I'm curious - you seem to be saying that FAANG companies can't find enough employees, but your support for the point is that Google hired a significant amount of H1B workers. However, I've read/seen that many H1B workers work for significantly less, and under more pressure, because they are trying to become citizens in the US. Is it possible that the reason for FAANG companies hiring so many H1B workers isn't due to shortage of qualified new employees, but instead because they are more efficient workers, due to the pressures and lower salary?

I went studied CS in Idaho and know many of my peers took significantly lower paying jobs than they are qualified for so they could remain in the area. I'm certain at least some of them would rather work for larger companies with higher salaries and better benefits (and more prestige), if it didn't mean moving into the BIG CITY and leaving their friends/family behind.

In reality, it's probably a mix of both.

My main point was, a globally distributed labor pool is already accessible to FAANG and is being utilized despite higher transition costs both for the employer and the employee. The H1B hires for FAANG is the global top talent for which companies compete for, hence an upward pressure for compensation, not downward. In fact you can check the H1B salary information yourself from the website I linked, to see that salaries are at par with US levels. I admit there might be some difference is non-salary compensation such as signing bonuses and inital stock grants, but I would attribute that to lack/difficulty of deploying local negotiation tactics (e.g get several offers and pit them to each other). In general price of the labor is not a driving factor at all. Besides, most of these companies will happily pay for a law firm to help with the green card application process of their employees, and H1B is transferable to a new employer, possibly to another FAANG company. Yes, all of these pose transition costs, but it is far from the desparate overworked underpaid foreign worker image painted.

For your second point, the delta of the “higher salary” is important. US ranks the highest in sofware engineer salaries globally, which means for most countries coming to US as a software engineer will mean a much higher increase in salary than within US. If that delta offsets the perceived cost of leaving friends and family behind, they it is rational to take the offer. In other words, non-US candidates need to be hurting much more than US candidates to lose access to friends and family to not take the offer. In fact they already do, they lose access to their culture and their language unless they are from anglosphere. They still take the offers, so the income differential must be more than adequate to make the transition. Additionally, individual cost function of losing access to these things will differ. Many people will actively seek a challenge away from their friends and families to take up new opportunities and experiences. Your friends seems to have not.

Actually, I think is misrepresented what I was trying to ask by including salary. I don't think or have any evidence to suggest H1B salaries are lower, only that pressure on H1B employees is higher to perform, as they are working for more than just the salary, but also the visa.

Thanks for your detailed response, though. I understand what you're saying more clearly.

It is actually very difficult to get an initial H-1B worker, since the worker has to get selected in a lottery, and the company has to wait 7 months.[1] The odds of getting picked in the H1B lottery is around 32% as of 2020. The 7-month wait time itself massively disincentivizes employers from hiring non-US workers. The end result is that most of H1B sponsorships go to people already in the US on a student visa who are working for the company using a status called "F-1 OPT". It's quite difficult to get hired from abroad. Many larger companies still do it, and are willing to wait 7 months, but the wait 7-month time and uncertain nature of the lottery are significant factors that discourage companies from hiring non-US workers.

For out-of-US hires, Facebook will actually get you a Canadian work visa, and have you work in Canada for the 7 month wait, and potentially for year if you don't get picked in the lottery. The strategy for multiple large firms is to bring non-US workers to Canada first, and then try to move them over to the US, since US immigration law is extraordinarily restrictive compared to most countries.

[1] The company applies for the worker in March of the year, and if the individual is picked in the lottery, they get to start working for them in October.

> The H1B hires for FAANG is the global top talent for which companies compete for

If they aren’t wage fixing!

H1B in tech companies are not paid significantly less, and they can easily find alternative employers willing to help with the transfer in Silicon Valley. It's H1B in non-tech companies that manipulate job postings to massively underpay their workers, and whose geographically-limited set of alternative employers are already small and also generally less willing to offer legal support dealing with the H1B transfer issues.

What's stopping someone from moving to SF for higher comp on hiring, then getting a P.O. box or friend's mailing address in SF and moving back to work from lower cost area after some time?

Is your employer really going to decrease your salary after the fact? Can you file taxes in your lower cost of living state after you lock in your high SF comp package and never notify your employer but still pay your taxes in the state you moved back to?

Note: I don't condone illegal behavior just thinking of edge cases that benefit us tech workers.

If your employer thinks you're in California, they'll tell the California tax authorities that you are. CA will use that as evidence that you owe them a big chunk of your income. If you don't pay, you'll have to fight. To win, you'll probably have to prove that you misled your employer, which will probably result in your getting fired for it. If you lose, CA can force your employer to take the tax out of your salary, so you'll pay California anyway plus you'll probably have to pay the place you actually live if you've done anything to establish residence. Along the way, any number of other unpredictable problems can arise (bad credit rating, legal threats, ongoing disputes with entities that don't understand or care that you've surrendered, etc.)

