Protip for salary seekers pt 2: Results from some mining of the H1-B database | Hacker News Reader

Protip for salary seekers pt 2: Results from some mining of the H1-B database

the-interweb.com

The website in the OP is mine, so far all people who are interested in the uncropped lists, you can get it at http://www.the-interweb.com/bdump/misc/salaries.xlsx

The first sheet inside the Excel file is probably the most interesting one, showing software/computer/engineer salaries for nearly 3500 jobs.

I love programming but seeing that first list I can't help but wonder what it takes to be a Director or if the Anesthesiologist route is a more sure way to 300k a year. Trading 6 years for a sure thing doesn't seem like too bad a deal.

Anesthesiologists need 8 years of post-graduate study - 4 years of medical school, 1 year of internship and 3 additional years of residency (most programs combine the internship and the rest of residency into a single coherent curriculum these days)

Compared to entering a career in software straight out of undergrad, being a doctor takes a while to pay off. It takes even longer to pay off if you consider dollars per hour worked rather than dollars per year elapsed. For example, at the particular residency my wife is at, she works 1.5 to 2x as many hours as I do as a software engineer, while receiving less than half the pay. I should add that there's nothing exceptional about the number of hours either of us work or our pay.

I am also a software developer and my wife is becoming an Anesthesiologist. Would you mind connecting so we can learn what you may have picked up through the whole process?

My wife is actually in a Family Practice residency. I can't figure out how to send you a private message with my email, so here it is a little bit obfuscated:

#include <stdio.h> int main(void){puts("\x6d\x69\x6b\x65\x40\x6c\x61\x69\x6f\x73\x61\x2e\x6f\x72\x67");return 0;}

A lot of these high-paying jobs seem a lot less interesting to someone who has the hacker mindset. To me, they certainly do.

Also, you're guaranteed a nicely paying job, but there's no opportunity for massive wealth like there is in the riskier world of startups. Here, I may make 20k next year, or I may make 2 million. Anything's possible. More risk == more reward. This holds true.

There are jobs that pay 500+k / year for 30 years with little risk. The number of start up founders that make 15+ million in their lifetime is vary small. So, going into startup's to maximize lifetime earnings is probably not a great piece of advice.

That's a good point. Aside from continuing education requirements (a class every year or two, or whatever, I don't know specifics), an anesthesiologist has learned all they're going to use in their job when they pass their board exams.

Plus, I heard/read/apocryphalized once that anesthesiologists have the highest incidence of drug addiction of any profession. Apparently it's an occupational hazard to dip into the stash.

Do consider though that some of these positions may include options and other non-salary compensation. Sometimes the 'perks' are really the cake and the salary is just the icing.

Some of these positions can be personally identified. I just picked Physic Ventures to start and with some not too hard logic was able to figure who's salary was listed on the site.

That's true for almost all of the startups (and in one case, a company that just filed for IPO). It wasn't too hard to match this data to LinkedIn for quite a few people I know :)

Doesn't this violate some kind of privacy laws, anyway? (Edit: I mean the fact that the US Government is releasing data, not the fact that it can be mined)

No. It's public data. It would actually be illegal for the government not to release it.

Is every US Citizen's salary data released publically too (or in a format that it can be mined)?

If No, then why the distinction (did not want to use discrimination).

The legislative purpose of H1B is to preserve the ability of companies to hire professionals who cannot be found at any price in America. There are a few safeguards designed to promote this: a requirement to advertise for the position in the US, for example, and the publication process.

A frequent criticism made of H1B is that it is used as an end-run around our (typically fairly strict) immigration procedures to bring in modern-day indentured servants who do jobs many Americans can do at wages which are markedly lower than the prevailing US wages. You'll frequently see this in e.g. Slashdot criticism, with tales of H1Bs hired by Infosys or whomever paid to do systems engineering for $20k ~ $30k, which (if substantially accurate) is an abuse of the program.

FWIW, I am in Japan by the grace of a status of residence very similar to the H1B, and that would be yanked instantly if I was not earning more than the prevailing wage for similarly situated Japanese engineers. (Though there is another status here -- trainee -- which is widely abused to that purpose.)

