6 ms·

H1B Salaries in the US

177 points by smokinn 15y ago

smokinn 15y ago
If there's anything else you'd like to know I can post a follow-up or you can download the mdb database here: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/CaseH1B.aspx http://www.flcdatacenter.com/CaseH1B.aspx and the visualization software I used here: http://www.tableausoftware.com/products/desktop/download http://www.tableausoftware.com/products/desktop/download to check it out yourself.
Maven911 15y ago
would you be able to provide the average programmer salary for the biggest visa spenders
- smokinn 15y ago
  If you mean for example the average of all programmers inside Microsoft compared to the average of those on H1B, no I can't since that data isn't public. The H1B database is public and you're required by law to register every H1B hire in it. That's the data source I was looking at. Companies don't typically advertise what salaries they pay employees if they don't have to.
  - sriramk 15y ago
    I can tell you that Microsoft (and I'm sure the same holds true for Google and others) paid everyone the same, regardless of their visa process. Your financial package negotiation process was completely separate from your immigration status. Companies like Microsoft and Google sponsors a lot of visas because they try to find the best engineers, wherever they may be and then get them here.
Cherian_Abraham 15y ago
Upvote for not only interesting data analysis, but also for being objective about it. I clicked on the story, expecting a rant for one or the other, but found numbers speaking loudly than opinion ever could. Thanks.
dmix 15y ago
Its interesting how the top H1B companies are IT consultancy companies. There are far too many enterprise I.T. consultants and I'm all for B2B adoption of software. I question how much value these consultants add sometimes. I hear so many stories of failed deployments and spending millions on projects a few competent individuals could of accomplished.
- liuwei6 15y ago
  Outsourcing companies have lower salaries on average. Google salary http://www.salarylist.com/company/Google-Salary.htm?order=1 http://www.salarylist.com/company/Google-Salary.htm?order=1 Microsoft salary http://www.salarylist.com/company/Microsoft-Salary.htm?order=1 http://www.salarylist.com/company/Microsoft-Salary.htm?order... vs Wipro http://www.salarylist.com/company/Wipro-Salary.htm?order=1 http://www.salarylist.com/company/Wipro-Salary.htm?order=1 Accenture http://www.salarylist.com/company/Accenture-Salary.htm?order=1 http://www.salarylist.com/company/Accenture-Salary.htm?order...
  - keys1234 15y ago
    I have worked for one such company, the salary of a fresher joining such indian IT consultant companies range from 6k to 10k $ per YEAR.
  - lsc 15y ago
    and, generally speaking, lower quality people. The consulting companies seem to love picking up bright, young, attractive people with little experience after college. I mean, one place I worked, accenture snapped up half our team. Now, these were all bright kids; I'd have hired them... in entry level positions.
  - lsc 15y ago
    >Outsourcing companies have lower salaries on average. and, generally speaking, lower quality people. The consulting companies seem to love picking up bright, young, attractive people with little experience after college. I mean, one place I worked, accenture snapped up half our team. Now, these were all bright kids; I'd have hired them... in entry level positions.
georgieporgie 15y ago
It must really suck to be a senior software engineer making less than 95k knowing that there are probably some new grads that get an initial offer of more than that. Wait, really? By "some" we're talking "very, very few" right? Surely salaries haven't come that far since when I graduated.
- smokinn 15y ago
  Well anecdotally people can get near 90 at Microsoft it seems. So it's not that far off. Of course the offer depends on previous experience such a internships and your job position (I imagine SDEs probably make more than SDETs and some teams pay better than others) but it's not unheard of.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- ImprovedSilence 15y ago
  Yeah, I agree here. I think that kind of offer is way above the norm, but don't forget, college kids often think they are going to make a killing right after school, and it usually doesn't pan out that way. But still, I think 95k for a senior software engineer at msft is pretty lowball, unless something is left out, like bonuses or something.
  - city41 15y ago
    My annual bonus (cash and stock) at MS was about 30% of my salary. I dunno if that's the norm for the big/lucrative software companies or not.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  The number has been anecdotally creeping up. It was less than a year ago that I was reading a really good software dev could expect to make a little over 80k straight out of college. Either the competition for good programmers really did get that fierce, or HN's collective estimation of a good programmer salary has been undergoing self-inflation.
