Hello everyone.
I quickly built this little tool based on public records provided by the government.
The amount of information they provide is incredible. There are no explicit names, but for small startup or exec position it is easy to guess who is who.
As far as I know this is the biggest LCA database so far.
Yes I am still cleaning the data. It's all unbelievable the amount of crap you can find in the public records. I have a lot of duplicates unfortunately.
Down the road, I'm planning on providing a couple of cool charts/map about trends and evolutions.
- ratio of LCAs to total permanent full time employees. This will show which companies are really leaning on the H1-B visa (I'd estimate my "household name" software company is at about 50%)
- Source of prevailing wage. Interestingly employers don't have to use the BOL published data and can self report. I'd be interested to see how many self report.
- The average delta between prevailing wage and salary per employer/job title.
Check out Open Refine. Has a feature that clusters similar strings and unifies. I remember last time I looked at this data set... 4 letter acronyms spelled 12 different ways, it's unbelievably messy.
I actually think it means they decide to no make go further with the LCA. Like they decided to finally not hire the employee or the employee decided to not work for this company anymore.
Actually that makes more sense. It is possible to be working on another visa while a company files the LCA for you (TN, L, visas, etc), but it's probably less likely than a new H1-B hire.
For a company like Netflix, my guess is, you need to be a world-class expert at some area of scalable backends and/or big data. For example, you need to be a core contributor (in terms of concepts, architecture etc. - not just coding) to projects like Kafka, Cassandra, Spark etc.
Great implementation. I've seen the raw data before but never had the web development skills to execute on this idea. Can you also add a query where once you select a company and year, it groups by title and gives average salary.
Thanks for this! I'm currently looking at opportunities and this would help immensely during negotiations.
Would it be possible to search for role + location instead of company first? Essentially the refine functionality you provide on company's yearly page [0] to be at the root. You can perhaps make state or city mandatory so that it doesn't hit your backend hard.
Very impressive. I'm organizing an Immigration-themed "Startup Weekend" event[1] happening next week (in SF), and I think I'll be sharing this with participants there as an example of what can be done.
Instead of plotting a count per exact salary could you plot count per binned salary? Ie instead of plotting 1 at 105k and 1 at 107k plot 2 at 100-110k.
As it is the plots aren't particularly useful for comparing the distribution of salaries between companies etc.
Monthly Gross Pay $29,166.67
Federal Withholding $8,195.61
Social Security $1,808.33
Medicare $422.92
California $2,831.70
SDI $262.50
Net Monthly Pay $15,645.61
It is still pretty good. If you figure the housing premium between the Bay Area & a "normal" city is $1.5M vs $300K for roughly the same "middle class" house, then the monthly mortgage difference is about $5500, or about $66K/year.
So that $350K is equivalent to $284K in a "normal" place. Even being really conservative, and figuring extra costs (private school tuition, because even that $1.5M might not be enough to get you good schools, extra CA taxes, higher insurance rates, etc), we're still at an equivalent of about $250K. And that's a lot better than most people could get in any "normal" metro area as a Software Engineer.
That's not an unreasonable total compensation level for senior engineers in the bay area.
Remember that Netflix does not typically offer bonuses, stock grants, etc, and just pays people a salary. While most other big tech companies (eg, Google) have salary as 1/2 to 3/4 of your total compensation, with the remainder being bonus and stock grants (or options). So in the Google table here, you will see far lower salaries than Netflix, just because at Netflix, your total comp is almost entirely salary. I suspect that the Google H1B's are getting stock grants and bonuses that will increase their compensation substantially.
I'm not an H1B, but I'm speaking from experience. I'm a senior software engineer at Google, and I'm starting at Netflix in a few weeks. My total comp will be in the same ballpark at Netflix as my current total comp at Google, but will move from salary + bonuses + stock at Google to being almost entirely salary. I'm excited that I might actually be able to do my own taxes in the future.
Isn't it better the Google way? You will be taxed less since you can keep the stock for 1+ year and get taxed at the Long Term Capital Gains rate. Being almost all salary will get you taxed to death.
not so because options and RSUs mean that until the vest you don't get ownership of the stock. So if you keep it for an ADDITIONAL year then you get taxed long term on the _additional gain_.
Options gets hit by AMT tax when you strike them(assuming your total income puts you into AMT). You're going to be screwed either with RSUs or options by taxes just little less with AMT.
Options gets hit by AMT tax when you strike them(assuming your total income puts you into AMT). You're going to be screwed either with RSUs or options by taxes just little less with AMT.
Reasonable would be anywhere close to average. $350K is very much an outlier. It has to be. For every "senior software engineer" you show me making $350K, I'll show you 20 making less than $100K. $350K is insanely great, we're talking top-2% territory.
This seems to happen all the time in the comments here. Someone points out some insane top salary they found at some insane top company, and a bunch of people chime in with comments like "Oh, that seems pretty reasonable actually". It doesn't seem reasonable. It's not anywhere close to any median or mean. It's the far right of the distribution.
Find any company on Glassdoor where $350K is anywhere close to the center of the bar for "senior software engineer". I'll then eat my words.
Staff Software Engineers are "extra senior engineers" that are on the same HR level as engineering managers. I don't think Netflix makes this distinction.
It's a really clean implementation. However, it took me a while to understand what the website was all about (wasn't sure what LCAs are, etc.) One improvement could be making the messaging more accessible and less technical.
