Searchable and sortable H1B salary database | Hacker News Reader

Searchable and sortable H1B salary database

jobsort.com

163 pointsjobsort68 comments

I think we're seeing the wrong columns; prevailing wage is an immigration law term that speaks to the average wage paid for similar work in similar occupations in the same area.

That's why we see so many repeated values.

These aren't the actual salaries.

Good catch. There are two sets of numbers. Prevailing wage is data from BLS that sets a floor for H1B wages. Companies often pay much more.

This is another site that promises the same info: https://h1bdata.info/

At a glance, the numbers on the site you linked to look much more believable.

ok, citadel, totally believable salaries here. is this a typo? theres a zero missing.

Quantitative Research Lead CITADEL SECURITIES AMERICAS SERVICES LLC US$55058.00 US$55058.00 1 Quantitative Researcher Citadel Securities Americas LLC US$67288.00 US$67288.00 1 Quantitative Researcher Citadel Securities Americas Services LLC US$67288.00 US$67288.00 1

Yeah weird

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT VP | META PLATFORMS, INC. | $248768.00

Base, without equity

That's still low, that's an E7/M2 salary, VP is at least three levels higher (D1, D2, VP1).

Non-engineering roles at Meta have different salary bands and RSU comp per level than engineering ones (usually less and sometimes a lot less).

Product managers for Meta have similar pay range than eng.

This stat likely includes just base salary and not stock compensation.

Good tech companies pay employees higher than what is listed in the filing, they just don't want to divulge how much they're paying in public records. This is totally fine, there is nothing illegal about paying more.

Mediocre companies (or good startups who aren't considering this stuff too deeply) file with the exact salary.

Scam companies pay below what they filed (illegal).

So they're submitting false filings, you say? You know this how?

This is guaranteed money. I'm sure you've heard of appearance and performance fees in sports

Even the salary component is higher than what the filings say.

Yes, but there is nothing wrong with that! There is nothing wrong in committing to pay $200K but actually paying $250K.

They report actual pay to the IRS.

There is an important caveat here. H1B filings only includes guaranteed compensation, which is your base salary. Stocks and bonuses are not included here. That’s why you’ll see data points like Meta paying 200k for a VP level H1B. I reality they are absolutely not underpaying H1Bs at VP level and the person is printing millions a year.

It's just one position, not an average. There are other positions with the same title with higher salaries. Quantitative Research can be anything, basically just an Excel inputer could be called that.

I think salary expectations on HN, in tech and in the US are a bit off. Do you really believe someone crunching numbers is worth USD 600000 per year?

I think a lot of the comments where people casually dismiss salaries in the hundreds of thousands a year as too low are just attempts at flexing.

I view it more as an observation on compensation compared to value their labor brings to the employer’s bottom line.

There's some middle ground. People's salaries charted over time compared to CEO pay, productivity numbers, purchasing power, or inflation, etc, have degraded pretty badly over time.

Its Citadel, not some random company. They are infamous here in Chicago for paying people gobs of money and working you 80 hours/week. I would be highly suspect of any Citadel position under 100K.

The next Enron.

Quantitative Research as Citadel Securities is a set of specific, highly-paid, jobs.

And often paid in either bonuses or options. I haven't gone through the website much, does it distinguish pay vs. other compensation?

"Quantitative research" can mean basically anything.

In the industry, especially at a firm like citadel, it usually means a specific set of roles. It would be like "software architect" at a tech firm, the exact work might vary but by and large every software engineer is expected to have similar skills.

There is a huge hype machine on the internet where people want to believe there there are crazy high salaries in other companies. Even though they don't know anyone who works there, interviewed or otherwise even bothered to look into some actual evedence. I have had interviews with citadel and know people whose have roles with that title. Total comp is slightly below what a comparable person would make at Google or Facebook. There are a few rainmakers there but those people get everything in (cash) bonus. Many are getting a base that was set 5-10 years ago.

This is false, citadel is top of market. Google doesn’t pay that well

I think it's the other way around, actually. I think a lot of people, especially in Europe, have FOMO about the salaries in the United States. One of their coping mechanisms is to try to convince themselves that everyone is lying about their salaries.

Honestly I’m badly out of date, and all the gossip I’m hearing is that this pay isn’t prevailing anymore.

But a new grad returning intern was doing 380 at FB Thor first year in cash and stock.

And why not? These companies are printing 10MM per marginal hire.

Why is it a crime that the people doing the 18 hour days capture a bit of it?

I know more than one person who made more than $500,000 as a new grad, so it's not completely unreasonable. Most of that will be RSUs/cash bonus though, so not counted as part of H1B salary data as I understand it.

Do you really believe someone crunching numbers is worth USD 600000 per year?

- it depends where you live

- how tight that job market is

- and with inflation these days, probably 2x that.

Bit of a rant, but many things I buy are 40% more than a year ago, some are 100%, yes double the price. That means aalaries should follow the same metric.

