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Paychecks Exposed: Google, Apple, Facebook and More
- ronnier 16y agoMissing from the list are Microsoft and Amazon. I wonder how they compare?
- city41 16y agoGlassdoor has plenty of Microsoft salaries on file, you can just check at glass door itself.
- WalterGR 16y agoThe data is from glassdoor.com. Here are the salary pages for Amazon and Microsoft: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-com-Salaries-E6036.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-com-Salaries-E6036.ht... http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Microsoft-Salaries-E1651.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Microsoft-Salaries-E1651.htm
- gacba 16y agoI suspect CNBC being partnered indirectly with MSFT had something to do with the MS omission. No sense is looking bad in your own media outlet. The CEO approval rating for MSFT was a dismal 50%.
- viggity 16y agoI thought the same thing, but the article is specifically talking about Silicon Valley (perhaps so difference in cost of living isn't an issue?)
- chime 16y agoIs Facebook rated higher because it is the new cool kid in the neighborhood or because it is doing something different? After all, Google was considered the best place to work less than 5 years ago.
- parano 16y agoWhy would being "the new cool kid" affect job satisfaction ratings by employees? Unless you're suggesting they are more satisfied due to the coolness of the idea of working there.
- nostrademons 16y agoThere're a whole bunch of benefits that you get from working at the "cool new kid": 1.) Everything you do automatically has an audience. People care about the software you write and use it in their daily lives. 2.) You get social cachet from working there. Say "I work for Google", and a bunch of people will say, "Oh, that must be nice. I wish I was smart enough to get in there." Outside of a few nerds who are too cool for FaceBook, saying "I work for FaceBook" gets the same reaction. 3.) Being in a younger, game-changing company gives you the chance to work on cooler, game-changing technologies. Many tech workers are attracted by hard problems; young, fast-growing companies tend to have lots of hard problems. 4.) When companies are younger, they've accumulated less legacy code and fewer bureaucratic procedures. If you ask a bunch of Googlers what they hate most about working for Google, I bet a large portion will say "legacy code". This is a maintenance tax that isn't fun at all, yet has to be dealt with whenever you build something on top of it. Being younger and smaller, FaceBook has less of this.
- parano 16y ago#2 is a fair point, but I think you have it reversed on #1 and #3. You are a cool company _because_ you're young, game changing and have an audience, not the other way around. #4 is a property of most young companies regardless of their popularity.
- kristianp 16y agoDon't forget about the 'halo effect'. If a company is performing well, it tends to lead to better results in employee surveys, for no other reason than that. I know this doesn't exactly explain why facebook does better in the surveys than google, but I think part of the reason facebookers feel more satisfied, is because they know they get paid more than googlers.
- ryanwanger 16y agoHow could Facebook be so much higher in terms of satisfaction? Maybe it's too casual?!?
- ericd 16y agoIs it too casual if they're wildly successful?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- credo 16y agoFacebook seems to offer the most salary/compensation. More interestingly, Facebook is one of only two companies (among 10) where the company rating is higher than the compensation rating. Google gets 3.9 for company rating and also 3.9 for compensation rating (both are good). Facebook gets 4.3 for compensation rating. It gets an even higher score 4.6 for company rating (and that makes it the only company where Glassdoor describes the employees as "very satisfied") It will be interesting to find out what Facebook is doing right and why other companies aren't able to match it.
- alokm 16y agoMay be it has to do with the fact that number of employees in google are many times more than that of Facebook, bringing down the compensation avg as well as the avg job satisfaction.
- mkramlich 16y agoThey're also a younger company, and pre-IPO, and probably have cultural differences too.
- enjo 16y agoThe pre-IPO part is key. They still have a ton of employees motivated by the "I'm about to be rich" carrot. Facebook is young and growing, it's easy to have satisfied employees at this point. It's keeping them that way over the long haul that's the trick (particularly after the 'sexiness' has worn off).
- scorpion032 16y agoThe company that has a good engineering culture to flex your skills, and keep you from slacking off, keeps you happier. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, it appears to me, Facebook has this "do it" thing much more than Google and well much beyond Yahoo.
- Silhouette 16y ago
- rorrr 16y agoIs it just me or these numbers are not that impressive? Many of my friends make $100+/hr, it's not out of the ordinary. I'm sure there are really highly paid developers there as well, but it just feels good to know that you don't need to work for one of the huge companies to make good money.
- ryanfitz 16y agoI agree, in my experience most funded startups (in nyc) are willing to pay at least 120K a year and you can make much more consulting. I would have thought these two companies, which are seen as the top of technology, would be paying much more.
