I came across this link which lists in detail every H1B petition filed by an employer over last few years. One interesting thing is that they list the actually wage offered by a company for a given position to the beneficiary of each petition. This perhaps a more accurate representation of salaries in Tech industry than the glassdoor review.
As someone who has gone through this process, I'm sad to say the petition can have a 'projected' salary. So it's just as fudged a number as any. It holds no bearing on what the worker would truly get.
Interesting - I've worked at US companies with policies just like the one at the top of that page. I had no clue they were illegal. Hard to enforce was obvious though, and I do remember breaking such a policy at least once.
There are policies that the company can't disclose your salary, but I think that people just assume the existence of a (highly illegal) policy that says that you can't discuss your own salary. I make a point of telling anybody who wants to know, and when the specific number is relevant to a conversation (not very often) to not hesitate in giving it.
It's the least I can do for fellow workers, and I know that my salary is no measure of my worth.
H1-B workers can only be paid at or above prevailing wages in the area per Department of Labor stats. This is set in the law as to avoid displacing US workers.
Haha, having worked in the Indian offshoring industry for the last 9 years, I can only say that this is a joke. At least 100 of my co-workers have moved to US with wages much less than their American counterparts.
"Prevailing wages" is one of those statistics that can often be surprising. The bottom line is that some businesses, sample size and definitions of how the jobs are aggregated can drag the average down.
If you classify someone as a "Web Developer" then they will fall in bracket that is ~55% of the "Computer Programmer" bracket (this data is by County so it varies a lot by geography).
AL programmers are paid from 61k to 95k. SF programmers are basically 20+k higher.
Oh, I see! So the "prevailing wage" column is the one that is the wage in the area. I understand now. I misunderstood it to mean "the wage which they actually were able to get after being employed".
It doesn't look like applications from Google have been denied. Since the H1B visas are drawn in a lottery where there's three times as many applications as the quota, how are Google able to get all their application certified?
EDIT: Apparently 21/2436 have been denied. That's still nowhere close to 2/3 though
I can't find my own H1B in the database. I don't think the data is complete.
EDIT: I found another page that actually did have my own H1B: http://h1b.myftp.org/ . However, I believe it did show one H1B in my company as approved which is actually denied.
The published database is actually for the Foreign Labor Certification application (a.k.a LCA), which precedes making an H-1B application, and mostly approved. A certified LCA may not result into a successful H-1B petition though.
Many of these applications are probably for a transfer of status implying that the beneficiaries are already on an H1B working for some other employer.
If you want more detailed information, companies that have Labor Certification Applications are required to maintain Public Access Files, to be presented for perusal on demand to anyone that wants to see it, both at the company headquarters and the facility where the nonimmigrant worker is working.
The LCA has to be included in the PAF, but there's other stuff in there, too.
Likely all useless to you unless you're an investigative reporter, immigration activist, or just masochistic statistician, but it's supposed to be there, nonetheless.
I was surprised that India leads green card applications by such a huge margin. China and India should be about level since they both send about the same number of students to higher ed in the US and in similar specialties. Though I do see a lot more Chinese nationals in genomics/molecular sciences.
I was wondering about that because I saw only one application from my employer, but a few dozen from an Indian outsourcer that we have used in the past. This town is small enough that it's likely 90%+ of them are in this company.
One unintended consequence of moving to the US that I wasn't expecting is that now my friends back home roughly know what my salary is. I understood when moving here that the LCA (which has salary details) would be posted in public spaces, but I didn't notice it was also a matter of public record which in this day and age, means global public record.
I work in a smaller city, so while I may have been relatively anonymous in somewhere like Silicon Valley, my location, company and role and year of employment is more that enough to uniquely identify me. Such is life.
