6 ms·
Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019
- hotdogs 7y agoWhat's in Pittsburgh driving the median so high? I know Carnegie Mellon is there, but I was not aware of any sort of commercial tech hub.
- ct0 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_in_Pittsburgh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_in_Pittsb... Not from the area but could be a ton of drivers.
- idbehold 7y agoSelf-driving cars in part due to its proximity to CMU.
- Zaheer 7y agoZaheer from Levels.fyi here. Argo AI & Duolingo are based out of Pittsburgh. Uber & Google also have a decent sized presence. Some more context on their tech scene here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pittsburgh-tech/a-tech-boom-in-pittsburgh-brings-hope-and-angst-idUSKCN1MM13Y https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pittsburgh-tech/a-tech-bo...
- hotdogs 7y agoHuh, it's been about a decade since I last visited Pittsburgh, I had no idea. Thanks for sharing.
- crw5996 7y agoPretty much all the big tech companies have a presence here. From what I can remember, Microsoft (Azure Storage), Amazon (ML Alexa Teams), Google, Uber (ATG), Argo AI, Aurora, Facebook (Oculus), Duolingo, and Apple are all have offices in the city. In the suburbs I think Netapp and Oracle have offices.
- Zaheer 7y agoSignificant concentration of AI & ML teams probably raises the median (thanks to CMU). Some of the hottest skills in the market today.
- electricslpnsld 7y agoFacebook also has a FAIR office in addition to Oculus in Pittsburgh.
- s3r3nity 7y agoLots of AI & robotics companies, as well as FANG + Msft like companies opening offices here.
- braindeath 7y agoUber, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon all are present. What’s clearly wrong or at least misleading about this data is that they represent only a small fraction of the tech workforce in pgh. Other than Uber and Google these are only small offices. They also happen to be some higher paying jobs within those organizations. The reality is that most tech people in Pittsburgh are looking at jobs at UPMC, PNC, NetApp or a handful of smaller companies and poorly funded startups, few of which pay particularly well nor have worthwhile equity comp even relative to the low COL small markets. This 170k median doesn’t fit with other stats available, and is only true if your sample is limited to FAANG and unicorns, which exists, but is small in Pittsburgh.
- crispyporkbites 7y agoIs there data on the UK / London available?
- Zaheer 7y agohttps://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer Note that the figures are in US Dollars. In next few months we'll be adding better currency support.
- oarabbus_ 7y agoHonestly if you're a software engineer in the UK and you're concerned about salary... you should move to the United States.
- IneffablePigeon 7y agoWho isn't concerned about salary? Who is _only_ concerned about salary? Like most software engineers in the UK, I could almost certainly make at least triple by moving to the US but I don't consider it worthwhile for me. Many people do - there's no right answer.
- grammarxcore 7y agoI feel like this list is skewed by cost of living. The top four cities are also very expensive cities to live in and around. 200k in the bay area is scraping by whereas 100k in the Austin area gets you a house in a reasonable amount of time. Are there any plans to provide adjustments like that?
- Zaheer 7y agoYes! We're working on Cost-of-living (CoL) comparisons and adjustments. We've just finished extensively normalizing our data (which we used for this report). The next steps are better analysis over it including things like CoL.
- pascalxus 7y agoI've adjusted avg salaries based on cost of living here: https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the-highest-software-engineering-salaries-adjusted-for-col/ https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the-highest-... But, note, the above is for average software engineering salaries, not for the sky high FANGS.
- oarabbus_ 7y ago>200k in the bay area is scraping by What a gross exaggeration. Had you said 90k and for a family, then sure, but unless you consider "not having a new Tesla" as scraping by, this is disingenuous. Source: Lived in Bay Area all my life with under $200k salary, not homeless, not scraping by, saving (a little bit) of money, able to go out with friends and my hair isn't falling out from being unable to pay bills. Maybe some of the big earners out there would consider my lifestyle "scraping by" but I like to think I know the difference between "scraping by" and "living within your means".
- esotericn 7y agoProbably just talking about owning a home. To a lot of people it doesn't matter how many fancy toys they have, they want stability.
- 7y ago
- libso 7y agoHow is the level mapping between various companies decided?
