[Technophilis]

Looking at glassdoor.com and my personal experience, salaries are much lower than what people are claiming on HN

A major problem with Glassdoor salaries is the absence of a date range. The salaries they show is the average over the period of time starting when they started collecting salaries. So yes the salaries on Glassdoor tend to be lower than the current average.

A lot (too many) people on HN are claiming $200k base salary per year as being totally normal.

I agree. It is pretty high. My own reference for base salaries is my own website where I collect H-1B salaries. We also have an option to only show the salary distribution starting on a given year. For instance, for a software engineer at FB, the average base salary is $149k if you only include salaries reported after 2015 [1]. At Netflix however, Sr. Software Engineers make $200k on average[2].

[1] http://h1bpay.com/companies/Facebook/cities/Menlo%20Park-CA/...

[2] http://h1bpay.com/companies/Netflix/cities/Los%20Gatos-CA/jo...

[closeparen]

Consider also that most engineers are new grads. Glassdoor and friends should display an "average" that's very slightly higher than the new grad base salary, since most practitioners entered the field recently.

$200k base salary could well be totally normal for people with more than 10 years of experience, who are barely represented on Glassdoor.

[user5994461]

Confirm. Glassdoor is seriously biased by not having older, more experienced worker report their salary.

It's biased tower the numerous, new joiners, and they probably won't upgrade the information when they get promoted.

[photoJ]

Do you know when the paperwork is filed? ie are the listed H1b salaries based on first day of work at the company, or pay after multiple years? I'm trying to figure out if this is the money the company used to get the talent or if its reflective of their own internal raises as well?

[Technophilis]

The salaries shown on H1BPay are the salaries that the company promises to pay or is currently paying the H-1B applicant.

There are 3 common cases of when the paperwork is filed. First, foreign students who graduated from American universities in certain fields can work for a certain period of time after which they can transition to H-1B. So the salary is pretty much what they are paid when the application was filed which is somewhere between 1 and 27 months. Second, people hired from overseas or within the US who aren't new graduates and don't have a current H-1B visa. Their salary would be what the company offered to get the talent. The third case is when you transfer you H-1B visa where an application is not required so there is no change to the salary in the application.

[photoJ]

Fantastic. The rate of internal raises over the years at a company is something I've not seen a lot of statistics on. Your responses was exactly the claritrty I was looking for! Thanks!