[elisharobinson]

Some of the reasons why this is happening :

-> Getting an assignment in the US is viewed as a reward for employees who work in the company for 5+ years.

-> H1B visa employess are given a 50% minimum discount to market rate. cause lol what are you gonna do . Quit and go back in the Queue for H1B.

-> nepotism / favoritism self explanatory.

-> Are more willing to work 40+ hours a week. Less likely to take vacations.

These are the observations of myself and members of my family who are from India.

[infecto]

Is that discount really true? There is a definite discount but I have never seen 50%, all of this data is online, you can see the payroll for H1B employees.

https://h1bdata.info/

[victor106]

I have personally experienced this in all my previous projects and my current one.

H1B does suppress wages as employees don’t care how much they are paid. They only care that they stay on H1 so they get their green cards.

However, one they get their green card they feel the same that H1B’s suppress wages…lol…

[infecto]

Eh, your not wrong but my counter point is when I have looked up people before in the public data, their salary was in line what I and others were making in the same role. The H1B data does not list name but it is detailed enough that you can generally guess who it is in small-medium size companies.

[elisharobinson]

thanks for the ref , but it kinda proves the point . your source suggests the avg comp for senior software engineer is 100-150 K . on glass door it 178-263 . https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/senior-software-engineer-... .

[infecto]

Your analysis is flawed. Its much better to run through a FAANG and compare to levels.fyi. I just did for Meta and the base salary numbers are within the ranges I saw on Levels. Actual level is not outlined so its a broad range.

These numbers are set using prevailing wage calculations for a geographical area and role. There is an incentive for companies to figure out ways to get it as low as possible but I have never seen 50% myself, that is a hard stretch to pass the DOL.

[elisharobinson]

so your telling me my analysis is flawed because i didnt take META as a base. MY guy the article is about CTS. NOT META.

H1B is to tech what H2A is for agriculture . Yall want to Drive the combine ( Managment, Software development, VC ) but dont want to do the dirty work ( QA, Devops, IT admin )

[infecto]

>Yall want to Drive the combine ( Managment, Software development, VC ) but dont want to do the dirty work ( QA, Devops, IT admin )

Woah, less caps and racist thoughts and more critical thinking please. I am saying taking a simple average between the two like you did is flawed for a number of reasons.

1) You don't even have an apples to apples comparison. H1B data is based on prevailing wage which is just base pay. So taking your link, 129K - $171K/yr comparing to your other data, 100-150k. Lets take a simple average. and say the glassdoor wage is 150k, that means 50% minimum, remember you said minimum, is 75k. That does not really track with 125k.

2) Prevailing wage is based not only on the role but the geographical location too. An overall average between those two datasets is a very rough guide and I think its better to do direct comparisons at a company level or regional level. Again there is still a lot of normalization and cleanup to do in the datasets, the H1B data is not great for analysis right out of the gate.

Your case of a minimum 50% reduction in base pay is hard to defend except in outlier cases. If it was closer to 25% I think its a much easier number to defend.

[elisharobinson]

so you would admit that a 25% diff in base pay would be plausible . so would you also admit a 25% diff in benifits would also be plausible . granted the total diff would work out to somewhere around 30~40% range , but i still hold if we are comparing true apple to apple and we exclude FAANG , we would most likely get in the 50% range.

Some emphasis should be made on the total percentage of H1B applicants 75% are Indian and at-least ~90% of those are in the TECH working for CTS, TCS both are consulting firms They dont sell any products or services (and dont have offices in SF). They survive by giving the lowest bid for a service . And when the minimum wage is the lower bound why bother paying any higher (60-75% discount), This was the case prior to trump. After Trump H1Bs became scarce and to justify it you needed "highly skilled" employees and they made the paygap more justifiable to 45-50%.

So i still hold my original statement H1B is for tech what H2A is for agriculture.