Why did you just focus on H-1B candidates? And why in the most expensive part of the country? I don’t know how this sounds, but I’ve met tons of people from China, India, the Philippines, S. Korea, and Viet Nam who are quite comfortable living in a space the size of walk-in closets that 2500 sq ft homes seem to have.
There was one kid from South Korea who I met in a school I was attending a while back who was rather embarrassed about his accommodations and wasn’t sure what to do about it. Someone had arranged for him to say in an unfurnished 410 sq ft studio apartment in a dicey area that I considered quite “run-down”. It had a futon on the floor, some cardboard boxes he got from the trash that served as tables, and we sat on the floor. He had gotten some dishes and kitchen stuff from Goodwill.
After a while, he confided in me that he was feeling really embarrassed about this place, because it was so much better than where he came from and what his family was living in. He was here on a student visa with no work permit. So he felt that it was wrong to be paying so much for such a “luxurious” place when his family could have saved quite a bit if he could just find something less ostentatious.
These apartments were not well maintained; the area was not one I’d be comfortable living in; and it’s damn hard to find anything worse here unless you went to some really bad places and got truly flea-bag flats.
I hear stories that a lot of these immigrants in Silicon Valley will pile into average sized bedrooms with two or three bunk beds and they’re quite happy. The sad part is they’re each being charged $1000/mo, if not more. Part of their compensation is high in order to accommodate housing that most of them aren’t comfortable with. But their employers would be accused of discriminatory practices if they gave them lower salaries to compensate for their lower overhead. (Employers generally don’t pay what employees need; they pay a competitive rate set by the local market.)
My point is, I don’t think you could have picked a more atypical demographic to measure! BTW, you didn’t include the ~$50k needed to prosecute their visas, and all the other in-kind compensation their employers offer to help them deal with their immigration legal needs.
It does a disservice to most others because people will skim the stats and come away thinking this is fairly typical of “coders” all around the country. I despise the term “coder” as well as the fact that people honestly believe that as a highly experienced “coder” that there are TONS of jobs around that I could jump right into for $125k! I mean, everybody not in our industry has this impression that companies are begging to hire “skilled coders”. Not if you’re pigeonholed.
I pay $1500/mo for my house in Phoenix. It’s the most I’ve ever spent on housing in my life! And yet people say, “Oh, my, that’s a LOT! Couldn’t you find something cheaper?” For what I’ve got (2BR/2BA), it’s actually on the low-end of the market in terms of rentals. As a single-family home, it’s also pretty cheap. So it puzzles me why people think it’s expensive.
What they don’t see are the 2BR/1BA “luxury apartments” being built like weeds here that rent from $1700-$2500/mo and are snatched up as fast as they can build them by people from SF, San Diego, Seattle, SLC, Dallas, Houston, Miami, DC, Chicago, Boston, NYC, etc, who are used to paying far more for far less.
Ask Tesla or Switch employees in Reno what their salaries are and what they’re spending on housing. Companies like these are exploding in the Reno area because the supposed cost-of-living was so low. But poor planning by the City has caused that “low” cost-of-living to skyrocket out of control. And they don’t have a lot of H-1B folks there because there’s a lot of “rednecks” in Nevada who love Trump’s anti-immigrant BS, so they don’t feel very welcome.
How about surveying “normal” folks in “normal” cities around the country?
It’s true that salaries for Software Engineers are high relative to most other professions, but the housing costs are a big part of that and vary from city to city.
How about an analysis that normalizes salaries around cost-of-living for a standard basket of things that these folks typically consume, including housing and transportation? That would be really interesting to see.
