Most interesting takeaway for me is that salaries weren't significantly higher in SF in 2013. As someone living in NYC I always imagined moving to SF/Silicon Valley would give me a big pay bump.
Also one thing to note here: these are 'Labor Condition Applications', not actual salaries. Often they are one and the same, but (for example) they do not include pay rises. I've ended up being paid more than every LCA I've had since I've been in the US.
This is biased data. As someone who has mined the LCA data applications, I can say you're absolutely right.
These are H1B labor applications, and salaries are carefully calculated to be a certain margin over the average salaries for the same SOC jobs for employed citizens in the region. These SOC classifications can be nebulous and thus not reflective of the true market - e.g. "PROGRAMMER" could be anything from data entry to senior software engineer.
This means that the salaries are calculated and set for a successful LCA approval, NOT the market rate.
that's really interesting; there are so many caveats with the data that i almost thought it wasn't worth sharing, but we can let people draw conclusions themselves (and hopefully follow-up with other analyses, comments, etc)
if you don't mind, %-wise, how much more were you paid than your LCA? and do you think this is representative of others?
Also one thing to note here: these are 'Labor Condition Applications', not actual salaries. Often they are one and the same, but (for example) they do not include pay rises. I've ended up being paid more than every LCA I've had since I've been in the US.