We are interested in an API and would love to hear your plans about it. Will shoot you an email :)
Front End: twitter bootstrap. Back End: RoR+postgreSQL
I roughly spent a week on it. At first I was cleaning and moving some data around with RoR but it didn't seemed right to me. Then I started poking around with postgreSQL and once you get a hold of it, it's super powerful and does most of the job. Use indexes... on fairly large datasets it really makes a difference.
Thank you for doing this! Any tips on how I can learn and better at using twitter bootstrap? So far I've only figured out how to load the basic template.
Very cool site! I found similar data a while back, but nowhere near this organized/pretty to look at. It helped me make the decision of NOT taking a job that I had a hunch was a lowball offer.
Does anyone know if companies are allowed to include the bonus $ in the 'salary' figure in these LCAs?
Yeah, it was odd to see myself listed in there, too.
Although, at the moment, anyone who's interested enough to look at the H1B notice posted discretely on the wall of the kitchen at my office will see my salary, since it's my visa being transferred to our new parent company.
It was a strange feeling seeing the job details and the salary listed on the communal kitchen wall, and realising it was my job and my salary.
Last time I said this I was down voted. This kinda transparency needs to be there for citizens and residents too who don't have to go through LCA process.
I've always been in favour of transparency around salary and compensation. So, I'm not hugely perturbed by this.
It's a bit strange when it's done piecemeal, though, and without your knowledge - I jokingly asked my boss "is that my job listed on the wall, or are you hiring someone to replace me?"
I understand that highly compensated engineers get to solve unique challenges on grand scale, enjoy their jobs and are
generally content with their professional positions.
But I just can't stop wishing for those engineers using their immense knowledge, authority and financial resources to bootstrap own tech companies and improve the diversity of the tech ecosystem. They don't need venture backing, they don't have pressing need to compromise and have the means to experiment with new business models, whether it is open source, open-* or social enterprises.
If youre well paid to solve exactly the kind of problems youre interested in working on, its easy to see why some would prefer working at Google / Facebook. Most technical people I know who have left to start their own business have shared that they now spend most of their time building the organization rather than creating technology. Some appear to enjoy this organizational hacking, while others have a tinge of regret about it.
Pushing back a little bit, not everyone is cut out for the startup lifestyle and the problems they're solving may not be solvable without the scale of a place like Google. Rather than encourage them to get out, I'd love to see them publish more about what they're doing, what challenges they're tackling, and how they've gone about solving them. That information gets pushed into the general ecosystem and other people then can run with it and iterate on it quickly. I.E. Google publishing the big table papers that became HDFS/Hadoop and the entire open source "big data" ecosystem that spawned from that.
I would not wish startup lifestyle on anyone and I don't advocate for that. I may have been unclear, but the engineers in question are exactly the kind of people who don't need to take outside investments and are able to bootstrap (as in use their own funds and rely on immediate/eventual cashflow).
They would have the independence, resources and authority to create self-sustaining social enterprises ( maximizing social impact rather than profits for external shareholders.), rallying supporters around their mission.
Seeding acquired knowledge back into the ecosystem is an orthogonal/complementary activity and depends more on their employer. I am not sure we can encourage the engineers to do that. Also, while sharing innovation "blueprints" is definitely a net positive for the ecosystem, I think it disproportionally benefits the megacorps, while indies and middle-sized tech businesses are being slowly squeezed out. The web is becoming more centralized and I am wary of that trend.
> I would not wish startup lifestyle on anyone and I don't advocate for that. I may have been unclear, but the engineers in question are exactly the kind of people who don't need to take outside investments and are able to bootstrap (as in use their own funds and rely on immediate/eventual cashflow).
The provide data is gross income, not net. Subtract federal and state taxes and you're at a more realistic figure for net income. Then subtract cost of living (i.e. property taxes, utilities) etc., and you're at a much lower figure for net expendable income than the numbers here. Your argument also assumes they're in a position personally to take on the associated risks of leaving stable employment and pursue a "moonshot" relying on savings and hopeful future cashflow. They might not be there. Also, running a business/organization is a far cry from slinging code and architecting and requires a different temperament, personality, and skill set. The individuals we're speaking of might be lacking in those or the desire to pursue such an activity. They might rather solve problems than deal with GAAP vs non-GAAP compliance issues, HR policies, marketing, or revenue generation. All things a corporate leader must address that an engineer solving problems might only ever have to address tangentially.
> They would have the independence, resources and authority to create self-sustaining social enterprises ( maximizing social impact rather than profits for external shareholders.), rallying supporters around their mission.
There are a lot of assumptions rolled into that sentence that I want to unpack.
First, what you're describing sounds incredibly similar to a non-profit and we're swimming in them. Why would engineers do a better job at building organizations that maximize social impact than people who spend their entire lives doing nothing but? The only comparative advantages I see are (possible) money and engineering acumen.
Second, how are we defining "social impact"? That's an incredibly nebulous term and one could argue that being part of a business generates social impact. Think of profit and revenue as an indicator of value provided. The more people buying and using my services generally implies I'm providing something of value. Ergo, pursuit of a profit and providing services people will expend money to pay for might be indicative of activities having a "social impact". People are willing to expend money for your solution to $PROBLEM over the possible alternatives indicating you're providing some value. As an engineer if I help the company solve a problem that lets them scale services to increase the number of people who can use it, offer new features, etc. I'm increasing the corporation's value proposition and providing a service to people to help solve their problems and meet their needs, I would argue that is a positive social impact.