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
Interesting stuff. I've got a few buddies working finance in NYC on visas, the're still making good bank. I would guess you're a west coaster though? Just things like being in NJ for a tax break, unlikely. NJ has tons and TONS of people(and taxes), don't let the 'little' town of Edison fool you, it's really still one huge suburb of NY. With a huge population from surrounding areas to pull talent from. Also, believe or not, most middle age people (HB1 peeps too) don't want to have to deal with NYC. Also, there is plenty of B2B and consulting work to be done outside the Oracles and IBM's of the world, don't think the big names do all the work, or even pay the best. Often times the smaller company will pay much much more, as their overhead is often a smaller percentage of revenues.
- smokinn 15y ago
  Actually, I'm from Canada which is why I don't know much about US cities outside the brand-name ones. Thanks for the clarification though.
technoir 15y ago
looks like there was a minor error there. The prevailing wage is not the wage offered to the H1B visa recipient, so it's not necessarily how much is being spent. That field is a required field for filing the application and is itself a statistic generated by a third party. it's a nice analysis though.
- smokinn 15y ago
  Ouch, you're right.. I really screwed up there. There's a wage_rate column and a prevailing_wage_rate and I should have used the former.. I'll try to fix this up asap.
  - technoir 15y ago
    statistics is hard. There is a good field description list out there... also it might be interesting to look at the status of applications. For example are there any applications where the wage rate was below the prevailing wage and were accepted? What is the relationship between % over prevailing wage and acceptance of the application? That might lead to a useful model.
    - smokinn 15y ago
      You're right, that would definitely be interesting stuff to look at. I'll probably delve deeper into this in a couple of days.. For now I just fixed up all my charts and I'm about to start editing the post where my commentary is now off.
- refurb 15y ago
  That's right. The prevailing wage comes from the Dept of Labor. Companies are required to pay at least the prevailing wage. I know when I was on H1-B, I was paid a good 50% more than the prevailing wage.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
Some context/theorizing about Edison, NJ. Edison is a largely Indian town. In particular, it attracts many people who don't want personal exposure to the US or non-Indians - such a lifestyle would be difficult anywhere besides Edison or Jersey City. They are only in the US to earn USD. My theory as to why Edison wages are so low: most of the Edison companies are low end bodyshops - if you need a warm body with J2EE, they will give you a warm body. Their competitive advantage is that the Edison guys they hire never talk to non-Indians [1] and never discover they are ridiculously underpaid. Incidentally, the food in Edison is fantastic. Jersey City also has good low end food (e.g., dosas), though nothing great at the higher end. [1] It's not even an Indian nationalism thing - many of them avoid socializing with Indians from a different state/ethnicity. I get dirty looks when they see me with an Indian girl.
- Cherian_Abraham 15y ago
  You cracked me up there, with that last bit. Its so bloody true, not all the time, but there is that state-affinity thing going. Do understand, cultures vary widely state to state, cuisine varies, those are some of the reasons. But at the same time, its a system that respects meritocracy like anywhere. If you are bloody damn good in what you do, people tend to flock to you.
- dsdawoao 15y ago
  Hahaha So true! as an India Grad student who has lived in New York, I totally agree with you, in fact I hated going in that area. I remember there was some controversy when some magazine author wrote an article about it. I actually agreed with him on nearly all points.
  - virtuabhi 15y ago
    Here is that article by Joel Stein http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1999416,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1999416,00....
- justlearning 15y ago
  another perspective as someone who frequented edison(indian food - oak tree road!) and lived near by - there's a swarm of small bodyshops, who pay bit more than market rate.My experience is that this "market rate" as per stats is what newcomers get for the first couple of years. (these newcomers are typically not well todo back home.)As these 'new' H1 hires gain market experience, they either negotiate or move on to some other small bodyshop. The big corps like Oracle don't pay as much for similar roles. As the o.p rightly discovered, most commute to NYC (go to edison station at 7.30am). (I don't know if this may have lead few banks to move their dev/it operations to NJ:) ). I know of some companies that didn't pay med insurance for more than 2 years. Few years ago, a top guy of a similar bodyshop was sent to prison