For all intents and purposes, the "trainee" visa in Japan is borderline slavery and is used to bring in extremely cheap labor from China and SE Asia.

Japan is actually pretty relaxed about immigration considering the xenophobic image. All you need is a job offer from a company willing to do the paperwork, (normally) a Bachelors degree in the field you will work in and a salary offer that is at least what a Japanese hire would get. No quotas or H1B hire-in-Japan-first requirements. You aren't trapped in your job - once you get a work visa, you can change to another company in the same field with no repercussions. Get married and you have full rights to work, not work or start a business as you please with a spousal visa.

Don't want to work for someone else or get married? 5 million yen in the bank (about $60k) and a business plan gets you an "Investors" visa.

Because US Citizens intentionally have more rights then non citizens (says a non citizen living in the US)

Not completely true. Sure you can vote and do a few other things but other than that, under the law citizen's and people on US soil are the same. The constitution makes it clear. Basically if a non citizen gets arrested, he has the same right to representation and all as an American citizen does. (As a permanent resident I find that important.)

And as far as salaries being published. State and Federal employees salaries are public. You can make a FOIA request for them if you want. So here's an example of Citizens who have their salaries made public.

Not completely true. Permanent residents can, for example, be stripped of their PR status for committing crimes and are required to carry evidence of their PR status at all times.

But in any case, wrt anything that concerns immigration matters (which visas fall under), there is most definitely not equal treatment.

Yeah that's true but you have to be found guilty first, they can't just (I hope) pick you up and put you on a plane without a trial of some sort or a valid reason that can be challenged in court (If you are a PR, that is or a visa holder).

Even American citizens can be stripped of their basic rights after being convicted of a crime.

True, but not their citizenship (although there's been suggestions of that to deal with "terrorists").

No, not all citizens salaries are disclosed, it's a feature of the H1-B program.

Feature sounds disillusioned especially with the social engineering and data-mining brought together.

Perhaps, but it is what it is.

I think that to solve the problem we should get everyone's salary in the open.

OK. What's yours?

102k/yr. And an up vote for you.

If they're state employees, at least for Texas, you can have that info along with their name, agency and title right here: http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee.... You can probably get it for other states too.

I worked for the state of Florida and salaries were public. Did not really have an issue with that. Your salary falls within a bracket anyway so you won't be making more than another with similar experience and position.

This should make it clear that if you want to start a startup without funding, you should move to manhattan, get a job in financial services and share an apt in queens. Do this for 3 years and you could have $100k in da bank. Then u quit and then startup.

It seems like a good way to make a good chunk of change to fund your startup, but as someone living in NYC I don't see it actually done that much. I think once you start working for the large bank you get used to all of the perks and it gets hard to leave.

It's probably technically possible to do, but would require lots of willpower and determination that you could put into actually starting your startup instead. There's also momentum to consider; not doing something entrepreneurial right now decreases the odds that you'll start doing something entrepreneurial soon.

I'm doing it this year but in London. I believe it all goes down to this: are you really working on this to get some money for your startup or are you just making money for yourself?

For me it's definitely the first option, couldn't care less about making more or less money right now.

Exactly! People will be buying houses and fancy cars and bottles of liquor at clubs for $250 - but you need to realize that what your doing is more important.

It's hard though. People will tell u that real estate s a much better option etc... Just keep your eye on the prize.

I'm on this journey with two friends and they just waste all the money on expensive restaurants and wine, it's crazy. Then they will say something like "Yeah but this bill is only x hours of work!" but then you end up with almost no money because when you don't know how to save then it's really easy to waste it all that way.

Now I'm just the opposite, I have a really hard time wasting money. By now I never had so much money in my life and still I'm completely unable to buy a Macbook Air* or something similar... I've been having some hard time trying to make my brain understand that it is quite okay to pay $30 for some dinner every once in a while. Does anyone else have this "problem"?

* Which, by my friends' reasoning, is just three days of work, at most.

Does anyone else have this "problem"?

Yes, or at least used to: I outgrew it. I think part of it came from being raised by a single mom and being very aware of how important money was. Once I had more of it than I needed, I simply didn't know what else to do besides bank it or invest it and the thought of spending made me break out in hives.