Third, what is a "self-sustaining social enterprise"? Generally, I've heard those called corporations and they resemble normal every day businesses. What is different about your notion other than they're privately held? They'll still need to generate a profit in order to grow and increase revenues to meet growing payroll and expenses. I'm having a hard time understanding how you're seeing social impact as different from bringing in $$$ in exchange for providing a solution to problems.
The other assumption here I think we need to address is the notion that the individuals possess the charisma to rally people to the cause. You're describing someone with an incredibly charismatic personality that draws people in, that's a significant minority of the population. Why is that skill set attributed to engineers making big figures? Generally, I've found the opposite to be true, the charismatics and visionaries tend to not be engineers -- engineering is generally too rigid for the charismatic...
Thank you for a detailed response and an opportunity to debate this issue.
>you're at a much lower figure for net expendable income than the numbers here.
I am from a country where most people earn less than $500/month. Most Americans earn much less than the numbers here. This argumentation always seemed a bit absurd to me.
>and pursue a "moonshot" relying on savings and hopeful future cashflow
While bootstrapping, a top engineer/s is/are always able to do consulting while simultaneously building a product in the same/associated domain. EmberJS/Tilde.io is a great example.
>They might rather solve problems than deal with GAAP vs non-GAAP compliance issues, HR policies, marketing, or revenue generation
Sure. The preferred strategy is to devise solutions for making all of that easier. One solution is to be a CTO/founder while delegating administrative and some business matters to the CEO/CFO/CMO cofounder.
>..similar to a non-profit and we're swimming in them.
The number of tech non-profits is miniscule.
Let's look at the organizations who build popular database software. This is a quasi-random choice without any specific reason.
PG(non-profit), MySQL(for-profit, Oracle), MSSQL(for-profit, Microsoft), OracleDB(for-profit), MariaDB (non-profit), MongoDB(for-profit), RethinkDB(for-profit), Neo4j(for-profit), Complexible(for-profit), Apache Jena(non-profit), Apache Cassandra(non-profit), Couchbase(for-profit), Apache CouchDB(non-profit), OrientDB(for-profit). Those are major SQL, NoSQL, graph and semantic database products.
There are 10 for-profits and 5 non-profits (3 of them are under the stewarship of one entity -- Apache Foundation). The list can be certainly expanded and weighted by userbase for accuracy.
Another interesting domain would be collaboration tools for developers. The list of popular products is much shorter here: Github(for-profit), Bitbucket(Pivotal, for-profit), Gitlab(for-profit).
3 for-profits, 0 non-profits.
My argument is opposite of yours: the number of non-profits is too damn small.
>Why would engineers do a better job at building organizations that maximize social impact...
Technology is a great enabler. Companies with [1-5]0 employees have valuations measured in billions. Obviously, most of them had VC backing (money & network effects) but same principles can be applied to social impact.
>Second, how are we defining "social impact"?
Depends on the domain. Number of people who are able to afford expensive high-tech medical procedures, for example. This is an easy part.
>Think of profit and revenue as an indicator of value provided.... I would argue that is a positive social impact.
Not at all. Think BP, early days Microsoft, Oracle, Linkedin, MongoDB, etc, etc.
>..the charismatics and visionaries tend to not be engineers..
One doesn't have to be perceived as a charismatic leader by general population, respect and authority among engineers/programmers/IT professionals/geeks is quite enough. There are millions of these and they possess powerful technological skills to change the world for the better.
> How does it overly benefit megacorps?...
This discussion in the HN format would require too much citations, data and tangents to be efficient.
Income disparity, unemployment, lack of social mobility is increasing locally and globally. Technology, robotics and automation is one of the main reasons for these trends. Corporations are beneficiaries of these trends and won't do much to stop them. I would much prefer non-profits and social enterprises to constitute a bulk of tech businesses...
> but the engineers in question are exactly the kind of people who don't need to take outside investments and are able to bootstrap (as in use their own funds and rely on immediate/eventual cashflow).
no, they're exactly the kind of person who wouldn't do a startup. you're thinking about this from the wrong end. risk averse people are generally the ones who make $1M/year at salaried jobs, exceptions like financial traders notwithstanding.
quite frankly if i could make $1M/year working for a megacorp i wouldn't have started my own company. these two things are mutually exclusive for me. why would i bust my ass if i could take 2-week vacations whenever i wanted and get paid $1M/year due to my elite skills?
in many respects, i started a company because i wasn't good enough to really 'make it' as an industry leading developer. i capped myself out as a consultant at about 150k/year. but i wanted more money.
many of my associates who also own businesses (tech or otherwise) also started because they were basically unemployable due to a variety of factors. issues with authority, massive egos, chip on their shoulder due to a previous fuck-over or failure, inability to kiss ass, did terribly in school, have a felony conviction from their misspent youth, etc.
these kinds of things aren't talked about in mainstream media but if you dig deep into an entrepreneur's past, you'll find this stuff a lot. normal, employable, salary-seeking people generally do not start companies of any kind.
To add to your point, people who are trying for H-1Bs aren't necessarily the same people who can apply to YC on a whim and get a company off the ground in no time.