for 'buy a green card' scheme he employed using employment immigration loop holes. Every year there are few companies that are in news for the wrong reasons. From what I saw, the non-passionate-just-work-for-pay guy who has worked in the US jumps to start a bodyshop after he has gotten his GC(greencard). It's very lucrative and luring on paper (you get n number of guys working on several clients and you make x over each guy - think 'pimping') I hope it has changed in the recent years. But this is changing. As more Indians are aware of better opportunities back home (and with the next gen Indian being more affluent than earlier generation), lot of them stay back. It's only the crude who go on and take the bait from the companies. fwiw, adding to yummyfajitas- it's not only the social separation of state/ethinicity; there's also an abstract eliteness that goes with bank-dev and non-bank - doesn't matter if you are with akamai in piscataway(neighbouring edison). :)
chaostheory 15y ago
I could be wrong, but I believe that Alpharetta is part of the Atlanta metro. It's result should be merged into Atlanta. IMO the results for all Bay Area cities (SF, Palo Alto, Fremont, Cupertino, San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mtn View) should also be merged into a single result.
- wh-uws 15y ago
  You are correct (I was raised in Atlanta). And in addtion to the bar area all the metro's should be merge. (maybe with a dropdown so you could see the cities and their suburbs individually)
- anamax 15y ago
  > IMO the results for all Bay Area cities (SF, Palo Alto, Fremont, Cupertino, San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mtn View) should also be merged into a single result. Why? The housing prices are very different. Heck, SF alone has a huge price range. I agree that NYC is too coarse.
  - chaostheory 15y ago
    Because they are effectively in the same geographic area. The housing prices aren't that different until you hit outlying areas like Livermore.
    - anamax 15y ago
      > Because they are effectively in the same geographic area. Yes > The housing prices aren't that different until you hit outlying areas like Livermore. No. Palo Alto's median house price is almost 3x San Jose and Fremont's. Union City is much cheaper than both, San Leandro's is less than 1/4th of PA's, and Oakland is significantly lower. Cupertino splits the difference between SJ and PA with nice houses while Redwood city does with crap. (Berkely comes in lower than both.) http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Palo_Alto-California/ http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Palo_Alto-California/ It might be reasonable to argue that the peninsula cities (to San Jose) are one market, but SJ and south and the east bay are different, even on this side of the hills.
oscarleung 15y ago
What we really need is a good Startup Visa. There are too many skilled entrepreneurs and programmers out there who are not getting their legit shot at the startup scene because of visa issues. Also with something like Tech, there happens to be a large amount of skilled talent outside the US.
- dotBen 15y ago
  We do need a good Startup Visa but I don't think the majority of folks working at out-sourcing companies are really the audience. They tend to be risk averse and instead value working for a blue chip client for a steady salary. (I'm a foreign national working in SF/SV on a different type of visa, not H1B)
DEinspanjer 15y ago
I don't have my copy of Tableau handy any more (using a Mac now) but I suspect that some of the map visualizations would probably be very interesting for visualizing these salary rates both spatially and maybe temporally depending on if there is trending data. Take a look at this old (and ugly!) post I did a while back: http://blog.mozilla.com/data/2010/03/06/using-tableau-to-investigate-datacenter-traffic-patterns/ http://blog.mozilla.com/data/2010/03/06/using-tableau-to-inv...
- smokinn 15y ago
  I took a quick look at the map view of this data and couldn't really come up with anything compelling to show, although a time series of bubble sizes could definitely be interesting.
shalmanese 15y ago
There was another analysis a while back which showed pretty convincingly that the H1B outliers were due to someone fat fingering the salary and inserting another 0.
- smokinn 15y ago
  The vast majority of outliers do indeed seem to be data entry errors. There are a lot of cases where the prevailing wage is something like 85k but the person makes 890k. They probably actually make 89k. Also, while I know New York is expensive I highly doubt any Assistant Research Professors are making 661 million dollars a year when the prevailing is 54k. More likely it's 66.1k.
  - tricolon 15y ago
    Regarding your second point: I thought those were aggregates.
- joshz 15y ago
  That's true. There are also several instances where wage rate unit (monthly, weekly, hourly, bi-weekly or yearly) is set lower than it should, like $6k/hour when they mean $6k/month.
- cpeterso 15y ago
