H1B Salaries in the US | Hacker News Reader

H1B Salaries in the US

smokinn.com

177 pointssmokinn79 comments

Some context/theorizing about Edison, NJ. Edison is a largely Indian town. In particular, it attracts many people who don't want personal exposure to the US or non-Indians - such a lifestyle would be difficult anywhere besides Edison or Jersey City. They are only in the US to earn USD.

My theory as to why Edison wages are so low: most of the Edison companies are low end bodyshops - if you need a warm body with J2EE, they will give you a warm body. Their competitive advantage is that the Edison guys they hire never talk to non-Indians [1] and never discover they are ridiculously underpaid.

Incidentally, the food in Edison is fantastic. Jersey City also has good low end food (e.g., dosas), though nothing great at the higher end.

[1] It's not even an Indian nationalism thing - many of them avoid socializing with Indians from a different state/ethnicity. I get dirty looks when they see me with an Indian girl.

another perspective as someone who frequented edison(indian food - oak tree road!) and lived near by - there's a swarm of small bodyshops, who pay bit more than market rate.My experience is that this "market rate" as per stats is what newcomers get for the first couple of years. (these newcomers are typically not well todo back home.)As these 'new' H1 hires gain market experience, they either negotiate or move on to some other small bodyshop. The big corps like Oracle don't pay as much for similar roles. As the o.p rightly discovered, most commute to NYC (go to edison station at 7.30am). (I don't know if this may have lead few banks to move their dev/it operations to NJ:) ). I know of some companies that didn't pay med insurance for more than 2 years. Few years ago, a top guy of a similar bodyshop was sent to prison for 'buy a green card' scheme he employed using employment immigration loop holes. Every year there are few companies that are in news for the wrong reasons. From what I saw, the non-passionate-just-work-for-pay guy who has worked in the US jumps to start a bodyshop after he has gotten his GC(greencard). It's very lucrative and luring on paper (you get n number of guys working on several clients and you make x over each guy - think 'pimping') I hope it has changed in the recent years.

But this is changing. As more Indians are aware of better opportunities back home (and with the next gen Indian being more affluent than earlier generation), lot of them stay back. It's only the crude who go on and take the bait from the companies.

fwiw, adding to yummyfajitas- it's not only the social separation of state/ethinicity; there's also an abstract eliteness that goes with bank-dev and non-bank - doesn't matter if you are with akamai in piscataway(neighbouring edison). :)

There are many "training" institutes in places like Edison, where they train you in practically any IT skill for 3 months, fake your resume and get 3-4 other Indians as a reference.

Many of these employees are brought to the US before there is an actual job at a client site. Then they are trained. Many are US college grads, who face going back home empty handed unless they get a H1 visa. Or they end up in Dunkin Donuts.

This is probably the biggest reason why their salaries are low. Because the H1 sponsor has propped up the employee, it is skimming their wages, and can exploit them in other ways, like no holidays, dodgy insurance etc.

Check out some of the training ads here:

http://us.classifieds.sulekha.com/

You cracked me up there, with that last bit. Its so bloody true, not all the time, but there is that state-affinity thing going. Do understand, cultures vary widely state to state, cuisine varies, those are some of the reasons. But at the same time, its a system that respects meritocracy like anywhere. If you are bloody damn good in what you do, people tend to flock to you.

Hahaha So true! as an India Grad student who has lived in New York, I totally agree with you, in fact I hated going in that area. I remember there was some controversy when some magazine author wrote an article about it. I actually agreed with him on nearly all points.

Here is that article by Joel Stein http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1999416,00....

My roommate is from Edison NJ, and has voiced many of the same sentiments. He's said the community is incredibly closed off, and that in high school the Indian kids mostly kept to themselves.

It seems misleading to report one number for New York and separate numbers for San Jose, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Fremont, Palo Alto and Cupertino, for which the combined number comes to 1,167,640,693, which puts the Bay Area in second place, without counting e.g. Berkeley, Livermore, Walnut Creek etc.

Edit: perhaps that way Edison should be lumped together with New York? But the Bay Area should really count as a whole.

Upvote for not only interesting data analysis, but also for being objective about it. I clicked on the story, expecting a rant for one or the other, but found numbers speaking loudly than opinion ever could. Thanks.

...being an H1B programmer in Houston doesn’t seem to be all that lucrative...

The 'Avg. WAGE_RATE_1' table puts the Houston salary at 67K, the NYC Salary at 112K.

But Houston has no city or state income tax, and much cheaper housing, food, transport, and other goods. In fact, according to the Cost-of-Living calculators at...

http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.htm... ...or...

http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/mortgages/moving-cost-of...

