Throwaway account. I’ve been with Amazon as an engineer for about 7 years now. We call ourselves diverse but really all we have are Asian (Indian and Chinese) devs... in some engineering orgs, white people outside of management are a minority (although it’s not just white managers, there’s tons of Indian managers too).
We have very few black people in engineering roles. I don’t know a single black engineer at this company to be honest and I’ve been here 7 years and interface with lots of other teams.
I don’t think the Indian or Chinese devs get paid less. The one data point I do have (anecdotal) is that every Indian dev I’ve met is generally on a spectrum between unhappy to extremely unhappy, and they’re only in their role because it’s very difficult to find another company that will sponsor you. So you either keep your mouth shut or risk getting let go and have to leave the country:
Amazons work culture is pretty shitty in many orgs - very cut throat. I’ve never seen the more horrific examples from the NYTimes article years ago about people crying at their desks, but I’ve been in enough contentious meetings and have seen people purposely set up to fail by their managers so they could be managed out because politics.
Yes, Indian and Chinese devs are unhappy because the H1B system unfairly exploits them and makes them wait for > 10yrs to be allowed to permanently stay. Of course, American companies are getting richer on their labor and their citizen co-workers get away with doing less while making more money. However, anytime there is a discussion on wages, blame them for everything. Learn to respect the guys on whose work Silicon Valley is what it is today.
This has been discussed many time in HN. Indian and Chineese H1Bs can keep complaining or they can immigrate to Canada with Express Entry system which levels the playing field. Business will soon follow.
I made the switch and it has improved my life and career in many wonderful ways.
One sad thing I see though is they consider Canada as Plan B. They will get their permanent residency visa but will still stay in US.
In my experience, it's a reflection of the organization. Shitty workplaces treat people with a little less leverage shitty.
I have also observed in some places that in some ways, diverse management structure is worse for some workers. White managers tend to be ignorant of subdivisions of asian society and treat all contractors or sponsored employees with aloof and impersonal management styles.
The article concludes that it pays H-1B employees fairly, but the data shows that the median H-1B engineer at IBM makes below the median salary for Software Engineers in the US. Clearly if IBM can't find enough US talent, it's because they aren't willing to pay the market rate.
H-1B is supposed to be for highly skilled employees. You don't pay highly skilled employees less than average.
It's more interesting to sort the source data by salary, ascending. IBM has quite a few more "developer" titles than Software Engineer and Software Developer, and many of them pay quite poorly.
The median for "Application Developer" is $77K with a low of $48.5K.
The simplest and effective way to solve the immigration problem is to give H-1B full job mobility and rights. This would benefit them and very quickly would bring the correct market value for everybody’s work. On the top side there will more genuine visa applications for real talent.
Depends on your definition of highly-skilled. Compared to an au pair? Very highly skilled.
An H-1B requires application of specialized knowledge and a bachelor's degree or the equivalent of work experience. So it's all a matter of perspective, but the highly skilled formulation talks about the skills required to do the job, not the competency within that specialization. Beyond that, I agree though, that visa status is a despicable reason to pay people less than what they're worth
It is really useful to compare a company to itself. If the company as a whole pays less than others and they are self consistent that says two notable things.
I realize this is not exactly a community that is friendly to being called out, but I have to simply say that it is inherently immoral to not only pay H1-B holders the same, tax them the same, let alone not make corporations that want to hire H1-Bs to sabotage indigenous populations in order to profit more, not pay massive penalties that only increase over time for the privilege of hiring a foreign national they poach away from another society, in order to compensate for systemic and fundamental mismanagement and failure at national governance at every single level.
IBM's comp isn't very good at any level, but they also don't hire much in super-high cost-of-living areas. Here in the Boston area I've only started making more than any of those entry-level salaries in the last few years (I'm 32) but don't live somewhere where buying a house is a pipe dream.
The real reason IBM has trouble attracting talent is that they have no idea what they want to actually be doing, from a technical perspective. They are a sales organization, and that's all that they are to anyone in a position to make decisions about anything. I took a bit of a pay cut to go to IBM--I needed to get out of consulting because it was impossible to get a bank to verify income for a mortgage--but it wasn't drastic. Even setting that aside, though, IBM was the worst mistake of my career. I left in five months because the job was so stressfully do-nothing (if that makes sense?) that I could literally feel myself becoming a worse person, not in a "technologist" sense but that of a human being, by being ground down by that culture.
That’s a pretty big difference, but it would also be interesting to know where these positions are located. The cost of living differences between SV and outside of the Bay Area is pretty substantial, making these absolute number comparisons a bit harder to interpret.
IBM has a legacy of a more diverse approach to developing technology. They also employ more folks who are applying software solutions vs. developing technology. When I worked with IBM stuff alot, the onshore developers were in Austin, Minnesota, Florida, Toronto, New York (including ex-NYC NY) and other places.
When I had IBM folks working for me in ye olden days (not subcontractors), they weren't working in the valley, and were perfectly good at what they did. They made about 30% more than the full time employees did, in exchange for living in Hilton.
Big tech is the way it is because right now they have access to unlimited money. The good times will roll until they don't! As things mature, the era of $160k college grads and $500k+bonus staff engineers will end.
Without reference to cost of living where that salary is applied is rather meaningless. 160 in the South Bay is not very good. 95 in Minnesota might be a lot more.
Companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc. pay H-1B workers extremely well. I'd expect IBM to be somewhere in the middle of the pack (and it seems like they are).
If you want to find actual abuse, look up all the "consulting" companies that file tens of thousands of applications every year at the tech equivalent of minimum wage - TCS, Cognizant, Wipro, Infosys, Deloitte, HCL, Accenture, Mahindra.
