OP: the 'administrator' button doesn't load new data, leaves previously rendered data in place.
That's an unfortunate result of some brackets having zero data and my code not handling that edge case well :(
Thanks for letting me know!
Show HN: A histogram of salaries given to H1B workers in the software industry
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Re: Show HN: A histogram of salaries given to H1B workers in the software industry
#12This gets to the rub of prevailing wage.
You are hiring a developer, do you call her an engineer where the prevailing wage is 87k or do you call her a programmer where the prevailing wage is 61k?
This type of fraud is difficult to prove and there probably isn't even anyone responsible in the government to verify or investigate issues.
EDIT: forgot to mention that the prevailing wage can be determined by salary surveys provided by the employer themselves (!!) during the labor application, giving even more incentive for tech companies to suppress wages by any means possible.
Re: Show HN: A histogram of salaries given to H1B workers in the software industry
#13This is pretty interesting especially for cities which have mainly a single software giant to know sort of how much an engineer in that company makes. Like for example Kirkland ( google ). There might be others like Menlo Park (Facebook ? ) too.
Re: Show HN: A histogram of salaries given to H1B workers in the software industry
#14I would like to see the 'value' taken from the point of view of the employer; how much is an H1B visa worth in terms of cost savings over a local employee?
Well, it's hard to quantify, but I'm guessing most of these employers derive tremendous value from having an employee they can basically own, and not have to worry about them leaving for a better company for a number of years. Obviously companies like Google and Facebook treat their employees well, but many of these visas are going to companies which are not Google or Facebook.
Re: Show HN: A histogram of salaries given to H1B workers in the software industry
#15It'd be interesting to see how H1B salaries compare to normal salaries, but that data probably isn't publicly available, right?
Exactly, I was kind of surprised that the H1B data was public in the first place. But private companies usually don't release their salary info. I don't even think public companies do.
payscale and glassdoor has some data but not publicly available. ie http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-eng...
Re: Show HN: A histogram of salaries given to H1B workers in the software industry
#16This is not relevant: > The best city for software engineers was Menlo Park with an average salary of $130,640 The best city for software engineers should not determined on salary only. If the cost of living is 10X cheaper in Huntington Beach and the average salary is $125k then the best city by far is Huntington Beach. Then again there is a lot more than salary to consider before moving to a city...
You're right. But I had to use some metric and I thought it was interesting to show some data about cities. As an interesting point, engineers in Menlo Park earn $30k more than in San Francisco. I'm not sure Menlo is that much more expensive to live in.
Remember that Facebook is the largest employer in Menlo Park by a factor of about 10, which will totally skew those rankings.
Edit: to be more clear, I'm making two points. Firstly, Facebook is not known for the sort of Tata/Infosys style abusive H1b (and there'll be almost none of them in Menlo Park) whilst SF is much larger, and there could easily be such a company with an office in SF.
Furthermore, the bar for entry to work as an engineer at Facebook is possibly higher than in SF as a whole.
Re: Show HN: A histogram of salaries given to H1B workers in the software industry
#17It'd be interesting to see how H1B salaries compare to normal salaries, but that data probably isn't publicly available, right?
By law, foreigners should not have a lower salary. When a company sponsor an employee for a visa, the salary is one of the criteria to check for the immigration. They should/have to make sure it match the average salary in the office location. So, if the office is in Boulder, CO instead of San Francisco then it's ok to not pay your employee $100k+.
But a least 4 of the top 10 companies sponsoring for visas in the US are playing very dirty[1][2][3][4] and pay there employee a lot less than they should.
And for what it's worth, most of this companies, now in trouble, are:
- Exploiting cheap labor from India.
- Compromising career and future opportunity of the employee they sponsor
- Affecting thousands of other visa applicants workers who want to move to the US and can't due to the illegal practice of those companies.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023045275045791674...
[2] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-04-04/news...
[3] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-07-20/news...
[4] http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2009/...
Re: Show HN: A histogram of salaries given to H1B workers in the software industry
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, I was kind of surprised that the H1B data was public in the first place. But private companies usually don't release their salary info. I don't even think public companies do.
payscale and glassdoor has some data but not publicly available. ie http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-eng...
Re: Show HN: A histogram of salaries given to H1B workers in the software industry
#19This gets to the rub of prevailing wage. You are hiring a developer, do you call her an engineer where the prevailing wage is 87k or do you call her a programmer where the prevailing wage is 61k? This type of fraud is difficult to prove and there probably isn't even anyone responsible in the government to verify or investigate issues. EDIT: forgot to mention that the prevailing wage can be determined by salary survey…
There is. Lately, a lot of the top companies sponsoring for visa are getting in trouble because of fraud[1].
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023045275045791674...
Re: Show HN: A histogram of salaries given to H1B workers in the software industry
#20Alternatively, you could look at what % raise a former H1-b visa holder receives when he gets his greencard.
I heard it can be 2x-3x, but I've never seen a formal analysis.