..earning 112K in Manhattan is equivalent to earning only 48K in Houston. (112K in Brooklyn = 57K in Houston; 112K in the NYC suburbs of Bergen-Passaic NJ = 79K in Houston.)

So in terms of standard of living, 67K in Houston isn't so bad.

I don't trust these cost-of-living calculations. Every time I've lived somewhere with a supposedly great cost-of-living I've felt poor (had to conserve my money) and every time I've lived somewhere with a supposedly bad cost-of-living I've felt wealthier. I can't think of a single exception.

I think it's because many things are constantly priced anywhere, such as cars, food etc. The only thing that is expensive is local, such as housing.

Or the COLA calculations include many areas where you wouldn't want to live. Where I live now has a low COL according to the statistics, but that's only because it includes the poor areas nearby. The only place anyone would want to live is very expensive, and more than some of the bigger cities I've lived in.

Food prices vary greatly by region. Of the two cost calculators I referenced, one identifies Houston groceries as costing 45% less than Manhattan, and the other has a long list of representative food prices, many of which are around twice as much in NYC. This roughly matches my personal experience comparing Bay Area grocery prices to those in the Austin, TX region.

Same goes for cars — though less so for new cars, even there, when you check prices at a site like Edmunds, there are regional adjustments. For used cars, the same model/year/mileage combinations go for much less in Texas than California. And that's before transfer taxes and registration.

I haven't seen that much difference in basic food prices, at least not enough to account for the huge disparities in cost of living I've seen in calculators like these. I lived in Brooklyn for two months earlier this year and restaurants and little boutique organic foods shops were very expensive there were also big supermarkets that were pretty affordable. The only thing that was far more expensive than, Houston, for example, was rent.

Interesting stuff. I've got a few buddies working finance in NYC on visas, the're still making good bank. I would guess you're a west coaster though? Just things like being in NJ for a tax break, unlikely. NJ has tons and TONS of people(and taxes), don't let the 'little' town of Edison fool you, it's really still one huge suburb of NY. With a huge population from surrounding areas to pull talent from. Also, believe or not, most middle age people (HB1 peeps too) don't want to have to deal with NYC. Also, there is plenty of B2B and consulting work to be done outside the Oracles and IBM's of the world, don't think the big names do all the work, or even pay the best. Often times the smaller company will pay much much more, as their overhead is often a smaller percentage of revenues.

Actually, I'm from Canada which is why I don't know much about US cities outside the brand-name ones.

Thanks for the clarification though.

Its interesting how the top H1B companies are IT consultancy companies.

There are far too many enterprise I.T. consultants and I'm all for B2B adoption of software. I question how much value these consultants add sometimes. I hear so many stories of failed deployments and spending millions on projects a few competent individuals could of accomplished.

Enterprise IT is all about money, cost reductions, etc. Good people are expensive as hell (we're talking bill rates of $2000-$5000/day). So outsourcing (and near sourcing) companies offer rates like "I'll give you 3 .NET guys that are three times as productive as that one guy who costs $3k/day and we'll only charge you $2k/day. Great savings!". These IT companies have fantastic profit margins. There is a complete disregard for the Mythical Man Month, thus all of the failure stories.

So the value they add is "we're cheaper and we can usually get you to where you want to be".

I look at this as Cargo Cult IT, but it makes sense in that if most IT project fail (and they do, something less than half outright or are canceled, significant lack of functionality and the like brings up "failure" to more than half) then this is a cheaper way to fail while still pretending to do IT.

Outsourcing companies have lower salaries on average.

Google salary http://www.salarylist.com/company/Google-Salary.htm?order=1 Microsoft salary http://www.salarylist.com/company/Microsoft-Salary.htm?order...

vs Wipro http://www.salarylist.com/company/Wipro-Salary.htm?order=1 Accenture http://www.salarylist.com/company/Accenture-Salary.htm?order...

>Outsourcing companies have lower salaries on average.

and, generally speaking, lower quality people. The consulting companies seem to love picking up bright, young, attractive people with little experience after college. I mean, one place I worked, accenture snapped up half our team. Now, these were all bright kids; I'd have hired them... in entry level positions.

I have worked for one such company, the salary of a fresher joining such indian IT consultant companies range from 6k to 10k $ per YEAR.

I think these companies are only called consulting companies because they are a vehicle for skilled programmers, engineers, etc. to get into the country and then placed at a client as a 'consultant' to fill roles specific to projects where the client wouldn't or couldn't arrange for an H1B visa themselves.

If there's anything else you'd like to know I can post a follow-up or you can download the mdb database here: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/CaseH1B.aspx and the visualization software I used here: http://www.tableausoftware.com/products/desktop/download to check it out yourself.

There was another analysis a while back which showed pretty convincingly that the H1B outliers were due to someone fat fingering the salary and inserting another 0.

