Why are tech salaries so <i>low?</i><p>Especially from these companies with large profit margins and huge revenue per employee numbers. It seems like engineers have captured almost nothing of the fruit of their labors.
One confounding factor not considered here is the number of "senior" engineers with less than 4yr work experience. Seriously, title inflation is just as rampant if not more in the tech sector than wage inflation. So how do you account for Senior Engineer vs here's a job we'll just add this nice title to.
Engineers are just middle class who didn't get screwed. The real bubble is in the medical industry and Wall Street and it's not gonna pop any time soon.
Most interesting takeaway for me is that salaries weren't significantly higher in SF in 2013. As someone living in NYC I always imagined moving to SF/Silicon Valley would give me a big pay bump.<p>Also one thing to note here: these are 'Labor Condition Applications', not actual salaries. Often they are one and the same, but (for example) they do not include pay rises. I've ended up being paid more than every LCA I've had since I've been in the US.
According to the data here, salaries for "Senior software engineer" in both SF and NYC are lagging rental inflation over the last 5 years.<p>Does this jibe with reality? Is the data bad, or are engineers losing ground?
As I've commented on other stories like this...<p>The biggest thing to know about these data from the US Department of Labor (DOL) is that they DO NOT reflect visas granted. They reflect Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) granted. denied, etc. This is only one part of the application for a visa, and every year the DOL certifies far more LCAs than there are available visas.<p>It is impossible to tell from the LCA data what companies actually followed through with the rest of the process and fees and were able to sponsor a foreign worker before the visa cap was hit each year. That information would come from US Citizenship and Immigration Service, and as far as I can find they do not release that information.
We recently used salary prediction data to come up with salary charts and maps as well: <a href="https://salaryfairy.com/salary" rel="nofollow">https://salaryfairy.com/salary</a><p>One interesting finding was that not only SF salaries are much higher compared to rest of the US, but users from SF tend to over-estimate how much the rest of the country is making. You can see this effect in the third map at <a href="https://salaryfairy.com/blog/first-10k-users-salary-maps-and-charts" rel="nofollow">https://salaryfairy.com/blog/first-10k-users-salary-maps-and...</a>
How hard is it to get a job in the US for an EU citizen? I've heard that one could wait for up to 2 years for a visa, so most small/middle-sized companies just don't bother and hire only US-based developers. Is it any easier for people with degrees in compsci?
It looks like Microsoft is the only product company in the top 10 for VISAs. All of the rest are essentially work for hire (and offshore) dev/consulting companies. <a href="http://www.salar.ly/statistics" rel="nofollow">http://www.salar.ly/statistics</a>
Here is some detailed analysis on H1b visa app (it does not seem to be current year)<p><a href="http://www.infocaptor.com/dashboard/what-will-america-pay-to-h1b-job-candidates" rel="nofollow">http://www.infocaptor.com/dashboard/what-will-america-pay-to...</a>
Salary bubble? More like a Salary deficit compared to the cost of living increases. Housing, Health, and Education have all nearly doubled in the last 15 years. My wages certainly didn't double.
" salary data from more than 1.2 million work visa applications the US Department of Labor has received between 2009 and 2013."<p>this seems like a treasure trove. any links to the raw data?
We're not in a salary bubble. If anything, it's the opposite.<p>I've analyzed the hell out of this "salary bubble" issue (or non-issue, because there is no such thing) at length.<p><a href="http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/05/24/whats-a-mid-career-software-engineer-actually-worth-try-779000-per-year-as-a-lower-bound/" rel="nofollow">http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/05/24/whats-a-mid-c...</a><p><a href="http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/software-engineer-salaries-arent-inflated-at-least-not-for-the-99/" rel="nofollow">http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/software-engi...</a>
Salary work is a dead end path. The only way to capture your economic value is to put it on the market as a business. I've taken too long to learn this. At a certain point you say to yourself that making the same thing week after week is foolish and you throw yourself into the fire to make it on your own.