Your presumption is either (if you not a h1 candidate) far away from the fact or don't want to accept the truth.
You are looking at the top 100 companies and their full-time employees but not at the 1000s of vendor-employer ponzi scheme/scams that happen every day in the form of contractors who apply with fake resumes, take proxy interviews and outsource the assigned work to someone in India. Doesn't stop there, the dependents of those do a unlicensed food selling, baby sitting, work in local stores, what not. The hard to digest fact is the student who comes on F1 visa, succumbs to the pressure of 90 days period to get into a job to maintain the visa status joins a consultancy company, which starts the game. These consultancies market the candidate with high experience fake resume, arranges proxy candidate to take interviews, even Falsify the requirement of GC/citizenship candidate requirement - all these to charge the client a 100$/hr and pay a mere 40$/hr to the candidate through their sister companies acting as layers. A honest try from USCIS to do a quick scan in containing these will drop at least 50% of H1B lottery applications, void 30% of the consulting company licenses and also help the right talent to get an opportunity. If you are a gov/USCIS rep, drop me an email I'll be more than happy to provide more details, and possible ways of catching the wrong ones.
Salary is not even the issue. The main issue is the employment restrictions. Instead of making H1-B a visa that lets an individual full freedom (like green card), it's tied to an employer and moving jobs is not that easy, and many employers also sponsor for green card, which is another process that can take years and make it harder to move. During this time the employee has little leverage asking for promo or raises. (promo and raises usually appear after the green card..)
Once you let employees freedom, the market will take care of the salary. I also understand that employers invest in the visa application and relocation of people, so it should be fair to them as well. This can solved by having a period (1-year is pretty reasonable) that prohibits new visa holders from moving companies.
Funny how ppl don't like to mention this and just focus on H1Bs getting paid "market rates".
It's almost like the SV's previous gentleman agreement of non-poaching got replaced with "hey, let's use H1Bs, sure we might have to pay near market rates, but at least we can tie them down for at least 3/5 years without any option of leaving".
H-1B holders can change jobs even without a green card. It's more of a hassle (takes 4-6 weeks) and has been made worse by this administration's repeated suspension of premium processing of applications. But visa holders aren't "tied" to their employers or "indentured servants".
I said it's not that easy, not that it's impossible. Also, H1-B transfer cost some money and involves lawyers, so some companies, like many startups, don't want to deal with that. The bottom line is that H1-B employees are at a disadvantage.
SV isn't the only place you find H1B's. Everyone from Toyota, AA, Sabre, etc in the DFW area has hired what seems like 1000's. There is hardly anyone but H1B's at Toyota in Plano from what I understand. I have heard some companies are laying of permanent staff and keeping H1B's because they're less expensive.
Personal experience in my part of the world seems to suggest that it is cost. Permanent employees are expensive and H1B's are so terrified of losing employment they are willing to work around the clock and for less.
I would like to see the whole program gone. I don't believe it is being used as it was intended.
I know of at least a few just from my office that are not on that site. Could it be that they are hidden through a contracting company and not hired directly?
Exactly, shut them down, American interests will be protected. Most of the folks getting on the H1-B have a masters degree in an American university, if they are in SV, it's usually a top-tier one. I've personally made some of the best hires on-campus.
I’d love to see comprehensive data on this. I worked at a fortune 10 oil and gas company in Houston. We had onshore contractors across a range, but I know a few of them made less than $18 an hour. The rest that we paid went to two different contracting companies.
It's possible (maybe even likely) that title deflation is happening, but based on my experience the salaries are definitely in line with the pay ranges for each job title (I worked at Amazon for 3 and a half years, so I have some first and second hand information on pay.)
If nothing else it's a great resource to see the unfiltered payscale at SV companies.
Thanks for the data. I see comments across threads on HN that say that H1-B hires are common. What is the incentive to hire them then? Are professionals in the US really that ill-equipped? I guess there is a bit of cognitive dissonance with FAANG complaining about no qualified workers but then FAANG only hired people who went to Stanford or Harvard and such.
I worked at two FAANG companies and my degree is from the University of Arizona. I only met a few people there whose degrees were from elite schools. Where do you get the impression that they only hire people from Stanford and Harvard?
Many SV companies are in constant need of more skilled engineers.
Since the H1B visa can be transferred, when I arrived in the USA, nothing would have prevented me from going door to door and find a better paying job. Especially in the SV where there are tons of companies hiring.
So companies have a good incentive to give you a fair salary.
This is not true for all visas. In particular there is one visa (sorry can't remember its name off the top of my head) that is an "international transfer visa" : you work for one year for the company in a foreign country and then you can move to the USA while continuing to work for that company. It is pretty easy to get that visa but it is also very hard to transfer it to another company afaik.
Hiring is also a bit broken in our industry. The thing is, it is often pretty hard to distinguish what makes a good or a bad engineer. This being said, there are just not enough skilled engineers in the USA.
It would absolutely be possible to hire more local engineers and train them on the job but that would cost a lot of time for uncertain results. Companies prefer to hire engineers that can already be pretty productive from day 1.
> Are professionals in the US really that ill-equipped?
Americans are plenty smart, but they are only 4% of the world population. American companies compete on an international stage and not having access to the other 96% of talent would be a competitive disadvantage.