The vast majority of outliers do indeed seem to be data entry errors. There are a lot of cases where the prevailing wage is something like 85k but the person makes 890k. They probably actually make 89k.

Also, while I know New York is expensive I highly doubt any Assistant Research Professors are making 661 million dollars a year when the prevailing is 54k. More likely it's 66.1k.

Regarding your second point: I thought those were aggregates.

That's true. There are also several instances where wage rate unit (monthly, weekly, hourly, bi-weekly or yearly) is set lower than it should, like $6k/hour when they mean $6k/month.

I hope that explains the $836,000 software developer at Microsoft and the $1,040,000 consultant at Mantis Technology!

Executives make multiples of those numbers. Why should it be unheard of that any software developer ever make that?

What we really need is a good Startup Visa. There are too many skilled entrepreneurs and programmers out there who are not getting their legit shot at the startup scene because of visa issues.

Also with something like Tech, there happens to be a large amount of skilled talent outside the US.

We do need a good Startup Visa but I don't think the majority of folks working at out-sourcing companies are really the audience. They tend to be risk averse and instead value working for a blue chip client for a steady salary.

(I'm a foreign national working in SF/SV on a different type of visa, not H1B)

Actually the whole H1B is a problem for a lot of immigrant workers. Some people I worked with at my previous employer were contracted through Patni. Patni employs foreign workers to companies (mainly Indian) and takes a cut of their pay. Once their visa is up(5 years I think) they have to go back to India for at least a year then re-apply. Also, when they sign contracts with Patni, they sign a non compete where they cannot be hired by the company they work for, cutting Patni out.

Its really a sad thing, and although the people I spoke with were happy to have good jobs in America, they were resentful that even if they worked hard, they couldn't get hired on permanently.

Did any of them try it? Just because you sign something doesn't mean you can be held to it. It would be worth a try.

Someone I know recently got hired this way. Patni had him on an L-1 visa and he was working at a Fortune 500 wealth management company (WMC) with HQ in Richmond, VA. He got an H-1B visa for himself, moved out of Patni, worked with a body shopper for 3 months and then had his boss at the WMC file an H-1B on his behalf. His old Patni bosses kicked up a row and tried to stop him from getting hired. In his case, the anti-poaching agreement was between Patni and the WMC; but the WMC management were firm in hiring him. For most people, I would assume that not to be the case.

I don't have my copy of Tableau handy any more (using a Mac now) but I suspect that some of the map visualizations would probably be very interesting for visualizing these salary rates both spatially and maybe temporally depending on if there is trending data.

Take a look at this old (and ugly!) post I did a while back: http://blog.mozilla.com/data/2010/03/06/using-tableau-to-inv...

I took a quick look at the map view of this data and couldn't really come up with anything compelling to show, although a time series of bubble sizes could definitely be interesting.

looks like there was a minor error there. The prevailing wage is not the wage offered to the H1B visa recipient, so it's not necessarily how much is being spent. That field is a required field for filing the application and is itself a statistic generated by a third party. it's a nice analysis though.

That's right. The prevailing wage comes from the Dept of Labor. Companies are required to pay at least the prevailing wage.

I know when I was on H1-B, I was paid a good 50% more than the prevailing wage.

Ouch, you're right.. I really screwed up there. There's a wage_rate column and a prevailing_wage_rate and I should have used the former.. I'll try to fix this up asap.

statistics is hard. There is a good field description list out there... also it might be interesting to look at the status of applications.

For example are there any applications where the wage rate was below the prevailing wage and were accepted?

What is the relationship between % over prevailing wage and acceptance of the application? That might lead to a useful model.

You're right, that would definitely be interesting stuff to look at. I'll probably delve deeper into this in a couple of days.. For now I just fixed up all my charts and I'm about to start editing the post where my commentary is now off.

I could be wrong, but I believe that Alpharetta is part of the Atlanta metro. It's result should be merged into Atlanta.

IMO the results for all Bay Area cities (SF, Palo Alto, Fremont, Cupertino, San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mtn View) should also be merged into a single result.

You are correct (I was raised in Atlanta).

And in addtion to the bar area all the metro's should be merge. (maybe with a dropdown so you could see the cities and their suburbs individually)

> IMO the results for all Bay Area cities (SF, Palo Alto, Fremont, Cupertino, San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mtn View) should also be merged into a single result.

Why?

The housing prices are very different. Heck, SF alone has a huge price range.

I agree that NYC is too coarse.

Because they are effectively in the same geographic area.

The housing prices aren't that different until you hit outlying areas like Livermore.

> Because they are effectively in the same geographic area.

Yes

> The housing prices aren't that different until you hit outlying areas like Livermore.

No.

