(Apparently this is an unpopular opinion)
An individual’s compensation is dependent on how much people with similar skills, backgrounds, and experiences will accept.
Is this fair?
Nope, and that’s why we have minimum wage. No matter how low the wage is, people will accept the job for the money.
It would be hard(if not impossible) to implement an effective universal minimum wage for international workers, but I don’t see any other solutions.
Some countries implement the above, some don't.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...
excerpt:
>That study was a key link in a chain of evidence leading to an entirely different view of the real origins of the Immigration Act of 1990s and the H1-B visa classification. In this alternative account, American industry and Big Science convinced official Washington to put in place a series of policies that had little to do with any demographic concerns. Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor. They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers. The result would be to render the US scientific workforce more docile and pliable to authority and senior researchers by attempting to ensure this labor market sector is always flooded largely by employer-friendly visa holders who lack full rights to respond to wage signals in the US labor market.
Given this view of H1-Bs and general immigration policy it seems quite obvious that they are not intended to have the same salaries as citizens, but rather to be used as a cudgel to keep the citizens in line and not be able to demand higher wages.
I want to be clear, I'm not arguing against your position of what might be fair or moral. I'm certainly not going to argue against equal pay for equal work. I just wanted to add some context along the lines of... I think it's working as intended.
I love immigration, I think immigration is a good thing, I think however immigration policy that encourages lower payments to foreigners working in the united states is bad for everyone but the employers, corporations are not citizens, and shouldn't be the primary beneficiaries of laws like these.
I have a fairly libertarian view on both immigration and income inequality. I'm generally ok with both. I have a harder time understanding people who support fairly liberal immigration while also being concerned about domestic income inequality. You didn't mention the latter, but it seems to me these positions are incompatible.
If you look at the parts of the labor market with the greatest mobility (mostly affordability to relocate), you'll find the highest wages, and I'm reasonably certain this is a causation thing, not merely correlation. Labor mobility will go a long way to fix income inequality.
Well, there is obviously a causal link from higher wages to greater ability to relocate; causation in the other direction is less clear. Intuitively, the employee pool being more free to relocate should create a broader geographic market with common prices, but that means small increases are more effective at drawing in more candidates just as much as it means small decreases will tend to dry up the pool. Assuming merit is easily determined in the field, it probably means wages nationally reflect merit better rather than geography, if merit can't be measured it probably means that wages reflect whatever rough-cut filters employers use to keep hiring manageable. But, still, I don't think it means industry wide better pay.
Everywhere I've worked, non-US persons (i.e. noncitizen and non-green-card) get paid the same or more than us persons. In fact they cost a lot more to hire not just because of the paperwork but all the damned time to get the paperwork processed. If you can find someone local who can start soon why would you choose anything else? FWIW this has all been H-1 and E3.
I understand there are various ways some big companies game the system (various schemes involving contracting out work to other companies in some way). But in 30 years of working in the Valley my experience has only been as I described above.
Actually, it's the law... but nobody bothers following it because nobody bothers enforcing it.
These are the top salaries I’ve seen if you’re committed to living somewhere inexpensive like I am.
This assumes 3 years+ of experience. DevOps is harder experience to get sometimes so just study cloud architecture and engineering which is similar. That whole field lends itself to self-study.
There are lots of non-remote jobs that pay higher than my current salary, but I don't see that many remote jobs in the $180k to $200k range.
Currently a sys admin in a standard large microsoft server environment with VMware, DHCP, dns and AD as my typical daily tools.
Change jobs to a role that will get you the experience you want. This may seem paradoxical, but no training is like on-the-job training. If you search around for a while you'll find somebody who you can convince that you're capable of doing the job.
I didn't have the background, experience, or credentials that mean most large places won't even look at your resume, but I found a startup that needed the strange role-straddling niche I was interested in and it's amazing. I like almost every part of my job, and the org is still small enough that I can see my work have a significant impact (good and bad).
There is DevOps the practice and philosophy(think agile) in which people with software engineering and systems administration experience work on "the same team" to deliver and operate product and/or services. They form a matrix team with complimentary and overlapping skills.
Then there is DevOps the team. These are typically also staffed with people who have experience in both developing and operating systems. Typically they will not work so directly with the product developers though, and they will be more focused on developer tooling, system automation, and operations.
Finally there is the role DevOps. Most places envision this as a person with both systems and software development experience to work in any of the aforementioned teams. For many they were called "systems engineers" previously and simply go with the title flow. Often they are full-full-stack developers; they also work at the systems/operations level.
Some places have DevOps assembly lines though, and they are staffed and run like a technical support call center.. Or a ticket mill.. You get the idea.
Really I’m a “major cloud provider sysadmin” who learned a few DevOps things over a couple of months (Docker, Kubernetes, a good amount of PHP) to take jobs that offered big salaries...
Cloud Architect / Engineer roles usually will pay at least 20k less than whatever has DevOps in the title.
That "DevOps" is supposed to be so easy that an ordinary full-stack developer can pick it up and there is no need for expensive senior system administrators and especially DBAs (="the cloud will handle it for us").
True: when one relies on cloud-provided databases (Amazon RDS), the need for a DBA goes down a bit, especially with a decent support contract from the cloud provider.
But the other part, like how to configure a machine for maximum throughput, how to properly implement failover networking, how to do OS upgrades (and especially with Docker containers, how to keep the stuff in the images updated!) and most importantly how to write a Docker image that does not "just work" but is performant, upgradeable and doesn't place stuff around everywhere totally ignoring LSB... this needs Linux administration experience.
tl;dr: companies label it "devops" to save money for Linux/DB Admins, but this gamble can really fuck up when you suddenly do need the skillset of a real admin.
(Somewhat kidding)
I would really really like to know what this is!
If $140k was your base, that's good for the area, roughly in the top 10-15% eyeballing it from the salary curve.
Here's mine... Base pay: $127k Real pay: $156k My location: Orlando Employer location: Phoenix Weeks vacation: 6
I will say those numbers on websites are lowered by the vast number of H1-B’s.
Also Indeed is rolling out a salary estimate tool and they’ve had companies call in to complain the estimate is too low and scaring away candidates lol.
I worked for KPMG previously (within 12 months) and made 140k as an AWS Architect (designing the environment and then building it out in the GUI).
This was in Dallas, Texas so good amount of money.
If you’re going into any consulting company as a cloud person or devops person with more than 2 years experience, anything less than 120k isn’t acceptable if you’re a US citizen.