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Protip for salary seekers pt 2: Results from some mining of the H1-B database
- keeptrying 16y agoDude this is awesome. Being a H1B myself, I always used to wonder why Americans wouldnt mine this information for themselves. If Techcrunch gets a hold of this I think your post could snowball into something big!
- orijing 16y ago> COMPACT SOLUTIONS LLC 4 SOFTWARE ENGINEER 1801250 > EMORY UNIVERSITY 12 ASSISTANT PROFESSOR 794454 > COMCAST CABLE COMMUNICATIONS, LLC 3 ENGINEER II 308533 Does this surprise anyone else? Wow!
- schwanksta 16y agoFTA: "The top 5 can be discarded because of obviously faulty entries in the database (as much as I would like there to be a company that pays the average software engineer 1.8 million USD a year!). The first legit average seems to be the three Citigroup analysts making an average of roughly $450K."
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- alphaoverlord 16y agoI'm curious why the OP thinks the first five entries on the list are "obviously faulty entries". They do seem like a lot of money, but I am sure there can be edge cases, after all, the sample size for each of them is really small. The titles do seem rather general, but perhaps they are top positions?
- lawnchair_larry 16y agoFor the record, I am the OP, but this isn't my blog. I previously linked to the databases on HN, and just saw now that the owner of this blog did some analysis on it. But I do agree that there seemed to be some faulty entries. This was the case for all of the previous years I looked at.
- zmitri 16y agoI was just approved for an H1B for next October, and received a bit more 25% raise after the immigration lawyers had already finished all the paperwork. I highly doubt they refactored it. It's likely that some of these are just estimates, and do not include bonus figures either.
- crocowhile 16y agoDon't know about the other but there's no way that an assistant professor is paid anywhere near 0.5M/year. Probably they get that amount over the 6-7 years that their contract last (before tenure).
- jonnathanson 16y agoI do admit that I'm deeply curious about the $800,000 "Assistant Professor" position at Emory University.
- sp_ 16y agoI created the lists in the OP and to determine whether an average salary value is legit I looked at the individual entries. For those I declared invalid there was something like four entries making $55000 and one entry making $550000, the latter one being an obvious typo in the database.
- DevX101 16y agoSome of these positions can be personally identified. I just picked Physic Ventures to start and with some not too hard logic was able to figure who's salary was listed on the site.
- copper 16y agoThat's true for almost all of the startups (and in one case, a company that just filed for IPO). It wasn't too hard to match this data to LinkedIn for quite a few people I know :) Doesn't this violate some kind of privacy laws, anyway? (Edit: I mean the fact that the US Government is releasing data, not the fact that it can be mined)
- r00fus 16y agoIs it me or do those company-specific average salaries seem very high (even excluding the top 3)?
- lawnchair_larry 16y agoNote that they are average for that job title, not across the whole company. So on average, these are what Seniors or Principals make at most companies, and not your typical engineer. The list is cropped, but further down you would see companies like MS have a lower tier engineer (such as "Software Engineer I" or "Associate Software Engineer" title with a lower average.
- keeptrying 16y agoThis should make it clear that if you want to start a startup without funding, you should move to manhattan, get a job in financial services and share an apt in queens. Do this for 3 years and you could have $100k in da bank. Then u quit and then startup.
- mnutt 16y agoIt seems like a good way to make a good chunk of change to fund your startup, but as someone living in NYC I don't see it actually done that much. I think once you start working for the large bank you get used to all of the perks and it gets hard to leave. It's probably technically possible to do, but would require lots of willpower and determination that you could put into actually starting your startup instead. There's also momentum to consider; not doing something entrepreneurial right now decreases the odds that you'll start doing something entrepreneurial soon.
- iaskwhy 16y agoI'm doing it this year but in London. I believe it all goes down to this: are you really working on this to get some money for your startup or are you just making money for yourself? For me it's definitely the first option, couldn't care less about making more or less money right now.
- keeptrying 16y agoExactly! People will be buying houses and fancy cars and bottles of liquor at clubs for $250 - but you need to realize that what your doing is more important. It's hard though. People will tell u that real estate s a much better option etc... Just keep your eye on the prize.