Good luck with all of that.

I think it’s gonna get really weird. If a company pays the same in seattle as SF (or near), and A person lives in SF, I’d rather pay a friend in WA state a few hundred a month to “rent a room” than 10% of my income to California.

That said there’s probably a bunch of laws around faking residency for tax purposes which id imagine has some hefty consequences.

Many faang companies pay the same 'higher' salaries at the same rates across seattle, sf, and nyc. The fangs used to do that when i worked there, but i wonder if they pay more in sf now? I'm sure some companies will want to pay you less if they can get away with it. But twitter will probably have to pay almost as much to keep their devs if they move. that's the key, keeping your workforce.

Patently untrue -- there are fixed ratios for each band v city. With all due respect such a bold claim deserves a link.

It used to be that way 3 years ago when I worked at Google. I don't have a link, it was personal knowledge. I'm 100% sure of it. They actually paid more for the zurich office cause taxes were so high.

> They actually paid more for the zurich office cause taxes were so high.

Google pays for cost of labor, not cost of living. While related, it isn't the same: for example, Google London pays much less than NYC, and Tokyo even less than that; yet Pittsburgh pays only slightly less than NYC despite being far and away the cheapest of the 4.

I believe Google's competitors tend to follow this model more than cost of living, especially internationally.

There are lowcost areas of CA.

So you'll make 4.5x a local salary instead of 5x.

You and your employer need to know where you actually live to pay state and local income taxes.

Falsifying this, to my knowledge, is not only a bad idea, but could easily be a termination-level offense and could be illegal.

I’m guessing you’re being downvoted by those who think your comment is encouraging unethical behavior.

While I certainly don’t think it’s ethical to do so, I did wonder the same thing - would companies start putting measures in place to verify you’re working from the same general area as your initially provided address? Eg, sifting through VPN log files to geo locate IP addresses etc.

They don't care as long as you show up to critical work meetings and are available when you need them for high-profile projects. I had a coworker (while at Google) who moved to Uganda without telling his manager, because he felt like it. His manager called a meeting for the next day, he hopped on a plane that night, showed up for the meeting, flew back to Uganda afterwards until he got bored there, and his manager was never the wiser, except for it being a great story for friends to tell.

What's stopping people is largely that

a.) if you aren't in the office, you miss out on critical opportunities, and if you aren't in the office too much, your boss may decide you're not worth keeping. (Officially, Google has a "if you don't show up for 3 days in a row without telling anyone you're considered to have voluntarily resigned". Unofficially this gets bent by high-performers all the time, but legally they can do it.) This is also why ambitious people at the satellite offices - NYC, Pittsburg, Seattle - move to Mountain View, because the high-priority projects require facetime and rarely go to remote employees.

b.) Hopping on a plane to make a meeting gets old really quickly, and also pretty expensive if you aren't pre-IPO. I know people who would commute from LA -> MTV, Uganda -> MTV, Seattle -> MTV, or do frequent business trips from Zurich or Sydney -> MTV. They hated it. You think the commute on 101 sucks, try adding the TSA to it.

Note that that comment is identical to a different one posted by that user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23162716

Location should not affect salary since when it comes to remote work it is completely irrelevant.

Until you and a remote candidate in Idaho are equally qualified but the Idaho candidate is willing to take 2/3 of the pay and live like royalty.

Should it be a race to the bottom? Also, I think it's pretty rare in tech to have multiple qualified candidates to choose from. Typically the candidates have multiple offers, not the other way around.

Compensation is not based on the value provided to the company. Compensation is based on "market rate" as in, the lowest amount of money a candidate is willing to accept to do the job. The information asymmetry is such that candidates accept offers for far less than the company is willing to pay.

That's not what market rate means. Market rate is a surveyed bell curve for the job across multiple companies.

Yes, the rate the market pays. That’s different than the value a candidate can bring to the company.

Good for the Idaho candidate, living in SF shouldn't warrant some kind of salary privilege (much of which just gets funneled to landlords and increasing housing prices).

Is it good for the Idaho candidate to get paid less for the same work? If a company is willing to pay $x for a role because it will give them $y benefit where $y > $x why should any candidate accept less than $x? How much of a delta between $y and $x is even acceptable? Why should we celebrate companies playing candidates against each other for the benefit of the few?

This realistically isn't a major concern because the pool of qualified software engineers in a state like Idaho is far too small to make a noticeable dent in market salary levels.

You're assuming the availability of mobile tech work will not enable more people to move to places with low cost of living, such as Idaho. I believe that it will.