Palo Alto's median house price is almost 3x San Jose and Fremont's. Union City is much cheaper than both, San Leandro's is less than 1/4th of PA's, and Oakland is significantly lower. Cupertino splits the difference between SJ and PA with nice houses while Redwood city does with crap. (Berkely comes in lower than both.)

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Palo_Alto-California/

It might be reasonable to argue that the peninsula cities (to San Jose) are one market, but SJ and south and the east bay are different, even on this side of the hills.

Fine you're right on the real estate. However I still find it ridiculous that Palo Alto and Mountain View are considered separate, as Santa Clara and San Jose are as well.

Cached url: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Nitpick, but I wish those tables were actual tables, not images.

Should have used Tableau Public instead of screen caps.

Is the implication here that the huge outlier salaries listed in the raw data are due to typos? I assume that's the case but didn't see it mentioned...

would you be able to provide the average programmer salary for the biggest visa spenders

If you mean for example the average of all programmers inside Microsoft compared to the average of those on H1B, no I can't since that data isn't public.

The H1B database is public and you're required by law to register every H1B hire in it. That's the data source I was looking at. Companies don't typically advertise what salaries they pay employees if they don't have to.

I can tell you that Microsoft (and I'm sure the same holds true for Google and others) paid everyone the same, regardless of their visa process. Your financial package negotiation process was completely separate from your immigration status. Companies like Microsoft and Google sponsors a lot of visas because they try to find the best engineers, wherever they may be and then get them here.

It must really suck to be a senior software engineer making less than 95k knowing that there are probably some new grads that get an initial offer of more than that.

Wait, really? By "some" we're talking "very, very few" right? Surely salaries haven't come that far since when I graduated.

I'm a senior in college, and Google offered me $100K + $30K bonus (on average, could be more or less) + $10K relocation to start.

Yup, seems about right. I didn't apply to Google, but I did get an offer from Amazon at $90k base + $25k bonus and $7500 for relocation.Where was your offer for? Mountain view?

The number has been anecdotally creeping up. It was less than a year ago that I was reading a really good software dev could expect to make a little over 80k straight out of college.

Either the competition for good programmers really did get that fierce, or HN's collective estimation of a good programmer salary has been undergoing self-inflation.

As another anecdote, I was offered $115k/yr + $10k relocation from Groupon right out of college (I didn't accept, but that was the highest offer monetarily).

Graduate degree, or undergrad?

Undergrad, and I didn't go to a prestigious school.

Frankly, that's amazing. I hope you took/get to take something that's not too far off that mark.

I do alright. I went with something that's lower salary, but there are things in life that are more important to me than money. Dailybooth, the company whose offer I accepted, seemed to have the maximal overall combination of the things I was looking for.

What I did wasn't magic, though. I worked my ass off to get relevant work experience starting as soon as I could. I used that to get into a YC company. They liked me and my work enough to write me a letter of rec and forward my resume to the YC founder's list. FWIW, no one even asked about college beyond "how's college going?" as I was in final's week of my last semester when I interviewed with a bunch of companies after the forward.

I have heard from a friend at Zynga that highliy-skilled grads are being hired straight out of college on 100k or slightly more.

Which may be more indicative of the cost of living in the valley rather than a rise in average salaries for grads.

$100K for fresh college grads is par for the course in Seattle too, so it's not just SV.

highliy-skilled grads

I can't help but find that rather contradictory.

That was my exact same thought. I've met some bright grads, but they still are way less effective in the real world than an experienced software engineer. I can't believe we are back to the boom days of 100k + bonus straight out of school. Hey, good for them, if I was a student right now I'd be stoked.

Well anecdotally people can get near 90 at Microsoft it seems. So it's not that far off.

Of course the offer depends on previous experience such a internships and your job position (I imagine SDEs probably make more than SDETs and some teams pay better than others) but it's not unheard of.

Here are some stats for starting salaries of Cornell CS grads http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services...

The Mean salaries are around 85k $ not including the bonus, most get bonus around 10k - 30k depending on the company

Yeah, I agree here. I think that kind of offer is way above the norm, but don't forget, college kids often think they are going to make a killing right after school, and it usually doesn't pan out that way. But still, I think 95k for a senior software engineer at msft is pretty lowball, unless something is left out, like bonuses or something.

My annual bonus (cash and stock) at MS was about 30% of my salary. I dunno if that's the norm for the big/lucrative software companies or not.

I'm a CS senior, and just speaking anecdotally, my friends who interned at $BigTech all received offers above 100k.

95k's pretty good life already and data is 2 years old.

The data seems a bit off.

According to the links the H1B salaries are actually higher than what US born/citizens get for the same job.

Data could be off but not for the reason you are mentioning.

That is how it is supposed to be since these jobs are theoretically given to outsiders because you could not find suitable people within the US.

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