- iaskwhy 16y agoI'm on this journey with two friends and they just waste all the money on expensive restaurants and wine, it's crazy. Then they will say something like "Yeah but this bill is only x hours of work!" but then you end up with almost no money because when you don't know how to save then it's really easy to waste it all that way. Now I'm just the opposite, I have a really hard time wasting money. By now I never had so much money in my life and still I'm completely unable to buy a Macbook Air* or something similar... I've been having some hard time trying to make my brain understand that it is quite okay to pay $30 for some dinner every once in a while. Does anyone else have this "problem"? * Which, by my friends' reasoning, is just three days of work, at most.
- sosuke 16y agoI love programming but seeing that first list I can't help but wonder what it takes to be a Director or if the Anesthesiologist route is a more sure way to 300k a year. Trading 6 years for a sure thing doesn't seem like too bad a deal.
- SeoxyS 16y agoA lot of these high-paying jobs seem a lot less interesting to someone who has the hacker mindset. To me, they certainly do. Also, you're guaranteed a nicely paying job, but there's no opportunity for massive wealth like there is in the riskier world of startups. Here, I may make 20k next year, or I may make 2 million. Anything's possible. More risk == more reward. This holds true.
- rhizome 16y agoThat's a good point. Aside from continuing education requirements (a class every year or two, or whatever, I don't know specifics), an anesthesiologist has learned all they're going to use in their job when they pass their board exams. Plus, I heard/read/apocryphalized once that anesthesiologists have the highest incidence of drug addiction of any profession. Apparently it's an occupational hazard to dip into the stash.
- barisme 16y agoDo consider though that some of these positions may include options and other non-salary compensation. Sometimes the 'perks' are really the cake and the salary is just the icing.
- Retric 16y agoThere are jobs that pay 500+k / year for 30 years with little risk. The number of start up founders that make 15+ million in their lifetime is vary small. So, going into startup's to maximize lifetime earnings is probably not a great piece of advice.
- repiret 16y agoAnesthesiologists need 8 years of post-graduate study - 4 years of medical school, 1 year of internship and 3 additional years of residency (most programs combine the internship and the rest of residency into a single coherent curriculum these days) Compared to entering a career in software straight out of undergrad, being a doctor takes a while to pay off. It takes even longer to pay off if you consider dollars per hour worked rather than dollars per year elapsed. For example, at the particular residency my wife is at, she works 1.5 to 2x as many hours as I do as a software engineer, while receiving less than half the pay. I should add that there's nothing exceptional about the number of hours either of us work or our pay.
- ReadyNSet 16y agoanybody up for charting this data?
- rglullis 16y agoYeap. I will definitely do something with it and put on salaryshare. Incredibly busy this week, though.
- nnutter 16y agoShould someone expect the salaries of H1-B employees to be comparable to resident employees? This is very interesting data but I'm wondering what all can be inferred from it.
- pquerna 16y agoYes, Under the law, H1B workers must be paid the higher of the prevailing wage or the actual wage. This gets messy because for H1Bs it is difficult to move between jobs, so it is harder for them to get raises, etc, but thats another whole story.
- loire280 16y agoThe law appears to be designed to ensure that foreign workers aren't hired for cheap to undercut the wages of US workers. If visa paperwork lives up to its reputation, however, a rational company would only hire foreign workers if they are talented enough to be worth the hassle or have skills that cannot be found elsewhere. Presumably these people would be paid well. These numbers may be higher than the true average.
- dotBen 16y ago...which is what confuses me as to why these figures are being promoted as away to be help salary negations of (presumably) US Citizens. Surely when that discussion happens the boss is going to say "yeah the other company is paying higher than the prevailing rate because they needed to satisfy the H1B salary requirement (that it be higher than the average local rate) but needed those foreign workers because of their domain expertise" (or whatever the reason was for hiring them)
- Maro 16y agoLet's take this one: CITIGROUP GLOBAL MARKETS INC. APPLICATIONS DEVELOPMENT SENIOR PROGRAMMER ANALYST $457K What do you have to know to be worth this much to a bank?
- dman 16y agoKnow the under documented legacy architecture inside out. Also helps if the bus factor of that arcane knowledge is in the low single digits.