At some point, though, you realize that having nice things doesn't mean you're wasting your money or that you're going to be homeless next week. Life is about balance. Be good to yourself, but be careful.

Every Asian and every indian has the same "problem" :)...

It helps if your job sucks like crazy (but also pays well). In that situation it becomes very clear that only savings will get you out of there.

Dinner out with friends once in a while is a good thing though.

If you have less time than money and getting more time gives you more money (even in indirect ways such as more/better sleep, exercise and food =better work), it just becomes a business decision.

It happens all the time in London, you see a lot of ex-finance people in the startup scene.

That's true that you don't see it but does happen. I did it. If you have a burning desire to start a company, that desire never goes away. Because og green card issues I could only make the jump after 7 years...

Good point, I guess I knew a few people who wanted to quit and start a startup or work for a startup but their green cards hadn't quite come through yet.

Hey, you going to the hackers Meetup tomm in NYC? I might see you there.

I believe Yipit started this way.

I'm curious why the OP thinks the first five entries on the list are "obviously faulty entries". They do seem like a lot of money, but I am sure there can be edge cases, after all, the sample size for each of them is really small. The titles do seem rather general, but perhaps they are top positions?

I do admit that I'm deeply curious about the $800,000 "Assistant Professor" position at Emory University.

I created the lists in the OP and to determine whether an average salary value is legit I looked at the individual entries. For those I declared invalid there was something like four entries making $55000 and one entry making $550000, the latter one being an obvious typo in the database.

Don't know about the other but there's no way that an assistant professor is paid anywhere near 0.5M/year. Probably they get that amount over the 6-7 years that their contract last (before tenure).

For the record, I am the OP, but this isn't my blog. I previously linked to the databases on HN, and just saw now that the owner of this blog did some analysis on it.

But I do agree that there seemed to be some faulty entries. This was the case for all of the previous years I looked at.

I was just approved for an H1B for next October, and received a bit more 25% raise after the immigration lawyers had already finished all the paperwork. I highly doubt they refactored it. It's likely that some of these are just estimates, and do not include bonus figures either.

In the movie ID4, the president is told by his military command that there are aliens and that there are artifacts. This is after the spaceships arrive. When the president asks why wasn't I told this (about the aliens), his advisors answer: "Two words. Plausible deniability"

When you look at the H1-B database, you lose plausible deniability.

If you want to take this further (for those of you who are university graduates), look at your alumni/class notes. Feel free to feel envious about the weddings/birth announcements/job promotions/degrees earned. Or maybe even feel condescension. And realize that it all doesn't matter. A person's life isn't just a set of facts, it is their personal impact on the ones they choose to love. The reason why baseball players make millions and why teachers make puny salaries is a question of financial impact. A baseball player through multiple channels (marketing, tickets, television, news) can indirectly affect many orders of magnitude people more than the teacher in their lone classroom teaching twenty kids. (This is why the Khan Academy is so powerful, it scales personal directed learning). If you want to get a more shallow sense, keep reading your class notes until you get to the deaths. Reading about people who are summed up in a paragraph. Life is not a guarantee.

Anyway, realize that salary is just a number and that true wealth is not how much you earn but how long you can maintain your preferred lifestyle without working (savings, ideally mostly passive income). The meaning of life is up to you to define it.

Should someone expect the salaries of H1-B employees to be comparable to resident employees? This is very interesting data but I'm wondering what all can be inferred from it.

Yes, Under the law, H1B workers must be paid the higher of the prevailing wage or the actual wage.

This gets messy because for H1Bs it is difficult to move between jobs, so it is harder for them to get raises, etc, but thats another whole story.

The law appears to be designed to ensure that foreign workers aren't hired for cheap to undercut the wages of US workers.

If visa paperwork lives up to its reputation, however, a rational company would only hire foreign workers if they are talented enough to be worth the hassle or have skills that cannot be found elsewhere. Presumably these people would be paid well. These numbers may be higher than the true average.

...which is what confuses me as to why these figures are being promoted as away to be help salary negations of (presumably) US Citizens.

