- Business Insider has analyzed salary data for thousands of workers to reveal how much large tech companies pay their workers.
- We crunched the numbers on 13 tech companies: Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Microsoft, Netflix, Salesforce, Snap, Tesla, Twitter, and Uber.
- The data, which US companies must report in visa applications for foreign workers, sheds light on how engineers, designers, managers, lawyers, and more are compensated in the US's ultracompetitive technology industry.
- Got a tip? Contact this reporter at rprice@businessinsider.com or +1-650-636-6268. Anonymity offered.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
A Tesla wind tunnel model design engineer gets paid $100,000 a year.
A city general manager at Uber focusing on scooters earns $115,150.
Netflix's chief marketing officer makes $187,907.
A senior director at Apple gets a cool $340,000.
And a vice president of global affairs and communications at Facebook makes a whopping $655,500.
In ultracompetitive Silicon Valley, tech companies splash out huge sums of cash to attract top talent. But compensation overall remains a closely guarded secret, with firms refusing to disclose their rates as employees take to forums and anonymous social networks to compare pay packets.
But there's one organization that knows exactly how much tech workers are getting paid: the US government.
When American companies file paperwork for visas on behalf of current or prospective foreign workers, they're required to say how much compensation the workers are being offered. And every year, the Office of Foreign Labor Certification discloses this salary data in an enormous, enlightening dataset.
Business Insider has analyzed this data to see how some of the biggest and most influential tech companies compare when it comes to compensation — and to inject greater transparency into the hiring process for job seekers.
The full dataset is huge — featuring tens of thousands of workers and countless companies. Our analysis focused on 13 key companies: Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Microsoft, Netflix, Salesforce, Snap, Tesla, Twitter, and Uber. The fields include online retail, electric vehicles, and social networking, and are collectively some of the most prominent companies working in the technology industry.
The data is a powerful tool for understanding compensation in the industry. If you're applying for a certain job, how much should you ask for? If you transfer internally, how might that affect your pay? Are you being underpaid compared with your coworkers?
Comparing salaries across the tech giants
This section explains Business Insider's methodology for analyzing the dataset. Keep scrolling to view the salary data itself.
Each entry in the underlying dataset includes the worker's proposed salary, as well as their job title and "job type."
What is job type?
It's a categorization of each worker into one of hundreds of standardized categories that have been predetermined by the US government. For example, Tesla has five workers in the dataset with the job type "chemical engineer" — but these workers' actual job titles vary, from senior cathode engineer to senior test systems engineer and staff research engineer.
These job-type categories are the same across companies, thereby allowing us to fairly compare the companies' varying levels of worker compensation, even if the exact job titles they use for their workers are different.
The companies employ hundreds or even thousands of immigrant workers in the US. (Google submitted paperwork for more than 9,000 prospective foreign workers on applicable visas in 2019, for example.) So to make sense of the data and allow for comparisons, Business Insider calculated a set of figures for each job type: the minimum, the 25th percentile, the median, the mean, the 75th percentile, and the maximum.
- The minimum and maximum are exactly what they sound like: the highest or lowest compensation received by a worker with a given job type at a given company.
- The mean is the average — if you add all the salaries up for a given job type, then divide them by the number of data points, you get the mean.
- If you line up all the salaries for a job type at a company up in order from smallest to largest, then pick the one in the middle, that's the median.
- And the 25th and 75th percentile are when you line up the salaries from smallest to largest and pick the one that's one-quarter or three-quarters of the way down, respectively.
Taken together, these figures allow you to see the range and spread that a company pays workers with a certain job type and how it compares with other companies, without combing through thousands of data points one by one.
Business Insider has also sorted the varying job types into nine thematic fields — like "engineering" and "scientists" — to make the data easier to navigate.
Select a field and then a job type to compare how different companies pay for similar roles. Not all companies have data for all job types. A single dot means there are not enough salaries in the dataset to show a range for that job type.
Select a job type:
How to read the chart:
`; document.write(template);Drill down even further into specific companies
Now it's time to dig deeper.
Looking at job types allows you to make cross-company comparisons, but they group together workers who aren't necessarily working the same roles. You can find out how much specific roles pay by looking at the job titles themselves.
There are thousands of different job titles in the dataset, corresponding to tens of thousands of workers. So to make the data easier to digest, Business Insider conducted a second analysis on the dataset. This time, workers at companies with the same job titles are grouped together, and for each job title at a company, the following figures have been calculated: the minimum, the 25th percentile, the median, the mean, the 75th percentile, and the maximum.
Again, these figures make it easier to absorb the data at a glance — and see the spread of pay for a specific job title.
Select a company, then a field, then a job type to see the analysis of that job type and then the analysis of all the job titles that are part of it. Not all companies have data for all job types or titles. A single salary figure means there was not enough data to calculate a range of averages.
Select a field:
Select a job type:
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