How Google, Facebook And Others Pay Their H-1B Employees

Editor’s note: Kiran Dhillon is a senior editor for FindTheBest, where she tackles big datasets to produce interesting insights.

Legislative debate regarding expanding the H-1B visa program is heating up in the U.S. Senate. H-1B visas allow foreign workers — specifically those in technical roles—to legally work in the United States. In lobbying for an expansion of the current H-1B visa program, Google executive Eric Schmidt said, “We take very, very smart people, bring them into the country, give them a diploma and kick them out where they go on to create companies that compete with us.”

Amid this discussion, jobs at Google, Facebook and other tech giants have grown increasingly lucrative for Americans and foreigners alike.

An analysis of records from the Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) reveals that the median salary offered to H-1B applicants by some of the biggest tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — is well over $100K and continues to rise.

Facebook has been the most lucrative company for H-1B visa holders thus far in 2015 (of the five companies above), with a median salary of $135K across all positions. But how do the companies stack up for specific roles?

By examining the most common professions among H-1B applicants for Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, five consistent career paths emerged across each company. Software engineers, systems software engineers, financial analysts, computer systems analysts and marketing managers make up a large part of H-1B visa applications.

Salaries for software engineers largely echo the overall trends, with Facebook offering the highest median salary and Amazon paying the lowest.

For financial analysts, we see the biggest outlier among all five job types, with Facebook’s median H-1B salary 46 percent higher than the next highest median salary (Microsoft).

Meanwhile, median H-1B salaries for computer systems analysts cover a much smaller range, with the most generous company (Google) paying only $23,100 more than the least generous (Amazon). The computer systems analyst role is also notable for being the only job for which Facebook is among the bottom two for foreign worker pay.

Foreign systems software engineers may want to avoid Microsoft, where we find our second biggest outlier. Microsoft pays these H-1B employees a median salary of just $82,828, 27 percent less than the next lowest paying company (Amazon).

For marketing managers, Microsoft once again places last, but the difference here is not quite as extreme as with computer systems analysts. Microsoft simply pays a median rate of 10 percent less than Amazon and Apple.

Finally, how do these companies stack up to other H-1B employers?

According to 2014’s salary distribution, they’re among the highest-paying, but certainly not the highest of all. About 7,000 H-1B applicants last year were offered salaries upwards of $200K.

You can see the distribution of H-1B salaries across all U.S. companies below.

Note: All data cited in this piece represents median salary information from H-1B visa Labor Condition Applications (LCAs). H-1B visa LCAs should not be confused with granted H-1Bs. After an LCA is approved, the company can enter their applicants into the H-1B visa lottery. Statistics on granted H-1B visas are not available through the OFLC.

Featured Image: oleschwander/Shutterstock



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Mobile Payment Startup MyCheck Raises $5M From Santander’s Innoventures Fund

MyCheck, another startup that wants to make it easy to pay your restaurant bill using your mobile phone, has closed a $5 million Series B. However, perhaps more noteworthy is the company’s new backer: the Spanish bank Santander via its recently launched Santander Innoventures Fund.

The $100 million fund launched in July with a remit to invest in early-stage fintech startups, with investments ranging from $100,000 to $10 million, so right across the board of early-stage. As well as capital, its portfolio companies are said to benefit from Satander’s “expertise and scale,” with the potential to have there product marketed to the bank’s 107 million-plus retail and commercial customers across Europe and the Americas.

“We approached Santander’s Innoventures Fund after the fund was announced in July last year,” MyCheck CEO Shlomit Kugler explains when asked how the investment came about. “The fund’s focus on fintech, particularly mobile payments, made it attractive to us. A conversation started, and we connected with Mariano [Belinky, Managing Director of the Santander Innoventures Fund] in September. We have since moved through the stages to where we find ourselves today.”

Initially launched as a consumer app in 2011, MyCheck has since pivoted to more of a B2B model, offering a platform that enables mobile payments/loyalty for big restaurant chains (such as Busaba and Prezzo in the U.K. and Blockheads and Aroma in the U.S.) and the hospitality industry more generally.

