I’m pretty sure this salary discrepancy exist at other companies too.[/quote]
I think the data from Glassdoor is much different from the data from the h1bdata website.
1. The h1bdata website is verified data. The Glassdoor data is user contributed, and who knows if the user generated content is true.
2. Glassdoor data encompasses all Senior Software Engineers, across all levels and number of years of service. The h1bdata website, on the other hand, shows the starting salary of people that were hired.
The upper $125k+ range show on Glassdoor probably reflect people who have been a Senior Software Engineer for some time, those that are closer to Staff Engineer who haven’t been promoted yet.
At least when I was hired by Qualcomm, the salaries that H1-Bs were offered were without +-$3000 from non H1-B hires like me. In fact, I was paid lower than the H1-Bs. I think that had to do with my then lack of negotiating ability than anything else, as I was just out of school and was naive to believe when people said “non-negotiable”….while as some of my peers with H1-Bs had competing offers from Nortel, so they got QC to match the comp packages.
Also, across departments and roles, Senior Software Engineer pay varies quite differently. A Senior Software Engineer in the test group weren’t paid the same as a Senior Software Engineer in Corp R&D, etc… This was a disparity among the job role itself, not H1-B versus non-H1-B… When a lot of us talked amongst each other , we didn’t see the H1-B pay versus the non-H1-B pay drastically differ within the same role/department. What we did see was Corp R&D Senior Software Engineers were paid a heck of a lot better than QCT Senior Software Engineers, despite title being the same, and despite the folks in QCT working longer hours than Corp R&D.
Lastly, I think many of us have been through the Qualcomm interview process. And all of us know what goes on in the process. Even before you get to the point of negotiating salary/comp packages, you have to go through the ridiculous number of technical questions and on a whiteboard problem solving, where many of us flunk out an never get a call back for a specific position. And if you recall, during that grueling day long interview process with 6-8 different engineers, sometimes interview with an entire panel, at no point did your salary requirements even come up. And then it was up to you after your got your package to see if you could negotiate something better.
So maybe the issue is that people on H1-B’s tend not to renegotiate their package? If so, is this really that much different from any pay disparity in general, like between men and women? And if so, how would you fix that? Do we need to regulate companies to make all salaries “non-negotiable” and the same? Seriously, it’s a tradeoff. Personally, I like the flexibility to be able to negotiate comp packages, but maybe for others, they just aren’t good at this and that’s why there’s a huge discrepancy.
I’m not saying H1-B abuse doesn’t happen. It does, particularly in IT chopshops and IT contracting shops. But imho it probably happens a lot less than people think it does in tech, especially at a large company where all this is much more visible. The bigger “job killer” is offshoring the entire operation to a remote office location. for a company like QC, it make much more sense for a company to move an entire development team to a remote office location, and pay those people 1/10 the salary as someone here….versus hiring an H1-B, going through the legal/immigration trouble, and still having to pay that person by US wage standards, if cost was the only concern.