Not even guaranteed compensation - that column is prevailing wages - avg market salary. Not what they’re paid. That’s the minimum they need to paid.

Glad to not see an auth wall, sites like this have been used in the past to collect and sell email addresses.

Random@throwaway.com can’t be that valuable surely?

Definitely, 10 minute mail is great for this, or if you actually want to keep the login you can use “masked email” through fastmail and 1password which I recommend.

That being said, most people don’t use the internet this way, and websites like OP have been used maliciously as lures to collect targeted data, such as an email list of people interested in H1Bs..

Any examples? If you’re collecting data don’t you need an email to avoid duplicate submissions

I created a site similar to this few weeks ago https://h1binfo.org/ It has 5M+ records containing H1B salary data from 2014 - 2023 and uses Meilisearch.

My employers data seems to be accurate. Great work, fast search too.

For the uninformed - what is the point of these sites? Do they serve as proxy for a more general wage database? I’m guessing there’s some disclosure law for h1b

> Do they serve as proxy for a more general wage database? I’m guessing there’s some disclosure law for h1b

That’s the idea. At least in theory, H1B salaries are meant to be in line with what native workers are paid.

Search is very fast and also found my employer name on the list. easy to use as well.

I'm seeing salaries of $17M/year ..

https://h1binfo.org/visa/464448 Looks like the application was "Withdrawn". Most probably a typo when filing?

Most of these high salaries $1M+ are either "Withdrawn" or "Denied". But there are other applications "Certified" at around $1M/Year. https://h1binfo.org/visa/469433

Hey your website looks great, I started looking around and unfortunately hit a HTTP 500 within 2 clicks :( For e.g. https://h1binfo.org/jobs/Assistant%20Professor/2023 shows a SQL query error.

Btw, very cool to see a 2023 website powered by PHP Symfony :) it's been a LONG time since I worked with PHP frameworks but good to see them still in use in newer sites.

Some numbers (like $157,477.00) are very frequent; what's up with that? Is that a specific threshold that holds legal significance?

Neat observation! My guess is that that is the prevailing wage required for H1b: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/wages

This seems to show about 86,000 records total, but aren't there about that many H1B opportunities available each year? Are the salaries not reported again each year, just in the year of the hire? Is there a way to get the unique set of all H1B salaries currently employed in the US?

These data just reflect the statutory labor certifications filed as part of the H1B process. Like with the PERM filings for green cards they tend to understate compensation in tech since they only include basic salary and not stock bases compensation which is normally half of your total comp as a senior.

Interesting low-ish means for Software Engineers for the FAANGs. Weren't they all supposed to earn 250k minimum or something?

A big chunk of FAANG compensation is stock, which isn't part of the H1b filing. Cross reference those salaries with levels.fyi to get a better picture.

> Linux Kernel Software Engineer BYTEDANCE INC.

What would ByteDance (TikTok parent company) need with a Linux kernel engineer?

Speculation

- power and performance tweaking - drivers for custom or unusual hardware (video/audio?) - security analysis - integration of software with Linux

This doesn't answer the parent commenter's question. There is no scenario that any of these would be needed for a social media app.

For the app, no.

Server side, at a big enough scale, it might make sense for optimization, tuning, measuring, resolving weird bugs, etc.

The technical beast is the internet infrastructure. The phone client is nothing.

Same reason Twitter and Meta have kernel engineers - for their backend.

BYTEDANCE submitted a patch few months ago to reduce the system reboot time for a few milliseconds. That means a lot for rebooting their hundreds of thousands of VMs.

For senior engineers you need to at least double the number to get an idea of the actual total compensation.

Would be nice to format the numbers. Adding commas to separate the thousands makes it much more readable.

This seems useless. Sorting has 360k down to $7. Either make it hourly wage or yearly salary. Both in 1 is confusing.

Not useless to me. While more preprocessing would be welcome you can easily distinguish annual, daily, hourly compensation yourself.

No you can’t. A day wage can be hourly for some. The table shows a mix of values that are meaningless.

Then you can just look at the annual ones. Anything over 75k is more than safe to say is annual. I only go that high because it seems like you need certainty that it is not quarterly or bi-annual.

What values could reasonably be both an annual salary and an hourly wage in the US, where this data is from? While of course mixing annual and hourly is bad practice and makes sorting pretty useless, it shouldn’t be difficult to distinguish the two if one is so inclined. I imagine there’s a very clear gap in that sorted sequence where the hourly values transition to annual. Take 20,000. As an annual salary you’d be living in poverty, and as an “hourly wage” you’d be making over $40,000,000 annually. No one making that much is actually paid an hourly wage of $20,000.

If I sort. Atleast on mobile. How do I figure out the lowest annual salary? I can’t. I don’t understand how anyone can defend this data. Either collect and provide good data or don’t bother at all.

I’m not defending the data. I’m pointing out that it could be processed without much difficulty to clean it up, if so desired.

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