It pairs the ability for a restaurant’s customers to ‘check in’ and pay using their mobile — waiter-free, if you will — with analytics and business intelligence so that customers can engage and be rewarded in ways that are more personal, rather than generic loyalty programmes.

“The dining payment experience has not changed or improved since the credit cards were introduced, while the needs and desires of the customers and merchants have changed dramatically,” says Kugler. “Merchants today are struggling to succeed and are looking for higher tickets, more traffic, cut expenses, and more effectively market themselves. Customers are looking for an “Uber-like experience” – to use their smartphone to receive great offers, be able to pay and leave at will whilst leaving their wallet at home.”

MyCheck already has a market footprint that extends across the UK, U.S, Israel and Brazil. Kugler says the additional capital “will allow us to accelerate our growth more aggressively particularly across U.S. and Western Europe. Specifically, we will invest in marketing as well as hire senior business development professionals in key growth markets.”

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A Farewell To Jobs

Few subjects elicit more skepticism than the so-called “sharing economy.” Kevin Roose argues: “The Sharing Economy Isn’t About Trust, It’s About Desperation.” Catherine Rampell warns: “there’s a dark side to these work arrangements … the shifting of risk off corporate balance sheets and onto the shoulders of individual Americans.”

US courts are wrestling with whether Uber and Lyft drivers are contractors or should be considered employees. (It’s a hard case: I can see both sides. It seems to me like an issue the Supreme Court ought to ultimately decide.) And they’re just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Rebecca Smith observes on CNN:

Major corporations are increasingly using subcontracting structures, like outsourcing jobs, hiring workers through staffing agencies, and franchising … Hundreds of thousands of people work days-long or hours-long “gigs” … PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimated last summer that the sharing economy as a whole, valued at $15 billion in 2013, could reach $335 billion globally by 2025. It’s not hard to see who wins and who loses in this scenario.

…Or is it?

I see her point: the gig economy tends to reduce workers to fungible, replaceable cogs. Workers devalued in that way inevitably make less money and receive fewer benefits. When you can be more easily replaced, you become, pretty much by definition, less valuable; and technology is making the process of replacing one laborer with another increasingly frictionless.

This isn’t restricted to Uber and Lyft drivers. Consider the increasing proportion of university faculty who are part-time lecturers, who “can also be hired quickly to teach just one class, if that’s what’s needed.” Consider the booming growth in temp jobs.

And consider jobs that haven’t traditionally been gigs. Tech makes it easier to onboard new people, too. It’s easy to imagine retail businesses, or restaurants/bars/cafes, hiring additional staff on-demand, on a shift-by-shift basis, through some Uber-like app for small businesses; replacing employees with interchangeable cashiers and baristas who move from store to store and restaurant to restaurant, one shift at a time, dependent on high ratings from each proprietor.

Imagine this process multiplied by a thousand during the next decade, across businesses large and small; imagine the atomization of large swathes of the economy into work done by increasingly replaceable human cogs.

And yet.

Significant portions of the economy already work that way today — to the benefit of the cogs in question. I’m thinking of registered nurses and software engineers. Today’s nurse shortage is expected to expand across the US until 2030. The leverage that good software engineers have in today’s tech market is sufficiently well-documented that I won’t bother belaboring the point.

And yet, in principle, both nurses and engineers are reasonably fungible. Short-term nursing contracts are plentiful, as are short-term engineering projects. One good iOS developer can easily replace another; good developers write code that’s easy for others to understand, maintain and expand. (One resulting irony is that sometimes a bad developer can be harder to replace than a good one.)

It seems like half the coders I know, or work with in my day job, are short-term contractors — often with their own startup fermenting on the side. What’s more, they do this by choice; they could easily get full-time work with benefits, but they prefer the flexibility of contracting. As do many nurses, as I understand it.