  I hope that explains the $836,000 software developer at Microsoft and the $1,040,000 consultant at Mantis Technology!
  - danssig 15y ago
    Executives make multiples of those numbers. Why should it be unheard of that any software developer ever make that?
ubasu 15y ago
It seems misleading to report one number for New York and separate numbers for San Jose, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Fremont, Palo Alto and Cupertino, for which the combined number comes to 1,167,640,693, which puts the Bay Area in second place, without counting e.g. Berkeley, Livermore, Walnut Creek etc. Edit: perhaps that way Edison should be lumped together with New York? But the Bay Area should really count as a whole.
gojomo 15y ago
...being an H1B programmer in Houston doesn’t seem to be all that lucrative... The 'Avg. WAGE_RATE_1' table puts the Houston salary at 67K, the NYC Salary at 112K. But Houston has no city or state income tax, and much cheaper housing, food, transport, and other goods. In fact, according to the Cost-of-Living calculators at... http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.html http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.htm... ...or... http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/mortgages/moving-cost-of-living-calculator.aspx?ec_id=m1025820 http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/mortgages/moving-cost-of... ..earning 112K in Manhattan is equivalent to earning only 48K in Houston. (112K in Brooklyn = 57K in Houston; 112K in the NYC suburbs of Bergen-Passaic NJ = 79K in Houston.) So in terms of standard of living, 67K in Houston isn't so bad.
- jbjohns 15y ago
  I don't trust these cost-of-living calculations. Every time I've lived somewhere with a supposedly great cost-of-living I've felt poor (had to conserve my money) and every time I've lived somewhere with a supposedly bad cost-of-living I've felt wealthier. I can't think of a single exception.
  - furtivefelon 15y ago
    I think it's because many things are constantly priced anywhere, such as cars, food etc. The only thing that is expensive is local, such as housing.
    - gojomo 15y ago
      Food prices vary greatly by region. Of the two cost calculators I referenced, one identifies Houston groceries as costing 45% less than Manhattan, and the other has a long list of representative food prices, many of which are around twice as much in NYC. This roughly matches my personal experience comparing Bay Area grocery prices to those in the Austin, TX region. Same goes for cars — though less so for new cars, even there, when you check prices at a site like Edmunds, there are regional adjustments. For used cars, the same model/year/mileage combinations go for much less in Texas than California. And that's before transfer taxes and registration.
jarek 15y ago
Nitpick, but I wish those tables were actual tables, not images.
- nod 15y ago
  Should have used Tableau Public instead of screen caps.
201studio 15y ago
Actually the whole H1B is a problem for a lot of immigrant workers. Some people I worked with at my previous employer were contracted through Patni. Patni employs foreign workers to companies (mainly Indian) and takes a cut of their pay. Once their visa is up(5 years I think) they have to go back to India for at least a year then re-apply. Also, when they sign contracts with Patni, they sign a non compete where they cannot be hired by the company they work for, cutting Patni out. Its really a sad thing, and although the people I spoke with were happy to have good jobs in America, they were resentful that even if they worked hard, they couldn't get hired on permanently.
- danssig 15y ago
  Did any of them try it? Just because you sign something doesn't mean you can be held to it. It would be worth a try.
  - mavelikara 15y ago
    Someone I know recently got hired this way. Patni had him on an L-1 visa and he was working at a Fortune 500 wealth management company (WMC) with HQ in Richmond, VA. He got an H-1B visa for himself, moved out of Patni, worked with a body shopper for 3 months and then had his boss at the WMC file an H-1B on his behalf. His old Patni bosses kicked up a row and tried to stop him from getting hired. In his case, the anti-poaching agreement was between Patni and the WMC; but the WMC management were firm in hiring him. For most people, I would assume that not to be the case.
gamma_raj 15y ago
Cached url: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://smokinn.com/blog/2011/09/28/h1b-salaries-in-the-us/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
dsolomon 15y ago
The data seems a bit off. According to the links the H1B salaries are actually higher than what US born/citizens get for the same job.
- akat 15y ago
  Data could be off but not for the reason you are mentioning. That is how it is supposed to be since these jobs are theoretically given to outsiders because you could not find suitable people within the US.
bostonpete 15y ago
Is the implication here that the huge outlier salaries listed in the raw data are due to typos? I assume that's the case but didn't see it mentioned...

