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> A new grad is demanding salaries that simply don't make the economics of training and hiring new grads work

This is just me, might not be representative, but as an indian CS graduate, I was willing to move to the US temporarily if it meant I could make FIRE money and return to India and basically chill out and work at interesting jobs without worrying about needing MNC/unicorn money to live well. I saw broadly two ways to do this - the startup scene, and the ridiculously high new grad salaries (which would enable FIRE in india after a few years) in the US back in early 2020s - when I was graduating. By the time I finished though, those salaries dried up like you are saying, and startup exits are easier in Blore these days and I can get funding from the usual bunch by just domiciling in Spore like flipkart did. Note that I did not expect the current AI bubble to last this long. Potentially could have cashed out on that. My impression is that if you know nvcc exists, you get money thrown at you in the US today... All in all, the idea fizzled out. Among my peers too, the people who went there for the usual M.S at a UC --> california job market pipeline are all people who are sure they want to settle in the US long-term, through the visa troubles and all. Others didn't go.

Point is, those high salaries were a big draw to a lot of people here including me. And in the absence of that companies now need to move here to get access to the same people. I think it is happening, unicorns/GCCs here are now paying quite well. I mean I had almost the median EU tech salary ($60K - 52LPA) for india cost of living at my _starting job_. So without the US starting salary being 150K-200K (a salary unattainable in india anywhere) like it was 5 years ago, it's a hard sell. Senior salaries are still high of course, but if you have to stay there 10+ years, you have a family there, kids there, loans there, and it is basically committing to settling in the US. Meaning that without the added security of the backup plan "return and you're either FIRE or super comfortable", its much more of a commitment to move. My circles have a selection bias of course, and for people who did not manage to get top 10% salaries here, the risk/reward is completely different.

1 comments

My reply was primarily about American new grads - who overwhelmingly don't do grad school.

And your anecdote is exactly what I am trying to explain on HN.

We as employers are fine paying high salaries to mid-career talent, but it's hard to justify hiring a middle of the pack new grad from CSU East Bay for a $130k base salary new grad role when I can hire a mid-career US returned FAANG dev in BLR or HYD for $70k-90k TC.

We will still hire new grads in the US for a $130k-$180k base, but they will have to actually be worth it. The brutal reality is, if you didn't attend a target CS program for your Bachelors (Stanford, Cal, MIT, UIUC, CMU, UT Austin, GT, UMich, UW, Cornell, Harvard, Columbia), at this point you probably aren't landing a high paying CS job - just like how in India if you didn't get a good JEE score, you're essentially relegated to being stuck at WITCH because you didn't get into a good BTech program, and it's an employer's market

A lot of people on HN assume Indians (and other foreign nationals) only do b*tch work like legacy springboot crap (and ofc plenty of people do), but an equally large cohort is doing legitimately competitive and innovative work.

> The brutal reality is, if you didn't attend a target CS program for your Bachelors (Stanford, Cal, MIT, UIUC, CMU, UT Austin, GT, UMich, UW, Cornell, Harvard, Columbia), at this point you probably aren't landing a high paying CS job

But what about after masters? What are the expectations there? Now of course there is the research path which is publishing well in your masters, working at deepmind or nvidia etc,. But I am talking about people doing non-thesis MS and then entering the job market. Is the base salary for those people still high?

> But what about after masters? ... and then entering the job market. Is the base salary for those people still high?

Not really especially when you factor in international tuition and loan servicing.

While it does depend on the program they attended, their past work experience in India, and their ability to land internships, in general I'd say salaries tend to be at the 25th percentile and below of what is shown on levels.fyi nationally.

But in all honestly, newly graduated masters students would be in the same boat as domestic undergrads if not worse becuase there isn't an incentive to hire an international student domestically and then go through the jumla of filing their H1B while they are on OPT unless they are a unicorn but if you are a unicorn, why would you even do a course based masters?!?

In fact, most of the complaints on HN about "H1Bs undercutting American salaries" tend to be these kinds of students because of how desperate they are to pay off a 1.5 to 2 crore loan with double digit interest rates despite having almost no scope of getting hired here in the US.

> for people who did not manage to get top 10% salaries here, the risk/reward is completely different

Yep.

Personal anecdote wise, I had a cousin who was working at Tech Mahindra in Chandigarh so on the lower end of salaries and got the US MS fuwara and they ended up attending UF (which is expensive and not a target).

We warned him not to come, but he didn't listen.

After spending almost $150k/1.5 crore getting the degree, the only SWE roles he could get could only pay $70k-80k in the NYC/NJ area which meant their take home after tax was rent was a little under $30k a year and this was during the 2022-24 period so no one wants to sponsor and he had a massive loan/EMI to pay off that was in the $17k-22k range a year.

He basically burnt through an extreme amount of family net worth (which was significant as they owned a house in Chandigarh) just to service a loan and basically remain in the same spot as before.

Another cousin did something similar to go to Canada despite us warning them not to do so either and their career is functionally screwed because it's even harder to find a role in Canada, but at least they attended a "college" so the tuition hit wasn't as severe.

In both cases it did not make financial sense for either to leave India for North America - their families had enough money in India that they could have bought significant property in Chandigarh and NCR and build generational wealth despite not necessarily working in the best jobs, but a lot of capital was basically burnt in loan repayment.

Like, let's be honest - the only people coming to the US to do a masters have a significant amount of capital because no one is going to guarantee a 2 crore loan without significant collateral, but at that point there are just better asset classes to diversify into.

From a financial standpoint, if you are Indian, it honestly isn't worth it doing some random coursework based masters in the US because in most cases you just aren't going to be hired by good companies anyhow, because none of us are willing to spend the capital to sponsor for an H1B after OPT unless you somehow ended up at a GAYMAN.

Interesting. Well, hope my friends get into GAYMAN companies then... whats the Y in there anyway? And is microsoft still excluded from the acronym? lol.

The Y means YC, and yes.

MS has a strict "only-hire-in-India" policy now.

Not to be a downer, but given the current market they are kind of screwed.

Ok, not asking in the context of this thread but in general: why do you think so? With their stake in openai especially and github being a good place to sell AI code assistants (one of the clear revenue streams for LLMs thus far) they seem quite well placed. Is it all their big "enterprise" and government contracts that bring them a lot of money now losing value?

1. Operational work is difficult to justify extremely high TCs

2. Other aspects of the business such as Cybersecurity just lack domestic talent in the US. That's why much of the MS Security portfolio engineering team is in Israel or India or people who are brought in via an L1/2

3. Vast swathes of MS employees from line level ICs up to Engineering Directors were stuck in immigration limbo because of the GC backlog or because of older parents, so a large number began returning to India with a slight shave on TC.