The pg essay quote seems to have gone out of fashion here a bit lately, but there's a perfect one for this occasion:
> So one way to build great software is to start your own startup. There are two problems with this, though. One is that in a startup you have to do so much besides write software. At Viaweb I considered myself lucky if I got to hack a quarter of the time. And the things I had to do the other three quarters of the time ranged from tedious to terrifying. I have a benchmark for this, because I once had to leave a board meeting to have some cavities filled. I remember sitting back in the dentist's chair, waiting for the drill, and feeling like I was on vacation.
I quite disagree with the premise of this quote for the following reason. When commercial product is being built, external requirements and interests are imposed on founders and their aspirations to create interesting/innovative software will be subverted by the need to compromise. However, the essay addresses this problem.
The engineers have the opportunity not to take outside investments and run their companies as they see fit. I believe that those bootstrapped companies would bring more social value than startups who are restricted by the boards, investment agreements, valuations and competition in high risk, high yield markets.
You're missing the point: They still would have to run the business. Meaning, not do what they set out in life to do, namely engineering. Where they are, they can pretty much just focus on the problems at hand and do research. All of the other crap is done for them.
There's a whole class of problems that it only makes sense to devote resources to in the context of a large organization. Compiler, kernel, library work that makes everything a fraction of a percent more efficient is nearly unjustifiable for most small organizations, but of immense value to large companies because of the scale at which they operate.
If you happen to be interested in solving those problems, a large company can be a wonderful place to work.
You are absolutely correct and I would love to see a scalable, sustainable community-based solution where languages would be designed for the social value first and megacorps second. I would prefer this solution to offer financial incentives comparable to the corporate jobs.
I think the problem is even though it sounds like a lot, $1.5m/year is not really some kind of "Tony Stark"-like riches. Yes, they might be able to temporarily stop working and live off savings, but probably not for that long. And furthermore, $1.5m, which is really $750k after taxes, doesnt really pay a lot of salaries. Hard to have an engineering division on $750k.
Also, I know plenty of people who are doing exactly what you are saying. The reality though is bootstrapping a startup is unlikely to make it more of a success anyways. The VC game picks winners in both senses - that they fund 'winners' and that they create winners by their own influence.
So a bootstrapped startup cannot ignore the VC realm regardless, especially once it is time to come to market.
The era of a silent genius sitting in a garage building durable software for the ages is a huge myth alas.
The VC game picks winners in both senses - that they fund 'winners' and that they create winners by their own influence.
It's about 5% the first and 95% the second, sadly. The well-connected VCs pretty much know what the outcomes and the valuations are going to be in advance. The less connected ones get burned by adverse selection and lose money.
So a bootstrapped startup cannot ignore the VC realm regardless, especially once it is time to come to market.
That I'm not as sure about. You just have to bootstrap into something that VCs aren't likely to be interested in, and get enough of an early lead and enough good will that they can't just make a competitor out of nothing should their interests change. It's quite possible, as far as I've seen. Bootstrapping is far harder than it should be (in part, because the American middle class is dying and no one has any fucking money) but I don't think that the VCs are the cause of that.
Speaking as an above average engineer, but not one of the super spectacular, I envy the work-life balance that many of these get to achieve, avoiding a lot of the slavish work tech startups often put them through. Even if they funded out of pocket, it would be a long hours, market pressured situation, where enough VC or big company money can still bury you despite brilliance.
I'm honestly not surprised some choose the good life at a big company - the world often doesn't treat such skilled people well.
Once you pay off your house, adjusting for cost of living doesn't make as much sense, especially for areas where rent or mortgage payments makes up a huge percentage of expenses.
Hmm, was hoping this would show the denied percentage, but the "denied" column doesn't corresponds to reality, not sure what it's supposed to represent.
Check out Wal Mart during year 2002. Either there is some interesting story or the data has a problem. Average salary goes up by about 50 times before dropping back down by about as much the next year.
Interesting to see the salary ranges at my employer. With similar titles, the range is quite large, even within the same physical location. And modifiers like "senior" or "principal" don't appear to correlate with the listed salary.
I work in finance, and browsing this list reinforces the assumption that people on H-1Bs are just cheap labor for employers. Most people on this list whose positions I can determine with confidence seem to make 10-20% too little.
If you're a US person, why not... But for someone who needs H1B sponsoring and relocation (probably with a family as well), Netflix is the worst company to work for as your first American employer.
Why, specifically? ... I came to Netflix on a H-1B, and they have been awesome. But if there are specific concerns (eg, no grace period in case of termination? something else?) I'd be interested to know what they were.
Because initially H1B's are tied to your employer. I think for the first 2 years? So if you're let go during that period, I believe you have to move back to your country. You can't directly transfer H1B to another company [during that period].
Disclaimer: I'm not an immigration lawyer... So while employers sponsor H-1Bs, and the employer name is associated with the H-1B, you shouldn't be "tied" to the employer, certainly not these days post AC21 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Competitiveness_in_the...). I've been headhunted while on a first term H-1B, and recruiters didn't blink when I mentioned I was on a H-1B. Transfers are common. (Has an employer given you the impression you were tied to them?)
But you mentioned being "let go" during that period, and needing to move back to your country. (A problem created by the H-1B's lack of a stipulated grace period.) Is Netflix considered a poor choice as it's seen to be quicker to fire, therefore this situation is more likely?