Surely when that discussion happens the boss is going to say

"yeah the other company is paying higher than the prevailing rate because they needed to satisfy the H1B salary requirement (that it be higher than the average local rate) but needed those foreign workers because of their domain expertise" (or whatever the reason was for hiring them)

I am not sure how this works on CA, etc. My father came to the US on an H1-B in 1999. He was hired as a contractor by an agency that specialized in bringing H1-B software developers from the former USSR and India. He then had to go look for an actual job, since this company was simply a middle man.

After he found a job, he got his salary: about 1/3 of the reported number. The rest was cleaned up by the agency that brought him here. Eventually, he got his green card and left the agency, but what this implies to me is that an H1-B worker may not get that much of the salaries reported on this list. However, as I mentioned, I have no idea what percentage of H1-Bs are hired through thrid-party middle men.

That sounds like an all-round illegal scheme. First, in order to get a H-1B you need an actual job offer, and with the application the employer is certifying that they will pay that rate. There is no such thing as a "middle man", you can't simply apply for an H-1B for someone with the intent of them going looking for a job when they get here.

It's not quite as crude as you made it sound. The programmer works for company X, with a fixed hourly rate. He has the H1-B with that company, and they are the ones who are sponsoring him. Company X contracts out to Company Y who pays company X for the services provided by the developer on-site. Company Y pays Company X, and Company X in turn pays the developer. On paper this looks legitimate to me.

Yeah, that's probably legit, but company X would (I hope) still be required to pay the programmer whatever they said in their H1B application.

Let's take this one:

CITIGROUP GLOBAL MARKETS INC. APPLICATIONS DEVELOPMENT SENIOR PROGRAMMER ANALYST $457K

What do you have to know to be worth this much to a bank?

I believe that row is a mistake too..

Here is the record that seems to be throwing off the average: http://www.immihelp.com/h1b-sponsoring-companies-database/vi...

The web app mentioned in the article is really great for searching and give you lots more useful information: http://www.the-interweb.com/serendipity/exit.php?url_id=847&...

EDIT: I work with Citigroup as a consultant on their internal legal applications (including the immigration tracking database). I did a quick search and I can promise, without revealing what is in the database, that the inflated numbers for the Citigroup positions are obvious typos.

We track base wage, prevailing wage, and upto wage. So (as a completely made-up example) if I see a position with a base wage of 95k, prevailing wage of 100k and upto wage of 1.15M, it's pretty obvious that someone just entered an extra zero.

In short, there are no Sr. Programmer Analysts here making $1M/year or even $400k/year. Nothing to see here.

you've just shuttered my world cry

Know the under documented legacy architecture inside out. Also helps if the bus factor of that arcane knowledge is in the low single digits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

There are HFT guys making this much.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov

Is it me or do those company-specific average salaries seem very high (even excluding the top 3)?

Note that they are average for that job title, not across the whole company. So on average, these are what Seniors or Principals make at most companies, and not your typical engineer.

The list is cropped, but further down you would see companies like MS have a lower tier engineer (such as "Software Engineer I" or "Associate Software Engineer" title with a lower average.

Does this take into account other types of compensation like stock options? I've accepted a position as an H1-B and the salary I was offered is over 10% lower than what is listed in that data ... would it be prudent to bring it up?

> COMPACT SOLUTIONS LLC 4 SOFTWARE ENGINEER 1801250

> EMORY UNIVERSITY 12 ASSISTANT PROFESSOR 794454

> COMCAST CABLE COMMUNICATIONS, LLC 3 ENGINEER II 308533

Does this surprise anyone else? Wow!

FTA: "The top 5 can be discarded because of obviously faulty entries in the database (as much as I would like there to be a company that pays the average software engineer 1.8 million USD a year!). The first legit average seems to be the three Citigroup analysts making an average of roughly $450K."

anybody up for charting this data?

Yeap. I will definitely do something with it and put on salaryshare. Incredibly busy this week, though.

So Google has 506 H1B Software Engineers and they all make exactly $106,862?

It might be average salary.

There isn't an error with the "screenshot"?

How can avg be > of max? :)

Dude this is awesome. Being a H1B myself, I always used to wonder why Americans wouldnt mine this information for themselves.

If Techcrunch gets a hold of this I think your post could snowball into something big!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com