A few people will do that, yes, but there are a couple million software developers in the US, and most of them are not going to suddenly move to sparsely populated interior states. They'll spread out from the SF bay area a bit.

Actually, there is good reason to be within 30ms ping (99th percentile). Half that, plus the 5ms algorithmic delay from Opus (in CELT-only-restricted-low-latency mode) gives 20ms, which is the lower end of uncanny valley for real-time interactive audio (certainly for musicians in a band, but I'll presume relevance for verbal communication to set in at the same psychoacoustic threshold).

If you introduce any amount of latency by executing the encoder/decoder pair, you'll have to subtract double the latency from your ping-allowance.

If you try to have correctly-lipsynced audio in a video call, I only know of one setup to offer similarly-low video latency: a rolling-shutter in the camera, a line-by-line display (CRT should do well), and up-to a few lines algorithmic delay for e.g. running non-buffering JPEG (8x8 DCT and an online entropy coder (no pre-analysis for optimal Huffman tables or such) to save like 80-90% bandwidth). Analog TV camera+screen hardware should also work, but it's really inefficient and not easy to emulate with digital hardware.

Some companies agree with that and some don’t. For companies that disagree with you statement, the rationale is really simple: the company is ready to pay top $ because cost of life is high. They know that the rent you’ll pay is high hence the money. They’re reducing their net profit (ebitda) to lay the high salary you need to pay your rent. They do that because your rent in SF is what it is. But for those companies, there’s no way they reduce their ebitda for you to profit off that.

The other companies, who pay on value of output, will agree with that statement. As far as I know, most companies fall under cost of life approach rather than value of output.

> most companies fall under cost of life approach rather than value of output.

I think most companies fall under "what's the minimum we can get away with?"

I would think that most companies pay based on what is needed to retain employees and keep churn rates down to acceptable rates. Location should not matter beyond what the manager in charge or salaries think it matters for the employee willingness to stay at the company, and as such it depends.

Managers, probably. Companies + investors = less likely.

>what is needed to retain employees and keep churn rates down to acceptable rates

Ultimately, this value depends on the location. Assuming identical salaries, it is more expensive to retain someone for 5 years in NY than in Nebraska, because the person in Nebraska making $200k+ lives like royalty, and whereas NY would be a different story.

Google files 6.5k H1-B applications per yr which includes transfers (https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2019-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.asp...). To assume all of this goes to new employees is misleading since Google has attrition too. So assuming 10% attrition, Google needs to fill in that 10% and add more employees. Your argument conveniently assumes that H1s are only going to net new employees vs. those that fill the gap too.

> Your argument conveniently assumes that H1s are only going to net new employees vs. those that fill the gap too.

I also conveniently assumed that global 40k headcount increase was sufficiently representative of the US headcount increase, even though it inflates the denominator. It's the nature of back-of-the-envelope calculations to be convenient.

H1B and GC sponsorships come from the same pool. In other words, a Green Card application is sponsored for H1 candidates. You are double counting your numbers.

I do agree that this expectation that one sitting in Ohio will command the same salary working for a FAANG company is just wrong. Very likely, the companies will adjust their salaries based on where the person is.

Actually that's not strictly true. Green cards can be sponsored for non-H1B workers (eg E3, L1).

My understanding is that sponsorship on at least the E-3 is difficult or impossible; that visa is not "immigrant intent", which ostensibly means something in the statute with respect to paths to permanent residence.

Just because a visa isn't dual intent doesn't mean you can't apply for a Green Card. TN, E-3 etc can all lead to a Green Card but you have to time it right.

Speaking as a successful E3->GC sponsoree I can tell you it’s not impossible (proof by counterexample FTW).

For L1 there's no issue.

Yeah - but vast majority of GC applications will be from H1-B pool

FAANG-tier companies have set ratios based on band and city. The notion that they're going to ditch these suddenly feels bizarre.

You're right. I double checked the numbers and 22k is H1B only and green card is a separate 6k. Edited the comment to reflect this.

> FAANG salary is a pretty damn strong incentive to overcome that geo-friction to begin with.

This is really only true for certain segments of the population. In my early to mid 20s, I moved cross country numerous times. Now I hope I never have to move again. And if I did, it wouldn't be to the Bay Area or Seattle.

That 22K number includes renewals FYI.

So I'm not sure your statement that "more than half of new employers[sic] are supplied internationally" is true, because the H-1B numbers include renewals.

If anything I suspect a large number of remote jobs will lower demand for visa sponsorship since the candidate pool is no longer localized. One huge advantage of visa employees is that they tend to be more mobile, as in moving to where the jobs are, which is important when there is a divide between candidate selection and geographic availability.