_TITLE text,

LCA_CASE_WAGE_RATE_FROM text,

LCA_CASE_WAGE_RATE_TO text,

LCA_CASE_WAGE_RATE_UNIT text,

FULL_TIME_POS text,

TOTAL_WORKERS text,

LCA_CASE_WORKLOC1_CITY text,

LCA_CASE_WORKLOC1_STATE text,

PW_1 text,

PW_UNIT_1 text,

PW_SOURCE_1 text,

OTHER_WAGE_SOURCE_1 text,

YR_SOURCE_PUB_1 text,

LCA_CASE_WORKLOC2_CITY text,

LCA_CASE_WORKLOC2_STATE text,

PW_2 text,

PW_UNIT_2 text,

PW_SOURCE_2 text,

OTHER_WAGE_SOURCE_2 text,

YR_SOURCE_PUB_2 text,

LCA_CASE_NAICS_CODE text,

Decision_Date text);

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '/H1B_2010_TEXT/H1B_FY2010.txt' INTO TABLE visa_status FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';

I haven't opened the file but this sounds strange. I've reached the excel cell number limit before crashing computers with much less than 8gb of ram. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifica...

Creating a pivot table is very different from simply opening an excel file. Conceptually (it may be more optimized internally) it tries to create a cube of all possible results with all others. (An OLAP cube.)

So if you have columns 1, 2, 3, 4 and rows 1, 2, 3 it will create a cube for a combination of all dimensions.. So for all rows you will have all columns instantly queryable but also 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 2-3, 2-4, 3-4, 1-2-3, 1-2-4, 1-3-4, 2-3,4, 1-2-3-4 so that you can query any combination of rows/cells and instantly get your result.

As you can imagine this cube gets exponentially bigger as you add dimensions (columns) and will quickly kill excel if you load in too much stuff.

I wish they didn't disclose both the company name and the title since some companies create a title just for one person. It takes no effort to figure out who's making what, myself included -_-

Open data / Gov 2.0 and that whole spiel is great but it'd be nice if privacy was given a second thought, even if it's the data of non-citizens

In most states you can look up any state-employee's salary by name.

Right, but they publish the salaries of all employees. If they published the salaries of just the out-of-state workers, we have a similar scenario.

Better yet, if your company employs H1-B visa holders, they are required by law to put up the job advertisement along with salary offered in a public area of the office.

This requirement is to give opportunity to existing employees for the new position.

In a small company of about 400 people, where I worked, the job advertisements were posted in the kitchen area and it wasn't very hard to deduce what the salary of the newly joining member of your team is.

Not exactly.

A company only has to advertise these jobs if they are determined to be "H1-B dependent" (> 15% of employees are on that visa), or they need labor certification for a different form of visa (H2-B, E3).

This is fascinating. Descending order by salary is interesting. A lot of obvious typos, but a few interesting nuggets:

WALT DISNEY PICTURES 500 SOUTH BUENA VISTA STREET BURBANK CA 91521-0153 Marketing Managers PRESIDENT, MARKETING 850000

VOLKSWAGEN GROUP OF AMERICA, INC. 2200 FERDINAND PORSCHE DRIVE HERNDON VA 20171 11-1011.00 Chief Executives CEO 564000

And the very large number of physicians in the $500k-$600k bracket. Due to insurance reasons?

Better yet in some nordic countries ALL income tax filings are public data so you can tell what the guy sitting next to you is making.

Time for a some what off topic anecdote.

My workplace used to post all H1-B pay rates in the breakroom.

The day after my review, in which I brought up the pay discrepancy between me and the H1-B workers at a similiar grade, they all came down never to reappear.

This is a fairly large company, which made it even more shocking.

Was your salary more or less than the H1bs?

My salary was 10k less.

Wow, i'm amazed how low a lot of those salaries are

http://www.mediafire.com/file/7o8n967gmiv8yvm/H1B_FY2010.xls

wow... just wow, info like this exists? saved

Here's an easy excel file sorted by tab from lowest to highest salary.

Sad to see teachers are getting shit :(

www.glassdoor.com also has many salary data for many companies.

For example: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Twitter-Salaries-E100569.htm

nice one!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com