https://blog.step.com/2016/04/08/an-open-source-project-for-tech-salaries/
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Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft Salaries
Over the last month, we’ve seen a lot of compensation data provided anonymously by tech employees. We compiled and standardized some of this data to improve our understanding of what companies are paying, and we realized that we might want to share our findings.
Summary of Results
For this first pass, we focused on engineering compensation at Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft because there were more data points to work with. We standardized the engineering levels to the best of our abilities to compare compensation across companies for each level. We welcome any feedback or corrections to improve our analysis.
We found that Total Annual Compensation is the highest at Google, mostly due to their cash+stock bonus. For Levels 1 and 2, base salaries are comparable across the four companies. At Levels 3 and 4, Google and Facebook offer the highest salaries. Google’s cash+stock bonus value trumps all others, especially at more senior levels.
Median Annual Compensation Per Level
A Closer Look at the Data
Here’s the underlying data to the chart. You can also view the raw data here.
| Count | Annual Comp (Median) | Salary (Median) | Bonus (Median) | Stock Bonus (Median) | Signing Bonus (Median) | ||
| Level 1 | |||||||
| Amazon | SDE1 | 33 | $ 117,500 | $95,000 | $15,000 | $20,625 | $25,000 |
| E3 | 14 | $ 154,550 | $107,000 | $10,800 | $33,750 | $75,000 | |
| T3 | 10 | $ 172,000 | $110,000 | $16,125 | $49,000 | $11,000 | |
| Microsoft | SDE1 (59 or 60) | 32 | $ 123,500 | $107,500 | $11,000 | $12,500 | $15,000 |
| Level 2 | |||||||
| Amazon | SDE2 | 25 | $ 147,500 | $120,000 | $42,000 | $25,000 | $25,000 |
| E4 | 20 | $ 183,050 | $138,500 | $33,750 | $33,750 | $25,000 | |
| T4 | 25 | $ 201,000 | $ 130,000 | $49,000 | $49,000 | $ 15,000 | |
| Microsoft | SDE2 (61 or 62) | 53 | $ 143,000 | $123,000 | $10,000 | $10,000 | $20,000 |
| Level 3 | |||||||
| Amazon | SDE3 | 11 | $ 180,000 | $140,000 | $0 | $38,769 | $50,000 |
| E5 | 19 | $ 249,700 | $170,000 | $62,500 | $62,500 | $50,000 | |
| E6 | 4 | $ 358,750 | $200,000 | $118,750 | $118,750 | $20,000 | |
| T5 | 12 | $ 306,500 | $ 160,000 | $100,000 | $100,000 | $ 30,000 | |
| T6 | 2 | $ 472,500 | $ 207,500 | $205,000 | $205,000 | $ 7,000 | |
| Microsoft | Senior SDE (63 or 64) | 7 | $ 199,000 | $143,733 | $24,000 | $24,000 | $17,500 |
| Level 4 | |||||||
| Amazon | Principal Software Engineer | 1 | $ 445,000 | $160,000 | $35,000 | $250,000 | |
| T6 | 2 | $ 472,500 | $ 207,500 | $205,000 | $205,000 | $ 7,000 | |
| Microsoft | Principal SDE (65, 66, or 67) | 1 | $ 261,000 | $179,000 | $43,000 | $43,000 |
Notes: Google's T6 straddles Level 4 and Level 5, which is why it appears in each band Bonuses and stock amounts were all annualized straight-line. In reality, Amazon's vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, and 40% over the 4 years, but we ignored this for comparison Signing bonuses were not included in the Total Compensation calculation
Another way to look at this, for example, is that an SDE2 at Microsoft might make $123,000 base with $20,000 in cash and stock bonus. The equivalent level at Facebook would be an E4 making $138,500 base and about $44,500 in bonus.
We also looked at each company to see how Total Compensation changes across engineering levels. Compensation growth is highest at Google and Facebook, while Amazon has the smallest increase. Reported salary ranges for each level varied significantly. This may reflect different seniority and performance within a level, the value of the company stock when equity was awarded, or other supply and demand factors.
Total Compensation Ranges Per Level
Breaking down compensation between Salary, Equity, and Cash Bonuses, we can see that Facebook and Google offer the largest opportunity for salary and equity value growth with increasing levels.