Personally, I was considering Netflix as a poor choice as the first H1B sponsor because I thought you (your H1B) are tied to your employer for some initial time. If that is not the case, I could reconsider Netflix :) Assuming that they give enough termination notification (and also helping with landing new jobs, as they mention in those famous slides). My former boss works at Netflix for a couple of years now and mentioned about good opportunities there, but Netflix was out of the table for me because of this possible initial H1B moment and generally because of that "the culture of fear".
Btw, how do you feel about this? Does this fear really exist?
Is it possible for a good engineer to have a relaxed life and atmosphere and a family friendly situation at Netflix?
It's also because they explicitly prefer to shift as much compensation as possible towards salary as opposed to stock, benefits, perks, etc. They released a long presentation about why they do this, I think it's somewhere on Slideshare.
See my reply below.
TLDR version: Netflix compensation is all salary. Google, etc, comp is salary + stock + bonus, and I suspect these applications list just salary, not total comp.
Netflix engineers are better than the average engineer (even in a given job title), so the prevailing wage calculations don't represent the true economics.
But in any case, H1-B visas can lower the wages of engineers without H1-B holders earning less than Americans. It's just like any import. The import itself doesn't have to be sold for cheaper, it's just that the presence of the import lowers the price via competition, so that both the import and the local good are cheaper than the price before importing started.
I'm a software engineer, and I searched my company and found that the average salary listed was inline with what I know to be our baseline staff salary for developers. (For what it's worth, we annually review industry salary surveys and adjust compensation for our existing employees accordingly.)
A lot of engineers (especially in the Bay Area) either want the excitement and IPO potential of a start up or the stability of working for a large, established company. It makes recruiting difficult for mid-sized companies like mine.
Looks as if you are looking at some different data set than we all are. Check out Netflix, Google, Twitter etc. - these are more than competitive rates.
Unless you went into bodyshop companies like TCS, Infosys etc. to make yourself feel angry.
Given the high salaries of tech employees and the low unemployment among them, I think that "cheap labor" isn't exactly what I would call the H-1B system.
It is a bit exploitative of the immigrants, by which I meant that the companies use the strict/stupid US immigration system as leverage. But citizens or taxpayers in the US have no reason of complaining. Maybe these H-1Bs are preventing an entirely cut-throat competition for talent, but on overall, those people add to the economy, and in a big way. Anyone who earns like 100K a year creates numerous other jobs and pays a lot of taxes...
All imports are "cheap" whether labor, steel or iphones. Cheap is good, because if you can get something cheap it means you can get it with minimal resources.
The only reason to limit immigration is externalities. For example, Israel has very open immigration for Jews. It does not allow open immigration for African refugees because they believe it would have a negative impact on their society. For some strange reason, other nations are fearful of stating the same thing, but they clearly have something like this in mind when they limit immigration.
Cheap labor is a net positive. The only valid reason to oppose immigration (and I think it is very valid) is the negative social externalities that immigration causes.
Nicely made. It would be helpful to view the information grouped by job title, with summary statistics on salary across all employers, possibly also with standardized numbers that include adjustments for differences in regional cost of living for the various worksite locations (via either BLS numbers or whatever wolfram alpha uses to get equivalent salaries for other cities).
It's also a little depressing to see salaries this high (I'm at a non-profit).
Really interesting project. If you look at small but relatively well known companies, eg Magic Leap[1], it's possible to get some real insight in to where they're focusing their efforts.
Does anyone know how accurate employers are legally required to be with these? Is this just base salary, or are they allowed to include cash bonuses, stock bonuses, etc?
I'd be a little careful with that as it may end up anchoring your salary.
The prevailing wage may not reflect the actual prevailing wage (which is why the H1-B visa is attractive to some employers) and if companies aren't paying much more than the inaccurately low prevailing wage then you may end up short changing yourself.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadThe amount of information they provide is incredible. There are no explicit names, but for small startup or exec position it is easy to guess who is who.
As far as I know this is the biggest LCA database so far.
I did notice that searching for Google gives you 5 different entities that are all Google.
Down the road, I'm planning on providing a couple of cool charts/map about trends and evolutions.
- ratio of LCAs to total permanent full time employees. This will show which companies are really leaning on the H1-B visa (I'd estimate my "household name" software company is at about 50%)
- Source of prevailing wage. Interestingly employers don't have to use the BOL published data and can self report. I'd be interested to see how many self report.
- The average delta between prevailing wage and salary per employer/job title.
- A way to search by geographic region.
I also noticed that the sort buttons (for salary) behave backwards of what I'd intuitively expect?
Would it be possible to auto-merge likely duplicate company names?
Great job, keep it up!! :)
What kind of skills of knowledge or experience do you have to have so that you take more than quarter million of dollars??? Incredible!!
If you could (make a case that you) consistently decrease churn then you'd pay for yourself at that rate.
1: http://www.wired.com/2012/04/netflix-prize-costs/
Would it be possible to search for role + location instead of company first? Essentially the refine functionality you provide on company's yearly page [0] to be at the root. You can perhaps make state or city mandatory so that it doesn't hit your backend hard.
[0]: http://data.jobsintech.io/companies/***/2015
You can also search Green Card PERMs.
