[jagjit]

I have heard this from a lot of H1 engineers - especially ones with a couple of years of experience. I myself was one but never bought this reasoning - though cannot deny there may be some truth in it. My own understanding is that mostly this applies to startup companies: 1) They generally have a harder time recruiting so supply/demand forces them to pay higher generally. 2) Their spending extra on the work visa or residency processing is a way to buy insurance against the employee leaving any time soon(till the green-card is processed which is a period of 2yrs-infinity) 3) They generally prefer hiring recent graduates (and there are only so many US citizen graduates every year). Why they do so? Again I think because of a few reasons (though cannot deny there may not be any truth in these): a) Recent graduates are cheaper and are hungrier and a lot of the work does not need specialized phds but good computer science fundamentals. b) Freshly minted MS may not necessarily be better engineers/programmers but are more in tune with the latest tools in fashion which startups tend to use.