So, a Sr. Software Engineer on H1B gets paid less than your average Software Engineer with < 1 year of experience at QCOM in SD.[/quote]
We don't know who is posting on Glassdoor, or what dept they are in. On the other hand, the h1b website data is vetted.
There's a huge variation among different departments at QC, even if the title is the same, and years of experience is the same....even within Corp R&D, depending on the group. There's even pay discrepancy among senior engineers with a bachelor, versus masters, etc. And there's variation due to negotiating abilities of the individuals wit the job in hand. Perhaps people who are really good have multiple offers like during the old Nortel days, and had a lot more leverage. Maybe some with lower comp packages didn't have as many options elsewhere. Perhaps foreigners tend to be more timid when it comes to pay negotiations, and while QC tries to undercut everyone, many of the foreigners culturally aren't accustomed to ask for more....There's so many variables at a large company, that I've seen during hiring, it's not a slam dunk QC intentionally trying to undercut all H1Bs, but all employee prospects (some in HR even have pitched to me the "sunshine tax" of San Diego versus the bay area...
In addition, during the semi annual performance reviews, at least in most of Corp R&D, there were attempts to normalize comp packages within the dept for same title, performance rating, years experience, as managers would say, to account for market variations at the time of hiring, especially for older folks where their annual pay increases were lower than the prevailing new wages of new hires. And this applied to all employees, H1-B or not. So by the time of the 3rd or 4th performance review, huge variations if any (at least in Corp R&D) was minimized..
Does a large body of workers not willing or courageous enough to ask and negotiate better comp packages keep wages lower on average? Perhaps....But, unless companies really offer a non negotiable comp package across the board, you can't really prevent this..(Non-negotiable pay packages are pretty stupid imho...Top talent will just go elsewhere).
At any instance of time during the prescreening process of a candidate, at what point does salary requirements come up as a condition of employment for a QC job in corporate R&D, in all the interviews we've done for candidates? Not many. That was done after a decision was already made to hire or reject a csndidate based on his or her technicsl merit. After engineering determined the candidate was a hire, it was then HR that gave out the comp packages.
Do Hr Dept try to totally undercut candidates? Of course they do.. the more they can save the company money the bigger the company appreciates it! BUT, they do that to everyone, even some us non H1Bs... How many times have HR asked you if you currently have a job or not during com package negotiations? They want to know if they can undercut you or not based on how desperate you are for a job. The only difference is probably some of us feel we have to take shit a lot more than others, depending on our situation at that moment in time.