- Zaheer 7y agoWithin a company, levels codify the hierarchy, scope & responsibility of employees. The question we try to answer with our mapping is: "If an employee at company X were to switch to company Y, which level would they come in at?". The answer then is: what is the equivalent scope / responsibility across companies. There's several other factors (company size, interview performance, etc) that go into actual leveling when you switch companies and thus we really emphasize that this is a rough guide. I think we've settled on something that's generally agreeable for most folks. We constantly take feedback though and adjust based on what we hear from users switching between companies.
- chimeracoder 7y agoLooks like they're including RSUs for private companies as equivalent to cash, which dramatically skews the data. For private companies, RSUs aren't liquid, and ISOs actually cost money to exercise, so they arguably have negative value. Treating them as cash-equivalent makes these rankings very misleading.
- oarabbus_ 7y agoThey would be remiss not to include this when making a statement about total compensation.
- chimeracoder 7y ago> They would be remiss not to include this when making a statement about total compensation. Ideally they would be separated out. But if you have to make a single ranking, it's way more misleading to include RSUs/options for private companies than would be to ignore them.
- Zaheer 7y agoThey're certainly not cash equivalent but I don't think it's disingenuous to include in rankings. The fact is people evaluate that number and even use it as 'competing' offers. It does sway the market liquid or illiquid. I remember when Uber was on a hiring spree a few years ago and was throwing eye-popping numbers. I had several friends switch to Uber or other companies and use the Uber offer for negotiation.
- senordevnyc 7y agoAren't Stripe and Airbnb the only two private companies on these lists? And for both of those I would assume they're doing RSUs, not options? But agreed on the lack of liquidity. Cash is king.
- Trias11 7y agoCan we separate salary from stock-based comps?
- Zaheer 7y agoIf you click through to the company page, we have a graph with breakdown of salary, stock & bonus (ex. https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Lyft/ https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Lyft/).
- rcpt 7y agoWhy? They're all reported the same as income on your taxes
- electricslpnsld 7y agoCompensation from stock grants is significantly more volatile than base salary or bonus targets, but otherwise I don’t see a major difference.
- lhorie 7y agoNot if it's not actual stocks (i.e. pre-IPO companies).
- memn0nis 7y agoThese salaries are incredibly high for someone who never worked at a tech company in the valley. What's the general consensus on whether these salaries will increase, decrease, or stay the same in the medium term (i.e., next 5-10 years)?
- matt-attack 7y agoI want to think there will be a correction (because in so many ways it seem obnoxious), but frankly I don't see the need for their skills falling anytime soon. Tech drives everything in our world, and specifically, software.
- 0xBABAD00C 7y agoWhat kind of defeatist mentality is this? There should be a correction in the other direction, if anything.
- matt-attack 7y agoMeaning, software dev salaries should go up at these companies?
- 0xBABAD00C 7y agoAll across the industry. Engineers seem to be the most self-defeating self-doubting bunch when it comes to money. If you create X% of the value, do you want your compensation to be commensurate with your contribution, or do you want to experience a "correction" because it's "obnoxious", while the executive class enjoys the spoils? I have worked with brilliant software engineers who have expressed thoughts such as "personally I think I'm being paid too much". It's just crazy to me that this attitude exists, and I'm sure it's encouraged by people who don't think like that at all.
- doublement 7y agoWith nothing to back me up except the general impression I have, these numbers look out-of-whack even for the highest-paying employers in the Bay Area.
- umvi 7y agoObviously San Francisco and New York City have the highest salaries... they have the highest cost of living. Can we get a list adjusted for cost of living?
- lhorie 7y agoDepends on who you're living with. When I first moved to SF, living in a dorm downtown w/ shared bathrooms/kitchen among some ~50 people, I was paying $1.8k/mo. Then my wife and kids joined me, and we moved to a "proper" place in outer richmond. The cost for 2 bed + 1 kid in preschool went to 6.5k/mo. If you're single, you're probably looking in the range of 3.6 - 4.5k for a 2 bed rent, or half of that if you can get a roommate. Transit runs you about $80-100/mo. So if you're young and cheap, there's a lot of opportunity to build up a bank. On the other hand, If you are married w/ toddlers and your spouse is on a non-work visa, you're gonna have some tougher luck w/ COL.