[1] http://www.up.co/communities/usa/san-francisco/startup-weeke... (Use promo code "hn" for 70% off)
As it is the plots aren't particularly useful for comparing the distribution of salaries between companies etc.
$30,000 a month is a fantastic salary. No ifs, ands or buts.
Even if you have kids you can probably save something like 5k/month, which is good.
So that $350K is equivalent to $284K in a "normal" place. Even being really conservative, and figuring extra costs (private school tuition, because even that $1.5M might not be enough to get you good schools, extra CA taxes, higher insurance rates, etc), we're still at an equivalent of about $250K. And that's a lot better than most people could get in any "normal" metro area as a Software Engineer.
Remember that Netflix does not typically offer bonuses, stock grants, etc, and just pays people a salary. While most other big tech companies (eg, Google) have salary as 1/2 to 3/4 of your total compensation, with the remainder being bonus and stock grants (or options). So in the Google table here, you will see far lower salaries than Netflix, just because at Netflix, your total comp is almost entirely salary. I suspect that the Google H1B's are getting stock grants and bonuses that will increase their compensation substantially.
I'm not an H1B, but I'm speaking from experience. I'm a senior software engineer at Google, and I'm starting at Netflix in a few weeks. My total comp will be in the same ballpark at Netflix as my current total comp at Google, but will move from salary + bonuses + stock at Google to being almost entirely salary. I'm excited that I might actually be able to do my own taxes in the future.
Basically options and RSU = normal income
This seems to happen all the time in the comments here. Someone points out some insane top salary they found at some insane top company, and a bunch of people chime in with comments like "Oh, that seems pretty reasonable actually". It doesn't seem reasonable. It's not anywhere close to any median or mean. It's the far right of the distribution.
Find any company on Glassdoor where $350K is anywhere close to the center of the bar for "senior software engineer". I'll then eat my words.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Software-Engin...
Now, 250k isn't 350k, but 350k is the high end of Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, and that's what Staff Software Engineers at Google make.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Staff-Software-Engine...
Staff Software Engineers are "extra senior engineers" that are on the same HR level as engineering managers. I don't think Netflix makes this distinction.
We are interested in an API and would love to hear your plans about it. Will shoot you an email :)
Time required to create?
Other fun details?
(I ask because I have another dataset I want to work on recreating online in a searchable manner)
Does anyone know if companies are allowed to include the bonus $ in the 'salary' figure in these LCAs?
(this isn't a criticism of the site - just an interesting side effect of this kind of data transparency)
Although, at the moment, anyone who's interested enough to look at the H1B notice posted discretely on the wall of the kitchen at my office will see my salary, since it's my visa being transferred to our new parent company.
It was a strange feeling seeing the job details and the salary listed on the communal kitchen wall, and realising it was my job and my salary.
It's a bit strange when it's done piecemeal, though, and without your knowledge - I jokingly asked my boss "is that my job listed on the wall, or are you hiring someone to replace me?"
But I just can't stop wishing for those engineers using their immense knowledge, authority and financial resources to bootstrap own tech companies and improve the diversity of the tech ecosystem. They don't need venture backing, they don't have pressing need to compromise and have the means to experiment with new business models, whether it is open source, open-* or social enterprises.
I would not wish startup lifestyle on anyone and I don't advocate for that. I may have been unclear, but the engineers in question are exactly the kind of people who don't need to take outside investments and are able to bootstrap (as in use their own funds and rely on immediate/eventual cashflow).
They would have the independence, resources and authority to create self-sustaining social enterprises ( maximizing social impact rather than profits for external shareholders.), rallying supporters around their mission.
Seeding acquired knowledge back into the ecosystem is an orthogonal/complementary activity and depends more on their employer. I am not sure we can encourage the engineers to do that. Also, while sharing innovation "blueprints" is definitely a net positive for the ecosystem, I think it disproportionally benefits the megacorps, while indies and middle-sized tech businesses are being slowly squeezed out. The web is becoming more centralized and I am wary of that trend.
> I would not wish startup lifestyle on anyone and I don't advocate for that. I may have been unclear, but the engineers in question are exactly the kind of people who don't need to take outside investments and are able to bootstrap (as in use their own funds and rely on immediate/eventual cashflow).
The provide data is gross income, not net. Subtract federal and state taxes and you're at a more realistic figure for net income. Then subtract cost of living (i.e. property taxes, utilities) etc., and you're at a much lower figure for net expendable income than the numbers here. Your argument also assumes they're in a position personally to take on the associated risks of leaving stable employment and pursue a "moonshot" relying on savings and hopeful future cashflow. They might not be there. Also, running a business/organization is a far cry from slinging code and architecting and requires a different temperament, personality, and skill set. The individuals we're speaking of might be lacking in those or the desire to pursue such an activity. They might rather solve problems than deal with GAAP vs non-GAAP compliance issues, HR policies, marketing, or revenue generation. All things a corporate leader must address that an engineer solving problems might only ever have to address tangentially.
> They would have the independence, resources and authority to create self-sustaining social enterprises ( maximizing social impact rather than profits for external shareholders.), rallying supporters around their mission.
There are a lot of assumptions rolled into that sentence that I want to unpack.
First, what you're describing sounds incredibly similar to a non-profit and we're swimming in them. Why would engineers do a better job at building organizations that maximize social impact than people who spend their entire lives doing nothing but? The only comparative advantages I see are (possible) money and engineering acumen.