I think it's more that they're fairly indentured. Their visa is tied to a specific _kind_ of work, they're legally prevented from making money in any other way other than their current job, and while they can change jobs, my understanding is it is generally viewed as risky (for instance, if the new place doesn't work out, you've got a few short months to find employment or your visa is no good and you have to uproot your life)
It'd be really interesting to see data on how often H1B's change jobs compared to the rest of the population.
My anecdotal experience as a hiring manager in tech firms for over a decade: it’s not about money, it’s about quickly finding qualified employees. Unemployment has been (until recently) low. There wasn’t some large supply of unemployed, qualified engineers sitting around. Nearly everyone I hired already had a job. Expanding the search globally just gave me a better chance of finding someone.
There are plenty of >200k H1B workers in SV, and I do believe these engineers and specialists will wonder how they can do their work elsewhere if they can't reasonably plan a few years into the future:
That argument is wrong. H1Bs are liked by Silicon Valley because they want to be able to hire the best people from anywhere, and not restrict their talent pool to 5% of the world population.
All reputable Silicon Valley companies pay people exactly the same whether they are on a visa, have a green card, or are a US citizen.
One thing to remember is that in many cases H1-B workers are brought over by sponsoring companies which take a huge cut (I know cases of 40% or more) out of their salaries for the service of securing them the Visa. So those salaries might appear to be a certain number but the workers themselves may actually receive significantly less while some rent seeking company stashes the differences.
I know for a fact that in my industry (not in SV) H1-B wages are lower, going off both public data and conversations I've had with H1-B coworkers, many who I consider my friends.
As a side note, I don't blame H1-B workers at all for coming here. They're generally great developers and great people.
If some of your best friends are H1-B workers wouldn't the right answer be changing the regulations such that companies must pay market rate (as in for the US labor market, not internationally) for H1-B employees here?
In the companies I've worked at, H1-B workers get compensated in software engineering roles just as well as their peers, I've also seen outliers where it's significantly higher (depending on when they joined, how much in demand they were with competing offers, etc).
I getting seemingly contradictory comments here but one could weave a coherent story out of all of them:
1) H1B's get salaries that are comparable to US engineer salaries.
2) A middleman takes a big bite out of that, the engineer thus takes home less.
3) H1B's are essentially like most immigrants, indentured servants who have no freedom to leave their employers, thus have little leverage asking for promotions or even autonomy as an employee.
4) Companies probably are most aware of 3) but it seems like at least for FAANG the biggest factor is they don't want to invest in training people and rather want people who already are skilled and such. It's probably true if you draw your net very tightly yes anyone can find that there aren't enough qualified workers out there who won't demand I guess near half a mill salaries.
I think it's an astro-turf campaign, it feels like it. Because no one thinking logically is gonna push an agenda that hard without actually thinking through it.
Not astroturfing. Technically underpaying is illegal but there are ways around paying an H1-B worker what a US citizen might receive. Title reduction, etc. Even if the total paid is the same, consulting companies that help sponsor workers get a huge cut of the salary so ultimately we have workers being paid less.
> Technically underpaying is illegal but there are ways around paying an H1-B worker what a US citizen might receive. Title reduction, etc. Even if the total paid is the same, consulting companies that help sponsor workers get a huge cut of the salary so ultimately we have workers being paid less.
I'm sorry to break it to you, if your company isn't paying prevailing wages, they're doing something illegal. They need to be shut-down, not the whole fucking program.
There’s nothing illegal going on here. I posted earlier that I was at an oil and gas company in Houston, a Fortune 10 company at the time. We had IT contractors from Larsen and Toubro. As an example, one guy who reported to me was paid < $20 an hour after L&TI and another contracting company in the middle took their cut. He wasn’t thrilled with that situation but his other option was to quit and go back to India. The worst part was I couldn’t hire him directly because of his contract. He wasn’t allowed to quit and directly work for us. Kind of live slavery.
> Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater.
According to you, L&T were taking a cut out of the wages. Honestly, you should blow the whistle. L&T or whatever that middleman company is, they need to shutdown their H1-B program.
My company has a clause that we can’t hire people from this company for 9 months. If he waits around 9 months he’ll have to leave the country wayyyy before that.
Lots of companies such as Mahindra, Wipro etc bring their people on B1, J1, L1 and employ them illegally. They receive INDIAN wages, while working in US, and the poor folks work just for bagging power back in India. For them, having worked in US increases potential wage in their home country.
You are looking at the top 100 companies and their full-time employees but not at the 1000s of vendor-employer ponzi scheme/scams that happen every day in the form of contractors who apply with fake resumes, take proxy interviews and outsource the assigned work to someone in India. Doesn't stop there, the dependents of those do a unlicensed food selling, baby sitting, work in local stores, what not. The hard to digest fact is the student who comes on F1 visa, succumbs to the pressure of 90 days period to get into a job to maintain the visa status joins a consultancy company, which starts the game. These consultancies market the candidate with high experience fake resume, arranges proxy candidate to take interviews, even Falsify the requirement of GC/citizenship candidate requirement - all these to charge the client a 100$/hr and pay a mere 40$/hr to the candidate through their sister companies acting as layers. A honest try from USCIS to do a quick scan in containing these will drop at least 50% of H1B lottery applications, void 30% of the consulting company licenses and also help the right talent to get an opportunity. If you are a gov/USCIS rep, drop me an email I'll be more than happy to provide more details, and possible ways of catching the wrong ones.