My point is that’s not the gig and/or “sharing” economy, in and of itself, which undercuts workers’ pay, benefits, and (arguably) rights. It’s something far more classic; an excess of supply relative to demand. Professions where supply is low and demand is high frequently disdain full-time employment and voluntarily choose contract employment instead.

The troubles that overstressed, dehumanized sharing-economy workers face are very real, but they’re not caused by the so-called sharing economy. All that it does is spread work more evenly among those who want it. The real problem is that there isn’t enough demand for all the work that all those people want to do — and so it, and they, are devalued.

Tech arguably plays a role there as well. And it will play a much larger one, if it’s true that technology is destroying jobs faster than it creates them, as many people (including me) have predicted. But let’s not blame the “sharing economy.” It’s just a symptom, not the problem.

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TC AppleCast 11: If You Had To Choose Just One – Apple Hardware Or Apple Software?

On this week’s episode, we discuss both a lengthy profile of Tim Cook, as well as a full biography of Steve Jobs. We also cover some concrete announcements, including the open-sourcing of React, Facebook’s (potentially better than UIKit) UIKit alternative, and the acquisition of database company FoundationDB by Apple, and what that might mean.

But wait, that’s not all! We also tackle new rumors of a 4-inch iPhone 6c that surfaced this week, and look at the possibilities that might arise from a new patent applied for by Apple for smart packaging that lets users set up, secure and even purchase devices before ever taking them out of the box or speaking to a sales associate.

Finally, we ask the question first posed (or at least, most notably posed) by John Gruber back in a 2012 thought experiment: Forced to choose, would you opt for Apple hardware running other (Android/Windows software), or Apple software (running on Windows/Android hardware), all other factors being equal? Let us know either way, and find out what we’d choose below.

Direct download available here, or find us on iTunes and SoundCloud.

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Ellen Pao’s Statement On Losing The Kleiner Perkins Case: “The Battle Was Worth It”

Directly after the jury announced its final verdict in Ellen Pao Vs. Kleiner Perkins Caufield, in which it ruled against all four of Pao’s claims of gender discrimination and retaliation, Pao held a very short press conference at San Francisco’s Superior Court.

Flanked by her lawyers Alan Exelrod and Therese Lawless, Pao read a short statement. Embedded above is video (amateur video shot on my cellphone, that is) and transcribed below are her comments in full:

“I want to thank my family and my friends for your love and support during this very challenging time. I’m grateful to my legal team for getting me a day in court, and to everyone around the world, male and female, who have reached out to express support in so many different ways, and to tell me that my story is their story too, and their gratefulness to me for telling my story. I have told my story, and thousands of people have heard it.

If I’ve helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it. Now’s the time for me to get back to my career, to my family, and to my friends. Thank you all very much.”

After reading the statement, Pao demurred from answering additional questions being shouted out by the assembled press. Along with her lawyers, she swiftly headed toward the building’s elevators. There’s no word at the moment on whether she will appeal the ruling.

Pao also Tweeted a series of messages:

Featured Image: Eric Risberg/AP



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Remember Super Mario 64? You can now play an HD recreation in your browser

Remember Super Mario 64? Well you should – it’s arguably the greatest platformer since video games began letting you move through more than two dimensions.

We don’t all have a Nintendo 64 (or one of the several remakes) lying around though, so wouldn’t it be nice to be able to play it on your computer?

Developer Roystan Ross has gone and done just that, recreating the game’s first level, Bob-Omb Battlefield, with impressive accuracy and improved visuals to boot.

You can play the game in your Bowser browser using a Unity plug-in, and it runs fairly smoothly on my Surface Pro 3. The level layout and physics are virtually identical, and you can control Mario with either your keyboard or a gamepad.

There are a couple of things missing, like some of Mario’s attacks and the level’s Red Coins – and of course, it’s only one level – but it’s still worth checking out if you need something fun for the weekend.

If you’d rather to take the game around with you, you can also download it on Windows, Mac or Linux. Check it out, it’s impressive work.

➤ Super Mario 64 HD

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