177 points by smokinn 15y ago

If there's anything else you'd like to know I can post a follow-up or you can download the mdb database here: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/CaseH1B.aspx http://www.flcdatacenter.com/CaseH1B.aspx and the visualization software I used here: http://www.tableausoftware.com/products/desktop/download http://www.tableausoftware.com/products/desktop/download to check it out yourself.

Maven911 15y ago

would you be able to provide the average programmer salary for the biggest visa spenders

smokinn 15y ago
If you mean for example the average of all programmers inside Microsoft compared to the average of those on H1B, no I can't since that data isn't public. The H1B database is public and you're required by law to register every H1B hire in it. That's the data source I was looking at. Companies don't typically advertise what salaries they pay employees if they don't have to.
- sriramk 15y ago
  I can tell you that Microsoft (and I'm sure the same holds true for Google and others) paid everyone the same, regardless of their visa process. Your financial package negotiation process was completely separate from your immigration status. Companies like Microsoft and Google sponsors a lot of visas because they try to find the best engineers, wherever they may be and then get them here.

Cherian_Abraham 15y ago

Upvote for not only interesting data analysis, but also for being objective about it. I clicked on the story, expecting a rant for one or the other, but found numbers speaking loudly than opinion ever could. Thanks.

dmix 15y ago

Its interesting how the top H1B companies are IT consultancy companies. There are far too many enterprise I.T. consultants and I'm all for B2B adoption of software. I question how much value these consultants add sometimes. I hear so many stories of failed deployments and spending millions on projects a few competent individuals could of accomplished.

liuwei6 15y ago
Outsourcing companies have lower salaries on average. Google salary http://www.salarylist.com/company/Google-Salary.htm?order=1 http://www.salarylist.com/company/Google-Salary.htm?order=1 Microsoft salary http://www.salarylist.com/company/Microsoft-Salary.htm?order=1 http://www.salarylist.com/company/Microsoft-Salary.htm?order... vs Wipro http://www.salarylist.com/company/Wipro-Salary.htm?order=1 http://www.salarylist.com/company/Wipro-Salary.htm?order=1 Accenture http://www.salarylist.com/company/Accenture-Salary.htm?order=1 http://www.salarylist.com/company/Accenture-Salary.htm?order...
- keys1234 15y ago
  I have worked for one such company, the salary of a fresher joining such indian IT consultant companies range from 6k to 10k $ per YEAR.
- lsc 15y ago
  and, generally speaking, lower quality people. The consulting companies seem to love picking up bright, young, attractive people with little experience after college. I mean, one place I worked, accenture snapped up half our team. Now, these were all bright kids; I'd have hired them... in entry level positions.
- lsc 15y ago
  >Outsourcing companies have lower salaries on average. and, generally speaking, lower quality people. The consulting companies seem to love picking up bright, young, attractive people with little experience after college. I mean, one place I worked, accenture snapped up half our team. Now, these were all bright kids; I'd have hired them... in entry level positions.

georgieporgie 15y ago

It must really suck to be a senior software engineer making less than 95k knowing that there are probably some new grads that get an initial offer of more than that. Wait, really? By "some" we're talking "very, very few" right? Surely salaries haven't come that far since when I graduated.

smokinn 15y ago
Well anecdotally people can get near 90 at Microsoft it seems. So it's not that far off. Of course the offer depends on previous experience such a internships and your job position (I imagine SDEs probably make more than SDETs and some teams pay better than others) but it's not unheard of.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
Yeah, I agree here. I think that kind of offer is way above the norm, but don't forget, college kids often think they are going to make a killing right after school, and it usually doesn't pan out that way. But still, I think 95k for a senior software engineer at msft is pretty lowball, unless something is left out, like bonuses or something.
- city41 15y ago
  My annual bonus (cash and stock) at MS was about 30% of my salary. I dunno if that's the norm for the big/lucrative software companies or not.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
sliverstorm 15y ago
The number has been anecdotally creeping up. It was less than a year ago that I was reading a really good software dev could expect to make a little over 80k straight out of college. Either the competition for good programmers really did get that fierce, or HN's collective estimation of a good programmer salary has been undergoing self-inflation.

