This is dreadfully flawed. Comparing salaries at the top tech firms to a generic employee elsewhere is silly. That would mean that the whole industry is underpaid.
I would not say it is that flawed, since many of not most of these h1b folks work for these big companies. I don't know the exact numbers but around 2017 there were almost as many contractors at Google as FTEs working in the same offices on the same projects, but getting half or third of the FTE salaries.
These large consultancies staff at a <i>lot</i> of places that aren’t big tech. While they certainly have some good talent the overwhelming reputation with body shops is that they place some pretty mediocre talent.
> I don't know the exact numbers but around 2017 there were almost as many contractors at Google as FTEs working in the same offices on the same projects, but getting half or third of the FTE salaries.<p>Contractors get overtime. That’s why. It’s the same thing at most big companies when you compare contract and FTE for any position - one has higher salary and the other has overtime. It’s common for the contractor to actually have a higher annual (cash) comp.
Underpaying someone by 100% is non-sensical.<p>I tried my hardest to read this with good intentions and I finished it. I thought the "20m read" label at the top was exaggerated given the size of my scrollbar. But it did indeed take a while.<p>This website is (1) saying nothing of substance, and (2) impossible to read. While the actual content of the article isn't worth discussing, this is a great example of what bad writing looks like. There's not a single paragraph in sight.<p># Kitschy Heading<p>## n. Another Editorialized Heading<p>A table that is very hard to parse<p>* tons of bullet points
Was this written with a LLM? If so, please add a note about it at the start of the article.
Similar could be said for US government contractors. Not as high as 80-100%, but 50-70% is common.
Thoughts on Ai's impact on this industry subsector?
AI Slop
Before 2016, I was an outside consultant working with some long-term TCS IT and dev staff at a Valley client company that was just acquired by HP. (IIRC, HP then preferred Perot Systems as a staffing vendor.) TCS folks were mostly living extremely frugally in the SF Bay Area at the time.<p>Sometime around there, I consulted for Motorola Mobility where they hired contractors around the world in Eastern Europe and SE Asia. That gig came to a screeching halt after the head of that department expressed racist remarks about remote people in my presence and so they ghosted me because they just assumed I would talk to their HR or take legal action; I was broke then and couldn't do anything about it except learn the lesson that a lot of corporate types really don't give a fuck about being decent or professional.
[flagged]
Seems like a mix of AI slop and right wing racism.<p>> But here's what most people don't know: their average salary is under $105,000 — nearly 40% below what tech giants pay for similar roles.<p>Why would you compare random software positions with “tech giants”? Would you compare the pay for a local race track driver with an F1 driver?<p>> This isn't a story about hard-working immigrants. It's a story about a business model that exploits the H1B system.<p>Is it being exploited? The article doesn’t prove that at all.<p>> When 28,000+ positions pay 40% below market, it drags down wages for everyone in the field.<p>No, you’re just describing the market. “When the average is X, the data points below the average are below the average”. See how useless this observation sounds?<p>> The $90,000 gap isn't because the work is different.<p>The software work at big tech is absolutely different than software work at a random client of consulting companies. The fact that they both have a similar degree requirement is completely irrelevant.<p>-<p>There are so many more easily disprovable claims on this page. Conclusion: This is a propaganda website.