- ericd 16y agoThe decreased risk of a regular salary mitigates it - consultants don't really have job security, and it's hard to be fully employed all the time as a consultant. Also, there are a large number of paper millionaire FB employees, from the stock options. It's a hell of a bonus that I'm pretty sure isn't included in these numbers.
- JabavuAdams 16y agoThe reverse is true. The cooler a place is perceived to be, the less they can afford to pay developers, up to some threshold where they can't hire any good ones. There's a huge variance to what salary good developers are happy with. For every one who says "I wouldn't work for less than X", there are some who would, and moreover would not be unhappy at that salary level.
- hogu 16y agoagreed, especially given the recent discussion about talent wars... I would expect salaries to be higher given the war
- eitally 16y agoTotal compensation (including all benefits) probably adds up to close to $200k/yr for Googlers in MTV. That campus is not inexpensive to operate.
- d2viant 16y agoDoes this make anyone else feel extremely underpaid? I'm a software engineer at Fortune 200 company in a major metropolitan city, making about 30K less than these guys. It's not a technology company, so that must be the difference.
- dasil003 16y agoIs it Manhattan? Because if not you're cost of living is probably significantly less too.
- wh-uws 16y agoIt really depends on the area. Those numbers look like they factor in cost of living for California
- steverb 16y agoHonestly, I was looking at these thinking how under-paid they are. I contract for a company in a much lower cost of living area and I'm making more than the average Googler. I honestly don't understand why anyone would work for someone else for peanuts.
- myth_drannon 16y agoThere is a difference between a contractor with 20 years of experience and a kid straight out of college.
- JabavuAdams 16y agoDude, let's get real here. 100k + is not peanuts. It's higher than the median household income. There's a very real premium to working on cool stuff.
- mmt 16y agoMedian of which households? Although I believe the Bay Area's[1] "high cost of living" is frequently exaggerated, I also believe, however, that it can't be dismissed. If I had to put a number on it, it would be $10-$30k annually. [1] The location of all employees at each company may be applying a selection bias, since I don't believe Facebook has more than a tiny fraction of its employees outside of the Bay Area, whereas the same cannot be said of Google.
- Locke1689 16y agoThis is just blogspam. The site is glassdoor.com.
- devinfoley 16y agoIn this study, is "average base pay" basically equivalent to "midlevel salary"?
- brown9-2 16y agoNo. It's not a study, it's the average of salaries self-reported by employees on the website glassdoor.com. There is nothing to say that these self-reports are a fair sampling other than relying on there being a good number of them - I see 775 reported salaries on glassdoor for software engineers at Google.
- rwmj 16y agoFirst time I've come across glassdoor.com -- clear your cookies else your "free trial" runs out. At one small start-up company I worked at us developers/hackers eventually found an "encrypted" XLS document which contained all the salaries (this was when Excel "encryption" wasn't up to much). So we read everyone's salaries, from the management down. The interesting part was that certain people in management were taking home huge salaries, for not doing very much visible work. The company ripped off a lot of investors and was eventually sold for a tiny fraction (~1%) of the money which was put in. Which surprised no one on the inside.
- nopal 16y agoDo you think it's acceptable for you to have read the document, no matter how simple the encryption?
- rwmj 16y agoSure, why not? I don't get this whole secrecy around salaries. If it was up to me everyone in the company would know what everyone else was earning.
- nopal 16y agoWell, I don't think it's a question of whether salaries should be kept secret or not, I think it's a question of whether one should access data he's not supposed to just because he can.
- nopal 16y agoI find it interesting that this is getting down-modded. I think the ethics of IT is an interesting and important subject, and I was surprised to see someone unabashedly admitting to using his position to read confidential material. I don't think our industry has a good enough set of accepted ethical guidelines, and I'd like to see that change.
- redorb 16y ago
- leelin 16y agoBe careful of these numbers being biased lower than the real medians and averages. Glassdoor's gimmick is "tell us your salary and we'll tell you what everyone told us." They'll keep bugging you as you use the site until you finally relent (or play cookie / session reset games). I'm guessing that means most people who sign up are somewhat insecure about their salary level and want more information. The truly satisfied or highly paid folks either don't use the site much or only need to look at one page and leave satisfied that they are doing just fine.
- mynameishere 16y agoI would guess the opposite. People who are comfortable in making more than average would be more willing to divulge, even anonymously.
- arghnoname 16y agoAnyone else find it interesting what companies _aren't_ on the list? I guess MSFT didn't seem relevant.
- kenjackson 16y agoMSFT isn't really considered a Silicon Valley company, given their headquarters is in Redmond.
- arghnoname 16y agoAh that makes sense. I missed the Silicon Valley reference. Thank you for the correction.
- hess 16y agoWhat a weak article. 98,000 vs. 99,000, off an unreliable sample size. Expected from CNBC