ImprovedSilence 15y ago

Interesting stuff. I've got a few buddies working finance in NYC on visas, the're still making good bank. I would guess you're a west coaster though? Just things like being in NJ for a tax break, unlikely. NJ has tons and TONS of people(and taxes), don't let the 'little' town of Edison fool you, it's really still one huge suburb of NY. With a huge population from surrounding areas to pull talent from. Also, believe or not, most middle age people (HB1 peeps too) don't want to have to deal with NYC. Also, there is plenty of B2B and consulting work to be done outside the Oracles and IBM's of the world, don't think the big names do all the work, or even pay the best. Often times the smaller company will pay much much more, as their overhead is often a smaller percentage of revenues.

smokinn 15y ago
Actually, I'm from Canada which is why I don't know much about US cities outside the brand-name ones. Thanks for the clarification though.

technoir 15y ago

looks like there was a minor error there. The prevailing wage is not the wage offered to the H1B visa recipient, so it's not necessarily how much is being spent. That field is a required field for filing the application and is itself a statistic generated by a third party. it's a nice analysis though.

smokinn 15y ago
Ouch, you're right.. I really screwed up there. There's a wage_rate column and a prevailing_wage_rate and I should have used the former.. I'll try to fix this up asap.
- technoir 15y ago
  statistics is hard. There is a good field description list out there... also it might be interesting to look at the status of applications. For example are there any applications where the wage rate was below the prevailing wage and were accepted? What is the relationship between % over prevailing wage and acceptance of the application? That might lead to a useful model.
  - smokinn 15y ago
    You're right, that would definitely be interesting stuff to look at. I'll probably delve deeper into this in a couple of days.. For now I just fixed up all my charts and I'm about to start editing the post where my commentary is now off.
refurb 15y ago
That's right. The prevailing wage comes from the Dept of Labor. Companies are required to pay at least the prevailing wage. I know when I was on H1-B, I was paid a good 50% more than the prevailing wage.

yummyfajitas 15y ago

Some context/theorizing about Edison, NJ. Edison is a largely Indian town. In particular, it attracts many people who don't want personal exposure to the US or non-Indians - such a lifestyle would be difficult anywhere besides Edison or Jersey City. They are only in the US to earn USD. My theory as to why Edison wages are so low: most of the Edison companies are low end bodyshops - if you need a warm body with J2EE, they will give you a warm body. Their competitive advantage is that the Edison guys they hire never talk to non-Indians [1] and never discover they are ridiculously underpaid. Incidentally, the food in Edison is fantastic. Jersey City also has good low end food (e.g., dosas), though nothing great at the higher end. [1] It's not even an Indian nationalism thing - many of them avoid socializing with Indians from a different state/ethnicity. I get dirty looks when they see me with an Indian girl.

Cherian_Abraham 15y ago
You cracked me up there, with that last bit. Its so bloody true, not all the time, but there is that state-affinity thing going. Do understand, cultures vary widely state to state, cuisine varies, those are some of the reasons. But at the same time, its a system that respects meritocracy like anywhere. If you are bloody damn good in what you do, people tend to flock to you.
dsdawoao 15y ago
Hahaha So true! as an India Grad student who has lived in New York, I totally agree with you, in fact I hated going in that area. I remember there was some controversy when some magazine author wrote an article about it. I actually agreed with him on nearly all points.
- virtuabhi 15y ago
  Here is that article by Joel Stein http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1999416,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1999416,00....
justlearning 15y ago
another perspective as someone who frequented edison(indian food - oak tree road!) and lived near by - there's a swarm of small bodyshops, who pay bit more than market rate.My experience is that this "market rate" as per stats is what newcomers get for the first couple of years. (these newcomers are typically not well todo back home.)As these 'new' H1 hires gain market experience, they either negotiate or move on to some other small bodyshop. The big corps like Oracle don't pay as much for similar roles. As the o.p rightly discovered, most commute to NYC (go to edison station at 7.30am). (I don't know if this may have lead few banks to move their dev/it operations to NJ:) ). I know of some companies that didn't pay med insurance for more than 2 years. Few years ago, a top guy of a similar bodyshop was sent to prison for 'buy a green card' scheme he employed using employment immigration loop holes. Every year there are few companies that are in news for the wrong reasons. From what I saw, the non-passionate-just-work-for-pay guy who has worked in the US jumps to start a bodyshop after he has gotten his GC(greencard). It's very lucrative and luring on paper (you get n number of guys working on several clients and you make x over each guy - think 'pimping') I hope it has changed in the recent years. But this is changing. As more Indians are aware of better opportunities back home (and with the next gen Indian being more affluent than earlier generation), lot of them stay back. It's only the crude who go on and take the bait from the companies. fwiw, adding to yummyfajitas- it's not only the social separation of state/ethinicity; there's also an abstract eliteness that goes with bank-dev and non-bank - doesn't matter if you are with akamai in piscataway(neighbouring edison). :)

