Am I an underpaid Immigrant ?
I've just got my green card, sponsored by this small South Florida company, after working remotely for them for 3 years. I'm still in my home country, preparing to move to Florida. I'm currently making ~100k total compensation, and can probably get an immediate raise up to 120-125k, but can't reach anything above that in this company since I'm already top-level engineer there. I wasn't planning to look for new jobs so soon, but as soon as I changed my LinkedIn location, in short period of time I was invited for interviews at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Bloomberg, and some other minor companies, which makes me wonder. I have 16 years of work experience, Computer Science B.Sc in the best university of Latin America (which is obviously among the top schools worldwide), as well as a good MBA. In my previous job I was a Sr Manager (for 5 years) in a small company, managing 10 employees, but also doing software development for ~33% of my time, because I love programming. Due to a career decision, I decided to step down (back to being a full-stack Sr Software Engineer) and pursue a job in U.S. Despite having good college education, I've never worked with algorithms or low level programming. I've always been working on business aplications, and mostly with non-opensource technologies, and non large-scale / distributed systems. So probably it will take me a few months to get well prepared for FANG technical interviews. My career objectives are mostly around entrepeneurship, but also having good work-life balance to enjoy my wife and kids, and saving some money for future. Am I being strongly underpaid? Is living in South Florida a good career move (with 120-130k, but considering that the cost of living there is much lower), or should I pursue FANG companies, and look around Bay Area/NYC? Thanks for your opinions!
There’s an excellent chance you can greatly increase your compensation. You should at least explore the opportunities.
Not so fast, also consider the lower tax rates in FL plus no state income tax.
Exactly, my colleagues in FL say that it's cheaper and has lower taxes, despite being cheaper and faster to go back to my home country. But I don't want to just make the ends meet, it looks like with this salary in Florida I won't be able to save any money. I would probably prefer living modestly elsewhere and saving money.
In your shoes I would try to get competing offers for L4 or higher for about $300k or higher. Requires a review of algorithms and a concerted effort to line up competing offers.
I call BS. You can’t get a green card working from your home country
Please share the source of this information. I will share that with my immigration lawyer, he should probably give his diploma back or something :-)
@expedia this is how green cards were meant to be used and were used until recently.
Exactly what I was about to say. It's incredible how much the job market distorted immigration. I've even met people who believed immigrants aren't required to pay taxes here.
Immigrants should have to pay a little less taxes. They contribute to all systems, and much more than many Americans, but don’t get important rights like voting. Less rights, less taxes seems fair. After all, they shouldn’t have to suffer under a president like Trump without getting some kind of restitutions.
Another consideration - if you want some of that LAR culture in the US, you can't beat south Florida. Moving to the Bay Area or NYC certainly has some of it, but nothing compared to SoFlo.
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