5 ms·

This is a difficult problem to discuss, in large part because not all developers are created equal. There is a reasonable supply of entry-level and low-skill d

This is a difficult problem to discuss, in large part because not all developers are created equal. There is a reasonable supply of entry-level and low-skill developers. I refer to them as commodity developers: Developers who have a very basic skill set, who can do only a few specific things, none of them with extreme skill, but some of them reasonably competently. They typically do web front-end work, but sometimes work in Java on server back-ends. Typical pay ranges from $80-$120k, the same as it has been for 10 years or more. There also is a shortage of high-skill developers. Compensation north of $250k-$500k is becoming standard in some areas for such developers. [1] That pretty much could only happen if there were a shortage, since real wages have remained flat in general since the mid 1970's. [2] The problem is when companies ask for more H-1B employees, citing the fact that they can't hire developers for their highest skill positions (or claiming that they can't hire mid-skill developers at "market rates", because even the mid-skill tier is asking for more money now), but then import commodity developers. By importing such workers, it unfairly keeps those developers' wages down by creating an artificial surplus of employees at that level. The idea of an H-1B worker is that they are not supposed to be paid less than the "prevailing standard" for a worker of equivalent skill in the local market [3]. But if by hiring H-1B workers you're holding down the "prevailing standard" in pay, that hardly seems like companies are following the spirit, or even the letter, of the law. [1] My own compensation was in that range when I took a job working from remote full time, and I know several other developers at top companies whose compensation is well within that range. [2] http://www.thestreet.com/story/11480568/1/us-standard-of-living-has-fallen-more-than-50-opinion.html http://www.thestreet.com/story/11480568/1/us-standard-of-liv... and many other such charts and reports. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Employer_attestations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Employer_attestation...

