[quote=flu]We also had a bunch of lateral hires that were already greencard holders and H1-Bs that stayed maybe for 1-2 years, before they too jumped ship and went to Qualcomm, Apple, Google. And last year we lost a lot of people to Intel that I heard were paying people 40%+ more because they wanted to ramp up their mobile business (and no, we weren’t underpaying people).[/quote]
I tell you what, I rarely see people jump to new jobs that pay less or even with their current job. That is rare!
Most of the time that people jump, they jump for more money! In some cases they will to a straight-over jump for job security, but $$ talks.
I guess I’m saying you definition of “underpaying” is suspect to me.
[quote=flu]
And as another example. My company has 4 open recs right now for senior firmware engineers. Pretty good pay…You could definitely negotiate a very nice salary and total comp package since these positions have been open for a long time now. I think I might have even posted them here awhile ago. Not a single one of the people I reached out to replied. Why? How many of you with an “engineer” title can write firmware? I know I can’t. A lot of these H1-B’s are hired because they have learned/done what many of the rest of us had snubbed our noses at doing throughout our career. And frankly, they are better at doing it then those of us who haven’t done it that now suddenly want to do it[/quote]
Again, money talks. If you were offering a good enough pay, people would starting training themselves for it.
There was a point in my career where I switched over and did assembly coding to help out my employer. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I did it for about a year. When time came to look for a new position, I started getting bites from other companies doing embedded work, based on my most recent job history. So I thought about it long and hard and decided to decline those interview offers.
Why? I felt that embedded software development was a small sliver of the sw dev field [it is bigger now] and that I would be limiting myself going forward for something that paid no better and left me less satisfied.
Now, had I been able to get a 25% premium over app level development, do you think I would have made that decision? Absolutely not, I can tell you that!
So again, it comes down to pay.
It’s all mindset. You can argue all you want that you offer a decent wage and all you can get to take it are H1Bs, but I know how I felt back when I considered going embedded and to me it wasn’t “decent” enough to entice me. I’m betting the same thing exists today.