chaostheory 15y ago

I could be wrong, but I believe that Alpharetta is part of the Atlanta metro. It's result should be merged into Atlanta. IMO the results for all Bay Area cities (SF, Palo Alto, Fremont, Cupertino, San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mtn View) should also be merged into a single result.

wh-uws 15y ago
You are correct (I was raised in Atlanta). And in addtion to the bar area all the metro's should be merge. (maybe with a dropdown so you could see the cities and their suburbs individually)
anamax 15y ago
> IMO the results for all Bay Area cities (SF, Palo Alto, Fremont, Cupertino, San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mtn View) should also be merged into a single result. Why? The housing prices are very different. Heck, SF alone has a huge price range. I agree that NYC is too coarse.
- chaostheory 15y ago
  Because they are effectively in the same geographic area. The housing prices aren't that different until you hit outlying areas like Livermore.
  - anamax 15y ago
    > Because they are effectively in the same geographic area. Yes > The housing prices aren't that different until you hit outlying areas like Livermore. No. Palo Alto's median house price is almost 3x San Jose and Fremont's. Union City is much cheaper than both, San Leandro's is less than 1/4th of PA's, and Oakland is significantly lower. Cupertino splits the difference between SJ and PA with nice houses while Redwood city does with crap. (Berkely comes in lower than both.) http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Palo_Alto-California/ http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Palo_Alto-California/ It might be reasonable to argue that the peninsula cities (to San Jose) are one market, but SJ and south and the east bay are different, even on this side of the hills.

oscarleung 15y ago

What we really need is a good Startup Visa. There are too many skilled entrepreneurs and programmers out there who are not getting their legit shot at the startup scene because of visa issues. Also with something like Tech, there happens to be a large amount of skilled talent outside the US.

dotBen 15y ago
We do need a good Startup Visa but I don't think the majority of folks working at out-sourcing companies are really the audience. They tend to be risk averse and instead value working for a blue chip client for a steady salary. (I'm a foreign national working in SF/SV on a different type of visa, not H1B)

DEinspanjer 15y ago

I don't have my copy of Tableau handy any more (using a Mac now) but I suspect that some of the map visualizations would probably be very interesting for visualizing these salary rates both spatially and maybe temporally depending on if there is trending data. Take a look at this old (and ugly!) post I did a while back: http://blog.mozilla.com/data/2010/03/06/using-tableau-to-investigate-datacenter-traffic-patterns/ http://blog.mozilla.com/data/2010/03/06/using-tableau-to-inv...

smokinn 15y ago
I took a quick look at the map view of this data and couldn't really come up with anything compelling to show, although a time series of bubble sizes could definitely be interesting.

shalmanese 15y ago

There was another analysis a while back which showed pretty convincingly that the H1B outliers were due to someone fat fingering the salary and inserting another 0.

smokinn 15y ago
The vast majority of outliers do indeed seem to be data entry errors. There are a lot of cases where the prevailing wage is something like 85k but the person makes 890k. They probably actually make 89k. Also, while I know New York is expensive I highly doubt any Assistant Research Professors are making 661 million dollars a year when the prevailing is 54k. More likely it's 66.1k.
- tricolon 15y ago
  Regarding your second point: I thought those were aggregates.
joshz 15y ago
That's true. There are also several instances where wage rate unit (monthly, weekly, hourly, bi-weekly or yearly) is set lower than it should, like $6k/hour when they mean $6k/month.
cpeterso 15y ago
I hope that explains the $836,000 software developer at Microsoft and the $1,040,000 consultant at Mantis Technology!
- danssig 15y ago
  Executives make multiples of those numbers. Why should it be unheard of that any software developer ever make that?

