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Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public

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Re: Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public

#21

Post by tejaswiy »

timr wrote: post #5

Addendum for new grads interviewing at Microsoft: when you go to the welcome center on the morning of your interview, the H1-B filings for all recently hired foreign employees are posted near the candidate waiting area. These have salaries. These are especially helpful for answering that eternal first HR question about salary expectations. The best answer is to dodge the question entirely, but if you're not good at n…

Do you know what the middle of the posted range is, just out of curiosity? If I was interviewing at Microsoft, I don't think I'd want to go look at the salary postings before going in :S

Re: Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public

#22

Post by ajg1977 »

prpon wrote: post #11

Better yet, if your company employs H1-B visa holders, they are required by law to put up the job advertisement along with salary offered in a public area of the office. This requirement is to give opportunity to existing employees for the new position. In a small company of about 400 people, where I worked, the job advertisements were posted in the kitchen area and it wasn't very hard to deduce what the salary of th…

Not exactly.

A company only has to advertise these jobs if they are determined to be "H1-B dependent" (> 15% of employees are on that visa), or they need labor certification for a different form of visa (H2-B, E3).

Re: Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public

#24

Post by ajg1977 »

aristus wrote: post #13

Anecdotally, I've found that there is a "visa discount". H1B workers are paid a lot less than you'd think by looking at these public numbers or the salaries paid to citizens. When you can't quit without being deported, you tend not to negotiate too hard or complain when you don't get a raise.

I've heard this many times but have yet to see it.

An H1-B holder is free to leave their employer at anytime and move company, providing that new company agree to file the change with USCIS. This can be done an unlimited number of times and is straightforward because it's not a "new" visa. Many companies will not employ a foreign national without a visa, but will happily take ones with existing H1-B's.

These transfers are common in the tech industry, at least in my experience on the west coast. Thankfully I'm now green carded and no longer have to worry about these things though :)

Re: Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public

#25

Post by barrkel »

aristus wrote: post #13

Anecdotally, I've found that there is a "visa discount". H1B workers are paid a lot less than you'd think by looking at these public numbers or the salaries paid to citizens. When you can't quit without being deported, you tend not to negotiate too hard or complain when you don't get a raise.

I don't think H1-B visa holders are as desperate as you think. My company got me one, but I never moved, for a bunch of reasons. Salary was 90K a few years ago, and I only had a couple of years experience. Bigger blocker though was lack of vacation days, which was tied to seniority and not really negotiable. IOW I could have negotiated higher salary, but not what I wanted. So I didn't jump.

Re: Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public

#26

Post by ajg1977 »

http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=107

Christer Ericsson, a tech director at Sony Santa Monica (God of War) has pulled out all the figures for game developers a few times. As a point of reference, in my experience, game developer salaries tend to be ~10% higher than a similar role at Microsoft/Google/Apple but with poorer benefits.

Re: Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public

#27

Post by chussad »

tzs wrote: post #23

For you Jedi out there, the headache you are feeling right now is thousands of copies of Excel 2008 on Macs crashing as people try to make pivot tables from this data. My 2009 Mac Pro with 8 GB of RAM was defeated by the 2010 file.

in case this helps, this is for the year 2010 data create table visa_status (

LCA_CASE_NUMBER text, STATUS text, LCA_CASE_SUBMIT text, VISA_CLASS text, LCA_CASE_EMPLOYMENT_START_DATE text, LCA_CASE_EMPLOYMENT_END_DATE text, LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_NAME text,

LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_ADDRESS text,

LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_CITY text,

LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_STATE text,

LCA_CASE_EMPLOYER_POSTAL_CODE text,

LCA_CASE_SOC_CODE text,

LCA_CASE_SOC_NAME text,

LCA_CASE_JOB_TITLE text,

LCA_CASE_WAGE_RATE_FROM text,

LCA_CASE_WAGE_RATE_TO text,

LCA_CASE_WAGE_RATE_UNIT text,

FULL_TIME_POS text,

TOTAL_WORKERS text,

LCA_CASE_WORKLOC1_CITY text,

LCA_CASE_WORKLOC1_STATE text,

PW_1 text,

PW_UNIT_1 text,

PW_SOURCE_1 text,

OTHER_WAGE_SOURCE_1 text,

YR_SOURCE_PUB_1 text,

LCA_CASE_WORKLOC2_CITY text,

LCA_CASE_WORKLOC2_STATE text,

PW_2 text,

PW_UNIT_2 text,

PW_SOURCE_2 text,

OTHER_WAGE_SOURCE_2 text,

YR_SOURCE_PUB_2 text,

LCA_CASE_NAICS_CODE text,

Decision_Date text);

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '/H1B_2010_TEXT/H1B_FY2010.txt' INTO TABLE visa_status FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';

Re: Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public

#28

Post by robryan »

timr wrote: post #5

Addendum for new grads interviewing at Microsoft: when you go to the welcome center on the morning of your interview, the H1-B filings for all recently hired foreign employees are posted near the candidate waiting area. These have salaries. These are especially helpful for answering that eternal first HR question about salary expectations. The best answer is to dodge the question entirely, but if you're not good at n…

Couldn't you pick a number over the top and have them bring you down? Or are the recruiters likely to not even consider you if you do that?

Re: Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public

#29

Post by aristus »

barrkel wrote: post #25
aristus wrote: post #13

Anecdotally, I've found that there is a "visa discount". H1B workers are paid a lot less than you'd think by looking at these public numbers or the salaries paid to citizens. When you can't quit without being deported, you tend not to negotiate too hard or complain when you don't get a raise.

I don't think H1-B visa holders are as desperate as you think. My company got me one, but I never moved, for a bunch of reasons. Salary was 90K a few years ago, and I only had a couple of years experience. Bigger blocker though was lack of vacation days, which was tied to seniority and not really negotiable. IOW I could have negotiated higher salary, but not what I wanted. So I didn't jump.

As a class, perhaps not. All I know is from my what I observed with friends and family, mostly from Latin America, and many not in technology.

Re: Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public

#30

Post by jawn »

Time for a some what off topic anecdote.

My workplace used to post all H1-B pay rates in the breakroom.

The day after my review, in which I brought up the pay discrepancy between me and the H1-B workers at a similiar grade, they all came down never to reappear.

This is a fairly large company, which made it even more shocking.

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