- senordevnyc 7y agoIf you're a software engineer in a city where these companies employ folks and you're thinking this doesn't apply to you, I'd encourage you to at least give it a shot. It's not only the absolute best of the best who get these jobs. I recently decided to do a round of interviews after 10+ years as an independent web / iOS dev, having never had a professional software dev job. I'm also a self-taught developer with a business degree from a no-name state school. Despite all that, I've been really surprised and happy with the market reception here in NYC. I got interest from the bigger guys like Amazon, FB, and Twitter, as well as smaller companies like Dropbox, Stripe, Square, Coinbase, etc. Last week, I got a very good senior / staff offer from one of the smaller public companies for around $400k in first year comp. With bonuses, promotions, refreshers, etc, that could easily average $500k - 600k per year over the next few years. And I had no competing offers. Some of the other companies I'm in the loop with will almost certainly offer quite a bit more, although I love this company that made the offer and I'll probably just drop the other interviews and take it. Comp isn't everything. All this to say, if you're interested in making more $$ and these companies are hiring where you live, don't pass it up because you think it's only for hotshot 22-year-olds coming out of Stanford.
- geebee 7y agoHave you studied extensively for the technical exams? I've tried, and I've gotten interviews at several of the FAANGs as well as some desirable mature startups, but I fail at the technical screeinging stage. Not sure if I've tanked it or was close, but I get the "no hire" call or email after take-home projects or whiteboard exams. Btw, to give you sense of it, I'd have no trouble finding a loop in a linked list, printing all permutations of a set, or searching a tree recursively. I'd have to puzzle a bit to figure out how to do DFS vs BFS, but I'd get there, I don't have it loaded into memory. I wouldn't be able to implement merge sort on the spot, I'd need to look it up, though I could probably get it frontloaded. All I can say is dayum those interview exams are hard, what I described is a pre-req, nobody will just ask you to permute a set, but if you can't, you'll never solve whiteboard the problem they ask you in 45 minutes. For take-home projects, one (a rails app) was rejected because I used named routes rather than using the more conventional methods (I know this wouldn't be good to do in a production app... guess I just wasn't thinking about routes, it was a demo app, so I just threw some names routes in there for demo purposes, it was a take-home), along with some "duplicated" code that I thought was justified but never got to explain (I personally think extracting this into another method would be a pre-optimization that would need to be undone when the methods diverged, something I thought would be likely under the admittedly fabricated business requirements). I did have what I though was good testing, the reviewers did complement that along with some aspects of the app in their review. Sorry, don't mean to give you my sob story, I just... I'm at the point where I wouldn't mind a crack at these jobs but just feel like maybe it's not an effort that's going to pay off (I mean, how much more time do I really want to spend on the kind of problems in cracking the coding interview? I actually feel like I got something out of studying it and preparing, but going back over and over, nah... maybe other people retain this stuff better than I do, and you know, maybe that does actually say something about suitability for these jobs).
- zer0faith 7y agoDoes this data include Cyber Security type jobs?
- senordevnyc 7y agoIs this getting flagged? It's currently near the bottom of page 4, and should be in the top 10 of page 1. Are HN'ers just bitter / skeptical of these numbers?
- jedberg 7y agoControversial items can sometimes fall due to the anti-flamewar code. If it thinks the article is generating a flamewar in the comments it will get sunk.
- doublement 7y agoI don't know why it's falling away from the front page, but as far as skepticism goes, numbers that surprising raise more questions than answers. Your anecdotes have been very informative by the way.
- einpoklum 7y agoThese salaries is kind of obscene. But then, the conduct and social impact (in the US or outside of it) of many of these companies is also kind of obscene: Lyft and Uber employ pseudo-freelancers for very low effective wages; AirBnB are keeping apartments out of the regular rental market in favor of jacked up per-day prices; Facebook tracks everybody and shapes (to some extent) their consciousness and knowledge of the world; and so on.
- swat535 7y agoAs a Canadian Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience.. I think this list is comical.. I've managed to barely squeeze 120k-130k CAD (90-100k USD) out of big companies here (e.g Shopify). I'm not sure if having free medicare is worth losing 2-300k... Oh and I've tried applying for remote positions in the US and I get the good ol compensation skewed based on COL mantra.