- Maro 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
- bhousel 16y agoI believe that row is a mistake too.. Here is the record that seems to be throwing off the average: http://www.immihelp.com/h1b-sponsoring-companies-database/view-2010-3805002-citigroup_global_markets_inc.html http://www.immihelp.com/h1b-sponsoring-companies-database/vi... The web app mentioned in the article is really great for searching and give you lots more useful information: http://www.the-interweb.com/serendipity/exit.php?url_id=847&entry_id=136 http://www.the-interweb.com/serendipity/exit.php?url_id=847&... EDIT: I work with Citigroup as a consultant on their internal legal applications (including the immigration tracking database). I did a quick search and I can promise, without revealing what is in the database, that the inflated numbers for the Citigroup positions are obvious typos. We track base wage, prevailing wage, and upto wage. So (as a completely made-up example) if I see a position with a base wage of 95k, prevailing wage of 100k and upto wage of 1.15M, it's pretty obvious that someone just entered an extra zero. In short, there are no Sr. Programmer Analysts here making $1M/year or even $400k/year. Nothing to see here.
- apr 16y agoyou've just shuttered my world cry
- 16y ago
- wallflower 16y agoIn the movie ID4, the president is told by his military command that there are aliens and that there are artifacts. This is after the spaceships arrive. When the president asks why wasn't I told this (about the aliens), his advisors answer: "Two words. Plausible deniability" When you look at the H1-B database, you lose plausible deniability. If you want to take this further (for those of you who are university graduates), look at your alumni/class notes. Feel free to feel envious about the weddings/birth announcements/job promotions/degrees earned. Or maybe even feel condescension. And realize that it all doesn't matter. A person's life isn't just a set of facts, it is their personal impact on the ones they choose to love. The reason why baseball players make millions and why teachers make puny salaries is a question of financial impact. A baseball player through multiple channels (marketing, tickets, television, news) can indirectly affect many orders of magnitude people more than the teacher in their lone classroom teaching twenty kids. (This is why the Khan Academy is so powerful, it scales personal directed learning). If you want to get a more shallow sense, keep reading your class notes until you get to the deaths. Reading about people who are summed up in a paragraph. Life is not a guarantee. Anyway, realize that salary is just a number and that true wealth is not how much you earn but how long you can maintain your preferred lifestyle without working (savings, ideally mostly passive income). The meaning of life is up to you to define it.
- IgorPartola 16y agoI am not sure how this works on CA, etc. My father came to the US on an H1-B in 1999. He was hired as a contractor by an agency that specialized in bringing H1-B software developers from the former USSR and India. He then had to go look for an actual job, since this company was simply a middle man. After he found a job, he got his salary: about 1/3 of the reported number. The rest was cleaned up by the agency that brought him here. Eventually, he got his green card and left the agency, but what this implies to me is that an H1-B worker may not get that much of the salaries reported on this list. However, as I mentioned, I have no idea what percentage of H1-Bs are hired through thrid-party middle men.
- lutorm 16y agoThat sounds like an all-round illegal scheme. First, in order to get a H-1B you need an actual job offer, and with the application the employer is certifying that they will pay that rate. There is no such thing as a "middle man", you can't simply apply for an H-1B for someone with the intent of them going looking for a job when they get here.
- IgorPartola 16y agoIt's not quite as crude as you made it sound. The programmer works for company X, with a fixed hourly rate. He has the H1-B with that company, and they are the ones who are sponsoring him. Company X contracts out to Company Y who pays company X for the services provided by the developer on-site. Company Y pays Company X, and Company X in turn pays the developer. On paper this looks legitimate to me.
- lutorm 16y agoYeah, that's probably legit, but company X would (I hope) still be required to pay the programmer whatever they said in their H1B application.
- asder1 16y agoThere isn't an error with the "screenshot"? How can avg be > of max? :)
- djb_hackernews 16y agoSo Google has 506 H1B Software Engineers and they all make exactly $106,862?
- diegob 16y agoIt might be average salary.
- diegob 16y agoDoes this take into account other types of compensation like stock options? I've accepted a position as an H1-B and the salary I was offered is over 10% lower than what is listed in that data ... would it be prudent to bring it up?
- sp_ 16y agoThe website in the OP is mine, so far all people who are interested in the uncropped lists, you can get it at http://www.the-interweb.com/bdump/misc/salaries.xlsx http://www.the-interweb.com/bdump/misc/salaries.xlsx The first sheet inside the Excel file is probably the most interesting one, showing software/computer/engineer salaries for nearly 3500 jobs.