Database of all H1B petitions by company | Hacker News Reader

Database of all H1B petitions by company

visadoor.com

130 pointsambrood39 comments

I came across this link which lists in detail every H1B petition filed by an employer over last few years. One interesting thing is that they list the actually wage offered by a company for a given position to the beneficiary of each petition. This perhaps a more accurate representation of salaries in Tech industry than the glassdoor review.

Indeed! Thankfully, someone has compiled this data and made it easily searchable: http://www.salar.ly/

VisaDoor is a great resource, and we recommend it pretty heavily at http://OfferLetter.io .

There's something very visceral about being able to look at someone's specific offer, knowing that there is a person out there

I also wrote a bit about salary research in general, on our blog:

http://offerletter.io/blog/201410-research.html

And yes, to your point - absolutely more accurate than Glassdoor.

As someone who has gone through this process, I'm sad to say the petition can have a 'projected' salary. So it's just as fudged a number as any. It holds no bearing on what the worker would truly get.

This just looks full of Ads .. more detailed Analytical analysis is here - https://chartio.com/blog/2013/09/the-data-behind-h1b-visas

I'm not sure how I feel about the fact I was just able to look up my bosses salary.

What's wrong with transparency?

Many companies forbid internal discussions of salary. You can easily guess why.

In the US, federal law bars employers from forbidding internal discussions of salary and benefits.

http://www.twc.state.tx.us/news/efte/salary_discussions.html

Interesting - I've worked at US companies with policies just like the one at the top of that page. I had no clue they were illegal. Hard to enforce was obvious though, and I do remember breaking such a policy at least once.

There are policies that the company can't disclose your salary, but I think that people just assume the existence of a (highly illegal) policy that says that you can't discuss your own salary. I make a point of telling anybody who wants to know, and when the specific number is relevant to a conversation (not very often) to not hesitate in giving it.

It's the least I can do for fellow workers, and I know that my salary is no measure of my worth.

In some countries we discuss openly about salaries.

But the US is not one of those countries, and this dataset is US specific.

Can anybody tell me why wage offer and prevailing wage don't match up? Is there some kinda limit on what an immigrant can be paid?

H1-B workers can only be paid at or above prevailing wages in the area per Department of Labor stats. This is set in the law as to avoid displacing US workers.

Haha, having worked in the Indian offshoring industry for the last 9 years, I can only say that this is a joke. At least 100 of my co-workers have moved to US with wages much less than their American counterparts.

"Prevailing wages" is one of those statistics that can often be surprising. The bottom line is that some businesses, sample size and definitions of how the jobs are aggregated can drag the average down.

If you classify someone as a "Web Developer" then they will fall in bracket that is ~55% of the "Computer Programmer" bracket (this data is by County so it varies a lot by geography).

AL programmers are paid from 61k to 95k. SF programmers are basically 20+k higher.

This can also be the reason you see a company having multiple disparate titles or changing them seemingly at random.

Well most American employers do take this very seriously. I've typically been offered salaries well past the prevailing wage.

Oh, I see! So the "prevailing wage" column is the one that is the wage in the area. I understand now. I misunderstood it to mean "the wage which they actually were able to get after being employed".

Cool. Thanks for the explanation!

It doesn't look like applications from Google have been denied. Since the H1B visas are drawn in a lottery where there's three times as many applications as the quota, how are Google able to get all their application certified?

EDIT: Apparently 21/2436 have been denied. That's still nowhere close to 2/3 though

I can't find my own H1B in the database. I don't think the data is complete.

EDIT: I found another page that actually did have my own H1B: http://h1b.myftp.org/ . However, I believe it did show one H1B in my company as approved which is actually denied.

The published database is actually for the Foreign Labor Certification application (a.k.a LCA), which precedes making an H-1B application, and mostly approved. A certified LCA may not result into a successful H-1B petition though.

Many of these applications are probably for a transfer of status implying that the beneficiaries are already on an H1B working for some other employer.

I haven't seen any tech company beating the number requests from IBM yet. Please post if you do...

Wipro has over 6,000 so far this year

Does anyone know if I can get the raw data in any form without scraping the website?q

http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm#d...

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/caseh1b.aspx

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/download.aspx

I'm wondering why my petition is not there... what could be the reason ?

I can't find some companies on there I know have done it too.

If you want more detailed information, companies that have Labor Certification Applications are required to maintain Public Access Files, to be presented for perusal on demand to anyone that wants to see it, both at the company headquarters and the facility where the nonimmigrant worker is working.

The LCA has to be included in the PAF, but there's other stuff in there, too.

Likely all useless to you unless you're an investigative reporter, immigration activist, or just masochistic statistician, but it's supposed to be there, nonetheless.

Some interesting outliers in there, for example Google's CFO, Patrick Pichette, at $650,000 in 2012

[1]http://visadoor.com/h1bvisa-2012-I-200-12121-384409/chief-fi...

I was surprised that India leads green card applications by such a huge margin. China and India should be about level since they both send about the same number of students to higher ed in the US and in similar specialties. Though I do see a lot more Chinese nationals in genomics/molecular sciences.

A fair amount of those GC applicants are also the people who came here via consulting companies like Wipro/TCS etc.

I was wondering about that because I saw only one application from my employer, but a few dozen from an Indian outsourcer that we have used in the past. This town is small enough that it's likely 90%+ of them are in this company.

s/H1B/LCA

I'm in that data, yet I have an E-3, not an H-1B.

One unintended consequence of moving to the US that I wasn't expecting is that now my friends back home roughly know what my salary is. I understood when moving here that the LCA (which has salary details) would be posted in public spaces, but I didn't notice it was also a matter of public record which in this day and age, means global public record.

I work in a smaller city, so while I may have been relatively anonymous in somewhere like Silicon Valley, my location, company and role and year of employment is more that enough to uniquely identify me. Such is life.

Good news is: visas which don't require labor certification do not appear in the data. I'm on an O-1 and I'm not in it.

Is there a similar database for L1a visas available?

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