Second, how are we defining "social impact"? That's an incredibly nebulous term and one could argue that being part of a business generates social impact. Think of profit and revenue as an indicator of value provided. The more people buying and using my services generally implies I'm providing something of value. Ergo, pursuit of a profit and providing services people will expend money to pay for might be indicative of activities having a "social impact". People are willing to expend money for your solution to $PROBLEM over the possible alternatives indicating you're providing some value. As an engineer if I help the company solve a problem that lets them scale services to increase the number of people who can use it, offer new features, etc. I'm increasing the corporation's value proposition and providing a service to people to help solve their problems and meet their needs, I would argue that is a positive social impact.
Third, what is a "self-sustaining social enterprise"? Generally, I've heard those called corporations and they resemble normal every day businesses. What is different about your notion other than they're privately held? They'll still need to generate a profit in order to grow and increase revenues to meet growing payroll and expenses. I'm having a hard time understanding how you're seeing social impact as different from bringing in $$$ in exchange for providing a solution to problems.
The other assumption here I think we need to address is the notion that the individuals possess the charisma to rally people to the cause. You're describing someone with an incredibly charismatic personality that draws people in, that's a significant minority of the population. Why is that skill set attributed to engineers making big figures? Generally, I've found the opposite to be true, the charismatics and visionaries tend to not be engineers -- engineering is generally too rigid for the charismatic...
>you're at a much lower figure for net expendable income than the numbers here.
I am from a country where most people earn less than $500/month. Most Americans earn much less than the numbers here. This argumentation always seemed a bit absurd to me.
>and pursue a "moonshot" relying on savings and hopeful future cashflow
While bootstrapping, a top engineer/s is/are always able to do consulting while simultaneously building a product in the same/associated domain. EmberJS/Tilde.io is a great example.
>They might rather solve problems than deal with GAAP vs non-GAAP compliance issues, HR policies, marketing, or revenue generation
Sure. The preferred strategy is to devise solutions for making all of that easier. One solution is to be a CTO/founder while delegating administrative and some business matters to the CEO/CFO/CMO cofounder.
>..similar to a non-profit and we're swimming in them.
The number of tech non-profits is miniscule.
Let's look at the organizations who build popular database software. This is a quasi-random choice without any specific reason.
PG(non-profit), MySQL(for-profit, Oracle), MSSQL(for-profit, Microsoft), OracleDB(for-profit), MariaDB (non-profit), MongoDB(for-profit), RethinkDB(for-profit), Neo4j(for-profit), Complexible(for-profit), Apache Jena(non-profit), Apache Cassandra(non-profit), Couchbase(for-profit), Apache CouchDB(non-profit), OrientDB(for-profit). Those are major SQL, NoSQL, graph and semantic database products.
There are 10 for-profits and 5 non-profits (3 of them are under the stewarship of one entity -- Apache Foundation). The list can be certainly expanded and weighted by userbase for accuracy.
Another interesting domain would be collaboration tools for developers. The list of popular products is much shorter here: Github(for-profit), Bitbucket(Pivotal, for-profit), Gitlab(for-profit).
3 for-profits, 0 non-profits.
My argument is opposite of yours: the number of non-profits is too damn small.
>Why would engineers do a better job at building organizations that maximize social impact...
Technology is a great enabler. Companies with [1-5]0 employees have valuations measured in billions. Obviously, most of them had VC backing (money & network effects) but same principles can be applied to social impact.
>Second, how are we defining "social impact"?
Depends on the domain. Number of people who are able to afford expensive high-tech medical procedures, for example. This is an easy part.
>Think of profit and revenue as an indicator of value provided.... I would argue that is a positive social impact.
Not at all. Think BP, early days Microsoft, Oracle, Linkedin, MongoDB, etc, etc.
>what is a "self-sustaining social enterprise"?
Social enterprises are distinct type of entities with specific incorporation laws, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation as one of the examples.
>..the charismatics and visionaries tend to not be engineers..
One doesn't have to be perceived as a charismatic leader by general population, respect and authority among engineers/programmers/IT professionals/geeks is quite enough. There are millions of these and they possess powerful technological skills to change the world for the better.
> How does it overly benefit megacorps?...
This discussion in the HN format would require too much citations, data and tangents to be efficient.
Income disparity, unemployment, lack of social mobility is increasing locally and globally. Technology, robotics and automation is one of the main reasons for these trends. Corporations are beneficiaries of these trends and won't do much to stop them. I would much prefer non-profits and social enterprises to constitute a bulk of tech businesses...
no, they're exactly the kind of person who wouldn't do a startup. you're thinking about this from the wrong end. risk averse people are generally the ones who make $1M/year at salaried jobs, exceptions like financial traders notwithstanding.
quite frankly if i could make $1M/year working for a megacorp i wouldn't have started my own company. these two things are mutually exclusive for me. why would i bust my ass if i could take 2-week vacations whenever i wanted and get paid $1M/year due to my elite skills?
in many respects, i started a company because i wasn't good enough to really 'make it' as an industry leading developer. i capped myself out as a consultant at about 150k/year. but i wanted more money.
many of my associates who also own businesses (tech or otherwise) also started because they were basically unemployable due to a variety of factors. issues with authority, massive egos, chip on their shoulder due to a previous fuck-over or failure, inability to kiss ass, did terribly in school, have a felony conviction from their misspent youth, etc.
these kinds of things aren't talked about in mainstream media but if you dig deep into an entrepreneur's past, you'll find this stuff a lot. normal, employable, salary-seeking people generally do not start companies of any kind.
