How inflated are Blind salaries?
I do like seeing all of the salary threads in the Tech room, but I think all of us have a healthy sense of dubiousness for some of these numbers. To be sure, there are some astoundingly well compensated people in tech. That said, my gut says salaries on Blind are skewed up, and that those with high salaries post disproportionately. Since I work at a visualization company, I did some analysis on publicly available H1B salaries from http://h1bdata.us/highestpaidcompanies I’m curious if anyone knows about other reference datasets to calibrate expectations, or maybe has a source for checking non-salary comp (I feel like stock trades should be public).
Note that on H1B application you only need to disclose base salary. The numbers you see here includes bonuses and RSU grants which can be as high as or higher than base.
H1B is so interesting, because the salaries are required to be within some range of the “prevailing wage”. For traditional industries, this means that domestic employees won’t be undercut (or at least that’s the intent I gathered). But stock is just completely omitted, which tends to be common in tech (and tech disproportionately favors H1B).
There's no upper limit.
H1b often comes into play when the company doesn't want to pay the true market rate for a top talent. I've seen fake job postings for a junior developer that were basically listing qualifications of a senior developer for a junior developer salary. Of course they'd later claim they couldn't find anyone in US! And that's just one of the tricks. On Blind you can often see the actual levels & associated salary, it gives a better idea whether there are senior folks posting or junior. As for other sources, I find Paysa pretty accurate.
H1b workers in big tech companies tend to be younger / earlier in their career, so there's definitely a sampling bias that would skew down the statistics.
Last year, msft offered interns 107k base. I'm surprised there are h1b's who make less than that.
msft also have roles like consultants and support engineers
I thought most of those were vendors
This most likely due to the selection bias op mentioned.
Senior people won't be on H1B they will move to GC. Somebody who had been in the USA for 15 years will most likely will have GC and if working for Google will most likely will have salary upward of 200k.
these don't include stock grants I assume
These are H1B salary only, so no stock or bonus comp is included. I’m still amazed by the number of 175k+ salaries that seem to be floating around on Blind.
It's true. I have 7 offers most of them fall between $180k-$205k base.