ubasu 15y ago

It seems misleading to report one number for New York and separate numbers for San Jose, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Fremont, Palo Alto and Cupertino, for which the combined number comes to 1,167,640,693, which puts the Bay Area in second place, without counting e.g. Berkeley, Livermore, Walnut Creek etc. Edit: perhaps that way Edison should be lumped together with New York? But the Bay Area should really count as a whole.

gojomo 15y ago

...being an H1B programmer in Houston doesn’t seem to be all that lucrative... The 'Avg. WAGE_RATE_1' table puts the Houston salary at 67K, the NYC Salary at 112K. But Houston has no city or state income tax, and much cheaper housing, food, transport, and other goods. In fact, according to the Cost-of-Living calculators at... http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.html http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.htm... ...or... http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/mortgages/moving-cost-of-living-calculator.aspx?ec_id=m1025820 http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/mortgages/moving-cost-of... ..earning 112K in Manhattan is equivalent to earning only 48K in Houston. (112K in Brooklyn = 57K in Houston; 112K in the NYC suburbs of Bergen-Passaic NJ = 79K in Houston.) So in terms of standard of living, 67K in Houston isn't so bad.

jbjohns 15y ago
I don't trust these cost-of-living calculations. Every time I've lived somewhere with a supposedly great cost-of-living I've felt poor (had to conserve my money) and every time I've lived somewhere with a supposedly bad cost-of-living I've felt wealthier. I can't think of a single exception.
- furtivefelon 15y ago
  I think it's because many things are constantly priced anywhere, such as cars, food etc. The only thing that is expensive is local, such as housing.
  - gojomo 15y ago
    Food prices vary greatly by region. Of the two cost calculators I referenced, one identifies Houston groceries as costing 45% less than Manhattan, and the other has a long list of representative food prices, many of which are around twice as much in NYC. This roughly matches my personal experience comparing Bay Area grocery prices to those in the Austin, TX region. Same goes for cars — though less so for new cars, even there, when you check prices at a site like Edmunds, there are regional adjustments. For used cars, the same model/year/mileage combinations go for much less in Texas than California. And that's before transfer taxes and registration.

jarek 15y ago

Nitpick, but I wish those tables were actual tables, not images.

nod 15y ago
Should have used Tableau Public instead of screen caps.

201studio 15y ago

Actually the whole H1B is a problem for a lot of immigrant workers. Some people I worked with at my previous employer were contracted through Patni. Patni employs foreign workers to companies (mainly Indian) and takes a cut of their pay. Once their visa is up(5 years I think) they have to go back to India for at least a year then re-apply. Also, when they sign contracts with Patni, they sign a non compete where they cannot be hired by the company they work for, cutting Patni out. Its really a sad thing, and although the people I spoke with were happy to have good jobs in America, they were resentful that even if they worked hard, they couldn't get hired on permanently.

danssig 15y ago
Did any of them try it? Just because you sign something doesn't mean you can be held to it. It would be worth a try.
- mavelikara 15y ago
  Someone I know recently got hired this way. Patni had him on an L-1 visa and he was working at a Fortune 500 wealth management company (WMC) with HQ in Richmond, VA. He got an H-1B visa for himself, moved out of Patni, worked with a body shopper for 3 months and then had his boss at the WMC file an H-1B on his behalf. His old Patni bosses kicked up a row and tried to stop him from getting hired. In his case, the anti-poaching agreement was between Patni and the WMC; but the WMC management were firm in hiring him. For most people, I would assume that not to be the case.

gamma_raj 15y ago

Cached url: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://smokinn.com/blog/2011/09/28/h1b-salaries-in-the-us/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

dsolomon 15y ago

The data seems a bit off. According to the links the H1B salaries are actually higher than what US born/citizens get for the same job.

akat 15y ago
Data could be off but not for the reason you are mentioning. That is how it is supposed to be since these jobs are theoretically given to outsiders because you could not find suitable people within the US.

bostonpete 15y ago

Is the implication here that the huge outlier salaries listed in the raw data are due to typos? I assume that's the case but didn't see it mentioned...