ForHackernews 11y ago
> Compensation north of $250k-$500k is becoming standard in some areas for such developers. Do you have any more data on this? What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k?
- rewqfdsa 11y ago
  > What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k? Anecdotally, it's not a specific skill, but a talent for solving problems using any tools and skills necessary. The 10x developer is real, and he's not afraid to read a damn textbook or go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    "go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job" EXACTLY! I've been knocking them off for years. Most modern problems are variations on older ones. First step is to see if someone solved it already, how, and if I can use it. So, stopping code injection for example, I find that all kinds of hardware from 1960-1980 tagged memory & used CPU in ways that prevented it. Stack overflowing S.P.? Use a reverse stack like MULTICS. Pauseless GC? Put one in memory controller on your FPGA/ASIC like a Scheme machine did. I could go on all day on this stuff. So much wisdom in relatively, few books and a bunch of papers. I wish someone would figure out a way to collect, organize, and spread them. That way people might stop asking me things like whether OS's can be written in "managed code." Stock reply: "type Niklaus Wirth or Oberon System into Google."
    - ScottBurson 11y ago
      As glad as I am to see someone mention all this great old technology, I feel compelled to point out that the GC on the MIT Scheme chip was not pauseless. It was a fairly simple mark-sweep collector.
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        I'm talking about this one (see Storage Management on p17): http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-514.pdf http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-... They had to leave it out of the first prototype due to space constraints but describe the approach. They build a second, state machine into storage interface that continuously looks for stuff it can reclaim. The idea was clearly to make it concurrent and use dedicated circuits. An enterprising reader of old wisdom would combine this with any number of parallel/concurrent algorithms in literature to achieve GC w/ predictable, performance impact. That work was later referenced in a 1976 treatment of the subject that worked out foundational issues for concurrent collection: http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:8b7d64a2-e9a7-4b04-93fe-1845088e5d58/P_1866_1258.pdf http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:8b7d64a2-e9a7-4b04-... Most work in GC from them on focused on software implementations. Did find a hardware implementation in embedded space with some interesting choices: http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~morris/papers/IEEE_TMC_03.pdf http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~morris/papers/IEEE_TMC_03.pdf So, the original LISP machines and many later used mark-and-sweep often around or during a heap exhaustion. There were concurrent ones, with most using software. The Steele chip describes a concurrent design w/ straightforward implementation in hardware. That combined with literature gave people more than enough to acceptably solve this problem.
_delirium 11y ago
This definitely gets at the problem, imo. There would be much less opposition to the H1B program if it were bringing in exclusively employees with, say, $150k+ compensation. It would be hard to argue those employees are undercutting salaries, except perhaps a few of the higher salaries. But there are a lot of $60k salaries on H1Bs, which seems a lot more suspicious. How scarce can a skill be if you're only paying $60k for it? As far as I can tell, a lot of the misuse comes from the enterprise/consulting space. Companies like Google seem to be mostly using the program as intended, bringing in high-end and highly paid talent. But there's a weird corporate dance going on with "solutions" companies like IBM and Accenture, who subcontract through overseas outsourcing firms (sometimes derogatorily called "body shops"), who in turn use the H1B program to bring over some of their staff to the U.S. office to staff the contract. This use of the program looks more like undercutting wages than bringing in unusual, hard-to-find talent. My pet solution to the problem is to prioritize quota slots by pay tiers, as a rough proxy for how rare the skills being sought really are. So e.g. any company willing to pay $200k+ salaries to a candidate gets in line first for this year's H1B slots, then $150k+ applications are processed, etc. I suspect companies would oppose this for fear that it would create a bidding war for H1B talent, though, which is the last thing they want.
- SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
  >My pet solution to the problem is to prioritize quota slots by pay tiers, as a rough proxy for how rare the skills being sought really are. That is absolutely brilliant.
- IndianAstronaut 11y ago
  Instead of handing out H1Bs randomly, why not only grant them on a pay based rank?
Eridrus 11y ago
The problem with "prevailing wage" is that if you classify someone as the lowest tier programmer (not developer or software engineer), the prevailing wage is like 65k. So it's really quite easy to meet that, even for Infosys. As someone working in the states on a visa, I feel like the prevailing wage should be set at least at some high percentile of salary, the same way O-1 visas require* pay in the 95th percentile, though I don't think you want to get rid of the grades of developers so that companies can still hire excellent junior developers.
jazzyk 11y ago
"There also is a shortage of high-skill developers. Compensation north of $250k-$500k is becoming standard" I don't see it at all. At least in Boston, salaries seem to top out at $170K, perhaps a bit more if you have a _really_ rare skillset. But in a stagnant economy getting $180K is not easy. Usually a lot of hand-wringing about the cost, etc. The just-released Employment Cost Index (ECI) rose a record-low 0.2% last quarter. This is hard data, not anecdotes.
- pc86 11y ago
  Surely you don't expect us to take your hard data over the one poster and a few of his friends, do you?

ForHackernews 11y ago

> Compensation north of $250k-$500k is becoming standard in some areas for such developers. Do you have any more data on this? What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k?