Median Total Compensation Breakdown
Contribute to the Analysis
We pulled this data together from a few sources listed at the bottom of this post, and we’d like to build on it and make it better. We could use more data points for the four companies, particularly at the higher levels, as well as compensation data for other companies and tech roles. This would allow us to map levels and compensation across the larger companies or see how compensation for each role changes with company growth at smaller companies.
Share your compensation:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vA5fCF5OkNBzNRXRG96SoTmc1tUZjE4KIrqnwW0BZ9w/viewform
All answers will be anonymous and posted to a public sheet for anyone to view and download. We’ll also update our findings and analyses for different companies, tech roles, etc.
Step.com is a salary discovery platform that lets software engineers and product managers find out what companies think of them and how much they’d pay them. Estimates and feedback are based on hiring criteria and anonymized profile data. Step is 100% anonymous and free. For more information, check out www.step.com.
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27 comments
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The image link for the “Median Annual Compensation Per Level” is broken.
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@juancb42, thanks for letting me know! I just updated the image so you should see it now.
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The cell : A3:A4 is not formatted correctly and cell E3 is dependent on a formula based on cell J3 which has text!!!
Can you add in your study what is the shared revenue of the company for each of the salaries?
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@rubin thanks for pointing that out. At these 4 companies, bonuses don’t include a percentage of the company’s revenue, if that’s what you’re asking. If we do come across that for other companies, we’ll include in the bonus numbers and note it.
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love the salary transparency and its potential. would love to see this research expand and develop. imagine an api for this…
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@Macrina agreed! We’re working on expanding on it and keeping the data open for others to use.
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level1 facebook signing bonus shoud be wrong
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Level 1 Facebook signing bonuses seem very high. We double checked the raw data, and the entries are consistently around $75K. Not sure why, but we left the data as is.
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most facebookers who return after internship get that 75k. people who are recruited as full timers don’t. which is why there is a skew. also, it seems like principal data for msft is very less. hope we get more data points. is this report updated automatically as we get new data points ?
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It’s correct. Most of them interned at FB before, and FB gives that much signing bonus to encourage them to take their return offer.
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Would it be possible to factor in cost of living differences between Seattle and the Bay Area? WA state doesn’t have income tax, which can make a huge difference when comparing numbers (plus the housing prices in the Bay Area…)
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Great idea. We may try to do that in one of the next updates we do to.
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Your graph for Median Annual Compensation Per Level has the FB and Google labels swapped.
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Does the data account for cost of living?
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No, we did not account for cost of living. We may do this for another follow-up analysis.
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Looks to me like this was produced in Tableau, and it’s a public data source, why not publish it on Tableau public to allow interaction with the data?
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It was just a google doc and some excel charts :). Haven’t had a lot of experience with Tableau, but will check it out. Thanks!
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Would be nice to compare gender and ethnicity data, as I suspect the bonuses and stocks could be telling.
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We’re trying to capture gender data now. Good suggestion about the ethnicity data too.
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I check the data and it is full of errors. You restrict the analysis to 4 companies, 2 located in SF, and 2 located in Seattle. If I understand correctly, you only look at software engineers but exclude all other positions (like PM) from the 4 companies. I suspect the sample size for your results to be really small and thus may be severely biased. On the other hand, the location effect can not be identified (it is more expensive to live in SF than in Seattle, especially the housing price), therefore even if Google and Facebook are paying higher salaries, the actual salary gap may be quite small. Therefore the results can be quite misleading.
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You’re right in that the sample size is much smaller with just the 4 companies. We’ve indicated the count of each company/level sample size in the table in the blog and the pivot table in the google sheet. There’s not enough data yet to break it down by geography for each company, so for now, we’ve lumped it all together. As we get more data, we can get more granular.
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It appears there are some inconsistencies in the Annual Comp calculation, some rows include signing bonus whereas others exclude it. For example cell E167 sums salary, bonus, and stock value at grant, whereas cell E133 sums salary, signing bonus, bonus, and stock value at grant.
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Thanks for catching that! We’ve fixed it in the raw data and table summary in the blog.
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Can you explain what E5, E6, etc is? Also level 1, level 2 etc.? Is that how long you have been with the company or something?
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Here’s Quora answer by a former FTE at Facebook that describes the levels there: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-expectation-out-of-each-software-engineering-level-at-Facebook
For Level 1, Level 2, etc, these are the levels we created to standardize and compare across companies. Hope that helps!
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Thank you much. Very helpful.
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Looks Cool. Helpful to many and inspiration to few
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