> So one way to build great software is to start your own startup. There are two problems with this, though. One is that in a startup you have to do so much besides write software. At Viaweb I considered myself lucky if I got to hack a quarter of the time. And the things I had to do the other three quarters of the time ranged from tedious to terrifying. I have a benchmark for this, because I once had to leave a board meeting to have some cavities filled. I remember sitting back in the dentist's chair, waiting for the drill, and feeling like I was on vacation.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
The engineers have the opportunity not to take outside investments and run their companies as they see fit. I believe that those bootstrapped companies would bring more social value than startups who are restricted by the boards, investment agreements, valuations and competition in high risk, high yield markets.
There are many upsides to running and owning a tech business and for some of the engineers those upsides can outweigh the negatives.
If you happen to be interested in solving those problems, a large company can be a wonderful place to work.
Also, I know plenty of people who are doing exactly what you are saying. The reality though is bootstrapping a startup is unlikely to make it more of a success anyways. The VC game picks winners in both senses - that they fund 'winners' and that they create winners by their own influence.
So a bootstrapped startup cannot ignore the VC realm regardless, especially once it is time to come to market.
The era of a silent genius sitting in a garage building durable software for the ages is a huge myth alas.
It's about 5% the first and 95% the second, sadly. The well-connected VCs pretty much know what the outcomes and the valuations are going to be in advance. The less connected ones get burned by adverse selection and lose money.
So a bootstrapped startup cannot ignore the VC realm regardless, especially once it is time to come to market.
That I'm not as sure about. You just have to bootstrap into something that VCs aren't likely to be interested in, and get enough of an early lead and enough good will that they can't just make a competitor out of nothing should their interests change. It's quite possible, as far as I've seen. Bootstrapping is far harder than it should be (in part, because the American middle class is dying and no one has any fucking money) but I don't think that the VCs are the cause of that.
I do agree and believe most VCs successes to be self-fulfilling prophecies.
VCs dont just pick winners, they CREATE winners. How much of an effect this is debatable but it certainly is not a small effect.
I'm honestly not surprised some choose the good life at a big company - the world often doesn't treat such skilled people well.
http://data.jobsintech.io/companies/google-inc/2012?order_sa...
http://data.jobsintech.io/companies/google-inc/2014?order_sa...
Once you pay off your house, adjusting for cost of living doesn't make as much sense, especially for areas where rent or mortgage payments makes up a huge percentage of expenses.
Edit: Being there are so many Wal Marts, I mean this one. http://data.jobsintech.io/companies/wal-mart-associates-inc
Don't see 2002
Actually, there are quite a few Wal Marts.
Looks to be just due to errors in decimal place.
But you mentioned being "let go" during that period, and needing to move back to your country. (A problem created by the H-1B's lack of a stipulated grace period.) Is Netflix considered a poor choice as it's seen to be quicker to fire, therefore this situation is more likely?
Btw, how do you feel about this? Does this fear really exist?
Is it possible for a good engineer to have a relaxed life and atmosphere and a family friendly situation at Netflix?
But in any case, H1-B visas can lower the wages of engineers without H1-B holders earning less than Americans. It's just like any import. The import itself doesn't have to be sold for cheaper, it's just that the presence of the import lowers the price via competition, so that both the import and the local good are cheaper than the price before importing started.
A lot of engineers (especially in the Bay Area) either want the excitement and IPO potential of a start up or the stability of working for a large, established company. It makes recruiting difficult for mid-sized companies like mine.
Unless you went into bodyshop companies like TCS, Infosys etc. to make yourself feel angry.
It is a bit exploitative of the immigrants, by which I meant that the companies use the strict/stupid US immigration system as leverage. But citizens or taxpayers in the US have no reason of complaining. Maybe these H-1Bs are preventing an entirely cut-throat competition for talent, but on overall, those people add to the economy, and in a big way. Anyone who earns like 100K a year creates numerous other jobs and pays a lot of taxes...
The only reason to limit immigration is externalities. For example, Israel has very open immigration for Jews. It does not allow open immigration for African refugees because they believe it would have a negative impact on their society. For some strange reason, other nations are fearful of stating the same thing, but they clearly have something like this in mind when they limit immigration.
Cheap labor is a net positive. The only valid reason to oppose immigration (and I think it is very valid) is the negative social externalities that immigration causes.
It's also a little depressing to see salaries this high (I'm at a non-profit).
For example, I'd like to see everything in $city, and then be able to sort that by salary or job description.
How do I get this job? :)
EDIT: The application was withdrawn. That saved them some money.
[1] http://data.jobsintech.io/companies/ibm-corporation/2014?ord...
Good job otherwise!
http://www.salar.ly/salaries/?title=senior+software+engineer...
[1] http://data.jobsintech.io/companies/magic-leap-inc/2015
H-1B Senior Software Engineer $7,278,870,000 Year $63,294 Philadelphia, PA Unknown 1 Withdrawn 15-1131
The prevailing wage may not reflect the actual prevailing wage (which is why the H1-B visa is attractive to some employers) and if companies aren't paying much more than the inaccurately low prevailing wage then you may end up short changing yourself.