
Protip for salary seekers pt 2: Results from some mining of the H1-B database - lawnchair_larry
http://www.the-interweb.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/136-Data-mining-H-1B-salary-data.html
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sp_
The 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>

The first sheet inside the Excel file is probably the most interesting one,
showing software/computer/engineer salaries for nearly 3500 jobs.

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sosuke
I 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
A 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.

~~~
Retric
There 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.

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DevX101
Some 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
That'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)

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SeoxyS
No. It's public data. It would actually be illegal for the government not to
release it.

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tuhin
Is every US Citizen's salary data released publically too (or in a format that
it can be mined)?

If No, then why the distinction (did not want to use discrimination).

~~~
patio11
The legislative purpose of H1B is to preserve the ability of companies to hire
professionals who cannot be found at any price in America. There are a few
safeguards designed to promote this: a requirement to advertise for the
position in the US, for example, and the publication process.

A frequent criticism made of H1B is that it is used as an end-run around our
(typically fairly strict) immigration procedures to bring in modern-day
indentured servants who do jobs many Americans can do at wages which are
markedly lower than the prevailing US wages. You'll frequently see this in
e.g. Slashdot criticism, with tales of H1Bs hired by Infosys or whomever paid
to do systems engineering for $20k ~ $30k, which (if substantially accurate)
is an abuse of the program.

FWIW, I am in Japan by the grace of a status of residence very similar to the
H1B, and that would be yanked instantly if I was not earning more than the
prevailing wage for similarly situated Japanese engineers. (Though there is
another status here -- trainee -- which is widely abused to that purpose.)

~~~
edandersen
For all intents and purposes, the "trainee" visa in Japan is borderline
slavery and is used to bring in extremely cheap labor from China and SE Asia.

Japan is actually pretty relaxed about immigration considering the xenophobic
image. All you need is a job offer from a company willing to do the paperwork,
(normally) a Bachelors degree in the field you will work in and a salary offer
that is at least what a Japanese hire would get. No quotas or H1B hire-in-
Japan-first requirements. You aren't trapped in your job - once you get a work
visa, you can change to another company in the same field with no
repercussions. Get married and you have full rights to work, not work or start
a business as you please with a spousal visa.

Don't want to work for someone else or get married? 5 million yen in the bank
(about $60k) and a business plan gets you an "Investors" visa.

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keeptrying
This 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
It 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
I'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
Exactly! 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
I'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.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
_Does anyone else have this "problem"?_

Yes, or at least used to: I outgrew it. I think part of it came from being
raised by a single mom and being very aware of how important money was. Once I
had more of it than I needed, I simply didn't know what else to do besides
bank it or invest it and the thought of spending made me break out in hives.

At some point, though, you realize that having nice things doesn't mean you're
wasting your money or that you're going to be homeless next week. Life is
about balance. Be good to yourself, but be careful.

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alphaoverlord
I'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
For 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.

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zmitri
I 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.

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wallflower
In 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.

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nnutter
Should 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
Yes, 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
The 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.

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IgorPartola
I 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
That 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
It'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
Yeah, that's probably legit, _but_ company X would (I hope) _still_ be
required to pay the programmer whatever they said in their H1B application.

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Maro
Let'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?

~~~
bhousel
I 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/vi...](http://www.immihelp.com/h1b-sponsoring-companies-
database/view-2010-3805002-citigroup_global_markets_inc.html)

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&...](http://www.the-
interweb.com/serendipity/exit.php?url_id=847&entry_id=136)

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
you've just shuttered my world _cry_

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r00fus
Is it me or do those company-specific average salaries seem very high (even
excluding the top 3)?

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lawnchair_larry
Note 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.

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diegob
Does 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?

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orijing
> 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
FTA: "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."

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ReadyNSet
anybody up for charting this data?

~~~
rglullis
Yeap. I will definitely do something with it and put on salaryshare.
Incredibly busy this week, though.

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djb_hackernews
So Google has 506 H1B Software Engineers and they all make exactly $106,862?

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diegob
It might be average salary.

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asder1
There isn't an error with the "screenshot"?

How can avg be > of max? :)

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keeptrying
Dude 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!