rewqfdsa 11y ago
> What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k? Anecdotally, it's not a specific skill, but a talent for solving problems using any tools and skills necessary. The 10x developer is real, and he's not afraid to read a damn textbook or go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  "go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job" EXACTLY! I've been knocking them off for years. Most modern problems are variations on older ones. First step is to see if someone solved it already, how, and if I can use it. So, stopping code injection for example, I find that all kinds of hardware from 1960-1980 tagged memory & used CPU in ways that prevented it. Stack overflowing S.P.? Use a reverse stack like MULTICS. Pauseless GC? Put one in memory controller on your FPGA/ASIC like a Scheme machine did. I could go on all day on this stuff. So much wisdom in relatively, few books and a bunch of papers. I wish someone would figure out a way to collect, organize, and spread them. That way people might stop asking me things like whether OS's can be written in "managed code." Stock reply: "type Niklaus Wirth or Oberon System into Google."
  - ScottBurson 11y ago
    As glad as I am to see someone mention all this great old technology, I feel compelled to point out that the GC on the MIT Scheme chip was not pauseless. It was a fairly simple mark-sweep collector.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      I'm talking about this one (see Storage Management on p17): http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-514.pdf http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-... They had to leave it out of the first prototype due to space constraints but describe the approach. They build a second, state machine into storage interface that continuously looks for stuff it can reclaim. The idea was clearly to make it concurrent and use dedicated circuits. An enterprising reader of old wisdom would combine this with any number of parallel/concurrent algorithms in literature to achieve GC w/ predictable, performance impact. That work was later referenced in a 1976 treatment of the subject that worked out foundational issues for concurrent collection: http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:8b7d64a2-e9a7-4b04-93fe-1845088e5d58/P_1866_1258.pdf http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:8b7d64a2-e9a7-4b04-... Most work in GC from them on focused on software implementations. Did find a hardware implementation in embedded space with some interesting choices: http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~morris/papers/IEEE_TMC_03.pdf http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~morris/papers/IEEE_TMC_03.pdf So, the original LISP machines and many later used mark-and-sweep often around or during a heap exhaustion. There were concurrent ones, with most using software. The Steele chip describes a concurrent design w/ straightforward implementation in hardware. That combined with literature gave people more than enough to acceptably solve this problem.

_delirium 11y ago

This definitely gets at the problem, imo. There would be much less opposition to the H1B program if it were bringing in exclusively employees with, say, $150k+ compensation. It would be hard to argue those employees are undercutting salaries, except perhaps a few of the higher salaries. But there are a lot of $60k salaries on H1Bs, which seems a lot more suspicious. How scarce can a skill be if you're only paying $60k for it? As far as I can tell, a lot of the misuse comes from the enterprise/consulting space. Companies like Google seem to be mostly using the program as intended, bringing in high-end and highly paid talent. But there's a weird corporate dance going on with "solutions" companies like IBM and Accenture, who subcontract through overseas outsourcing firms (sometimes derogatorily called "body shops"), who in turn use the H1B program to bring over some of their staff to the U.S. office to staff the contract. This use of the program looks more like undercutting wages than bringing in unusual, hard-to-find talent. My pet solution to the problem is to prioritize quota slots by pay tiers, as a rough proxy for how rare the skills being sought really are. So e.g. any company willing to pay $200k+ salaries to a candidate gets in line first for this year's H1B slots, then $150k+ applications are processed, etc. I suspect companies would oppose this for fear that it would create a bidding war for H1B talent, though, which is the last thing they want.

SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
>My pet solution to the problem is to prioritize quota slots by pay tiers, as a rough proxy for how rare the skills being sought really are. That is absolutely brilliant.
IndianAstronaut 11y ago
Instead of handing out H1Bs randomly, why not only grant them on a pay based rank?

Eridrus 11y ago

The problem with "prevailing wage" is that if you classify someone as the lowest tier programmer (not developer or software engineer), the prevailing wage is like 65k. So it's really quite easy to meet that, even for Infosys. As someone working in the states on a visa, I feel like the prevailing wage should be set at least at some high percentile of salary, the same way O-1 visas require* pay in the 95th percentile, though I don't think you want to get rid of the grades of developers so that companies can still hire excellent junior developers.

jazzyk 11y ago

"There also is a shortage of high-skill developers. Compensation north of $250k-$500k is becoming standard" I don't see it at all. At least in Boston, salaries seem to top out at $170K, perhaps a bit more if you have a _really_ rare skillset. But in a stagnant economy getting $180K is not easy. Usually a lot of hand-wringing about the cost, etc. The just-released Employment Cost Index (ECI) rose a record-low 0.2% last quarter. This is hard data, not anecdotes.

pc86 11y ago
Surely you don't expect us to take your hard data over the one poster and a few of his friends, do you?