> If you want to find actual abuse, look up all the "consulting" companies that file tens of thousands of applications every year at the tech equivalent of minimum wage
I've seen it first hand while working in Telco's who hire those types of companies.
I’ve always believed that if you want to see a person’s true colors, look at how they treat people poorer or otherwise socially weaker than them. In other words, if your date is charming to you and nasty to the waiter, run like hell.
The same applies to companies: there’s no better way to cut through the recruiter nonsense like checking out how treatment of H1-Bs compares to treatment of citizens and green card holders.
A personal anecdote: a friend of mine who is on an H1-B works for a bank. This bank talks a great game about culture and working conditions and liberal social programs and opportunity and whatnot. How do they treat my friend? She makes forty percent below market rate for our area, and their policy is she has to work for them for five years before they even start the green card process for her. Meanwhile complained like Google and friends typically start the green card process immediately upon hire.
Anyone who looks at their promotional material (who isn’t already disinclined to trust a bank) would come away with the impression that this institution is some sort of paradise of opportunity and career advancement. Meanwhile anyone who’s worked for them for any appreciable length of time knows that isn’t true.
[+] [-] throwaway981211|6 years ago|reply
We have very few black people in engineering roles. I don’t know a single black engineer at this company to be honest and I’ve been here 7 years and interface with lots of other teams.
I don’t think the Indian or Chinese devs get paid less. The one data point I do have (anecdotal) is that every Indian dev I’ve met is generally on a spectrum between unhappy to extremely unhappy, and they’re only in their role because it’s very difficult to find another company that will sponsor you. So you either keep your mouth shut or risk getting let go and have to leave the country:
Amazons work culture is pretty shitty in many orgs - very cut throat. I’ve never seen the more horrific examples from the NYTimes article years ago about people crying at their desks, but I’ve been in enough contentious meetings and have seen people purposely set up to fail by their managers so they could be managed out because politics.
[+] [-] immigrant-h1b|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thbr99|6 years ago|reply
One sad thing I see though is they consider Canada as Plan B. They will get their permanent residency visa but will still stay in US.
[+] [-] Spooky23|6 years ago|reply
I have also observed in some places that in some ways, diverse management structure is worse for some workers. White managers tend to be ignorant of subdivisions of asian society and treat all contractors or sponsored employees with aloof and impersonal management styles.
[+] [-] jahlove|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
[+] [-] jammygit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ganeshkrishnan|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] RonaldDR|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] learc83|6 years ago|reply
H-1B is supposed to be for highly skilled employees. You don't pay highly skilled employees less than average.
[+] [-] tbyehl|6 years ago|reply
The median for "Application Developer" is $77K with a low of $48.5K.
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=IBM&job=&city=&year=2019
[+] [-] x0f1a|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wikiman|6 years ago|reply
An H-1B requires application of specialized knowledge and a bachelor's degree or the equivalent of work experience. So it's all a matter of perspective, but the highly skilled formulation talks about the skills required to do the job, not the competency within that specialization. Beyond that, I agree though, that visa status is a despicable reason to pay people less than what they're worth
[+] [-] mfer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RonaldDR|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anandsubra|6 years ago|reply
Apple: $160,548
Microsoft: $155,775
Google: $188,086
IBM: $95,857
The IBM total compensation does not even have 6 digits! No wonder they have a hard time attracting talent.
It would have been interesting to see the numbers for Amazon, Facebook and Netflix too.
[+] [-] eropple|6 years ago|reply
The real reason IBM has trouble attracting talent is that they have no idea what they want to actually be doing, from a technical perspective. They are a sales organization, and that's all that they are to anyone in a position to make decisions about anything. I took a bit of a pay cut to go to IBM--I needed to get out of consulting because it was impossible to get a bank to verify income for a mortgage--but it wasn't drastic. Even setting that aside, though, IBM was the worst mistake of my career. I left in five months because the job was so stressfully do-nothing (if that makes sense?) that I could literally feel myself becoming a worse person, not in a "technologist" sense but that of a human being, by being ground down by that culture.
[+] [-] mbreese|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|6 years ago|reply
When I had IBM folks working for me in ye olden days (not subcontractors), they weren't working in the valley, and were perfectly good at what they did. They made about 30% more than the full time employees did, in exchange for living in Hilton.
Big tech is the way it is because right now they have access to unlimited money. The good times will roll until they don't! As things mature, the era of $160k college grads and $500k+bonus staff engineers will end.
[+] [-] coldcode|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] highhedgehog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cvhashim|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|6 years ago|reply
If you want to find actual abuse, look up all the "consulting" companies that file tens of thousands of applications every year at the tech equivalent of minimum wage - TCS, Cognizant, Wipro, Infosys, Deloitte, HCL, Accenture, Mahindra.
[+] [-] engclass|6 years ago|reply
I've seen it first hand while working in Telco's who hire those types of companies.
[+] [-] tbyehl|6 years ago|reply
How does that even qualify for H-1B?
[+] [-] jfasi|6 years ago|reply
The same applies to companies: there’s no better way to cut through the recruiter nonsense like checking out how treatment of H1-Bs compares to treatment of citizens and green card holders.
A personal anecdote: a friend of mine who is on an H1-B works for a bank. This bank talks a great game about culture and working conditions and liberal social programs and opportunity and whatnot. How do they treat my friend? She makes forty percent below market rate for our area, and their policy is she has to work for them for five years before they even start the green card process for her. Meanwhile complained like Google and friends typically start the green card process immediately upon hire.
Anyone who looks at their promotional material (who isn’t already disinclined to trust a bank) would come away with the impression that this institution is some sort of paradise of opportunity and career advancement. Meanwhile anyone who’s worked for them for any appreciable length of time knows that isn’t true.
[+] [-] southphillyman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobloblaw45|6 years ago|reply