The email brought me this chart from Dice.Com. It is meant to show what H1B visa workers are making in big American corporations. Take a look:
| Company | # of H-1B Filings | Average Salary |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft | 32,735 | $135,535 |
| Vmware | 4,910 | $139,299 |
| Apple | 11,543 | $139,457 |
| eBay | 4,635 | $143,313 |
| 24,896 | $144,285 | |
| GM Cruise | 330 | $145,243 |
| Spotify | 468 | $145,800 |
| 1,794 | $149,188 | |
| Bloomberg | 2,914 | $149,863 |
| Waymo | 591 | $157,591 |
| 13,471 | $159,597 | |
| Doordash | 274 | $160,444 |
| Lyft | 1,174 | $167,650 |
| Airbnb | 1,451 | $168,306 |
Demand for code producers is high. The methods are myriad. Individuals that make timely, solid code are richly rewarded. The individuals that keep up with the ever-changing platforms for that code are also in high demand. They too reap rich rewards.
I’ll take you back to a time when Digital Equipment was in market favor and the language folks at Maynard were in high spirits. A young fellow from Redmond came and hired everyone at salaries unimagined up to that time. App and OS development stopped at Digital. The fellow from Redmond got the first iteration of Windows NT from the effort.
Paying performers in this IT business is de rigueur. It is also not as common as this chart indicates. Let’s dissect these stats a bit. Small and medium businesses cannot come close to this rate. The organizations hiring these workers charge the entire cost off as employee pay expense. That is the number you see above.
In the case of many H1B workers they actually get paid from the agency that brings them into the country as their sponsoring employer. Their employer bills the hiring corporation. Of course there is an employer’s/sponsor’s cut taken from that total billing. The aim of the sponsoring employer is to bring individuals that produce income for them. They also aim to just undercut what the “running cost” the client corporation is experiencing trying to acquire the same talent. It also allows for the quick “fire and hire” scenario when an individual does not pan out. That total cost is the big corporate “employment” cost shown above.
So does an imported worker enjoy those numbers shown above? No.
Your thoughts please???